Former White House chief strategist and CEO of Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign Steve Bannon has been indicted on one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering. The indictment is in conjunction with “We Build the Wall,” a private organization supposedly raising donations to build Donald Trump’s wall along the southern border. Also indicted were We Build the Wall frontman Brian Kolfage, serial fraudster Andrew Badolato, and real estate broker Timothy Shea.
All four are charged with defrauding Trump supporters by using interest in Trump’s wall to “raise millions of dollars, under the false pretense that all of that money would be spent on construction.” Kolfage, who had stated he would not be paid “a penny” for We Build the Wall, secretly pocketed hundreds of thousands with the help of Bannon, Badolato, and Shea.
A representative from the U. S. Attorney’s office states that Steve Bannon has been taken into custody. Unfortunately, there don’t seem to be any pictures currently available.
Bannon built Cambridge Analytica and Facebook’s advertising tools into what the Mueller report described as “information warfare” and was described by Bannon himself as a “psychological warfare mindfuck tool” that used social media data to manipulate the public and tools like Facebook’s to focus messages of hate on specific audiences. That effort also included using these tools to both suppress American votes and support Vladimir Putin.
At We Build the Wall, Bannon and his associates took what they had learned during the Trump campaign and engaged in the creation of “sham invoices and accounts to launder donations and cover up their crimes, showing no regard for the law or the truth.” Hundreds of thousands of dollars went directly to Bannon, which he used to cover a fraction of his vast personal debts.
The group ultimately produced little in the way of actual wall. But the flood of money from racist wall-supporters did buy Kolfage lots of nice stuff while he was accusing the National Butterfly Center of running a “rampant sex trade.”
Starting in approximately December 2018, BRIAN KOLFAGE, STEPHEN BANNON, ANDREW BADOLATO, and TIMOTHY SHEA, and others, orchestrated a scheme to defraud hundreds of thousands of donors, including donors in the Southern District of New York, in connection with an online crowdfunding campaign ultimately known as “We Build The Wall” that raised more than $25 million to build a wall along the southern border of the United States. In particular, to induce donors to donate to the campaign, KOLFAGE repeatedly and falsely assured the public that he would “not take a penny in salary or compensation” and that “100% of the funds raised . . . will be used in the execution of our mission and purpose” because, as BANNON publicly stated, “we’re a volunteer organization.”
Start the pardon clock … now.
