Steve Bannon's Alleged Border-Wall Scam Is the Entire Trump Movement in a Nutshell
It seems important that the president's associates keep getting arrested. It's not just his former fixer or his longtime political whisperer or his former deputy campaign manager or his former national security adviser. It's the people who've run his campaigns from the very top. Before 2016, when he was sharing internal campaign polling data and strategy with a man whom a Republican-led Senate committee has now classified as a Russian intelligence agent, Paul Manafort was up to his neck in crooked business. And now, we've learned his successor—Stephen K. Bannon, man about town—has joined the party.
The Acting U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York announced Thursday that Bannon has been arrested for his role in a scheme to defraud "hundreds of thousands of donors in connection with an online crowdfunding campaign known as 'We Build the Wall.'" The group, which promised to build a wall on private land near the southern border, did not turn out to be above-board.
Bannon has been charged with one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering, which could apparently earn him up to 20 years in prison. Despite their public promises that this was a "volunteer organization" and that they wouldn't take a dime in donations cash, Bannon and some of the other co-founders did, according to the Southern District, take cash. Bannon stands accused of hoovering up more than $1 million through "a non-profit under his control," which he then used to cover hundreds of thousands of dollars in personal expenses. They allegedly used fake invoices and sham vendor payments to try to cover up the payments.
I, for one, am shocked to learn that these people would lie through their teeth for personal gain at the expense of others who they view as easy marks. I thought this was about securing our southern border! And where would this scheme be without one of the co-founders, Brian Kolfage, waging war on a butterfly sanctuary near the border in Mission, Texas, which he viewed as getting in the way. That campaign included smearing the facility as a front for "rampant sex trade." Does this sound familiar? Have you noticed that these Trumpist psychos are always accusing people of sex trafficking to try to get them out of the way? Does this maybe go on top of the giant pile of evidence that the neo-blood-libels against anyone who opposes the president's movement are possibly a crock of shit?
Anyway, the indictment announcement featured a line that is basically a summation of this entire thing.
Acting U.S. Attorney Audrey Strauss said: “As alleged, the defendants defrauded hundreds of thousands of donors, capitalizing on their interest in funding a border wall to raise millions of dollars, under the false pretense that all of that money would be spent on construction. While repeatedly assuring donors that Brian Kolfage, the founder and public face of We Build the Wall, would not be paid a cent, the defendants secretly schemed to pass hundreds of thousands of dollars to Kolfage, which he used to fund his lavish lifestyle."
Scamming people while "capitalizing on their interest in funding a border wall"? Sounds about right. Sounds like the president's movement in a nutshell.
Oh, and by the way, you'll notice that Audrey Strauss is the "Acting" U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. There's a reason for that. In June, Attorney General William Barr—now d.b.a. the president's Cellino & Barnes—announced that the man who was then the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District, Geoffrey Berman, had resigned. Except Berman then went public and denied he'd resigned. Then Barr said Trump had fired Berman anyway. Then Berman testified before Congress and made it clear Barr had been trying to force him out the whole time. He said Barr tried to get him to take a job elsewhere in the Justice Department, and admitted to him that the administration wanted Jay Clayton, the head of the SEC, to take the Southern District job. Clayton has no experience as a prosecutor, but he is Trump's golfing buddy.
While Clayton probably had his own interests in seeking the Southern District job, Trump and Barr's interest was clear: get the guy out who is leading investigations into Trump associates, and get a guy in who will quash them. This was clear at the time, though most people thought it had something to do with Rudy Giuliani. Now it seems fair to infer it at least had to do with Bannon, if not also others still to come. But luckily, the free press and the Democratic House combined at the time of this nakedly crooked maneuver to stop Clayton's installation, even if Berman was unavoidably canned. Clayton stayed put at the SEC, where he can keep helping out his Wall Street buddies, and the Southern District gig was taken up on a temporary basis by Berman's deputy, Audrey Strauss—a career prosecutor.
And that's why Bannon was charged with crimes. He did them, and the president and his lackey AG were stopped before he could obstruct justice on his behalf. Score one for the rule of law, and for Corey Lewandowski, who for now looks like—against all odds—the most reputable person ever to serve as Trump's campaign manager. (Brad Parscale has not been accused of any crimes, though his financial arrangement with the 2020 campaign was something to behold.) Perhaps it's a matter of time for all of them. Just look at the larger list of people associated with this "We Build the Wall PAC." It's a murderer's row of right-wing scam artists.
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