Former Breitbart owner and Trump Administration strategist Steve Bannon and his buddy Brian Kolfage are charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering.
The duo joined forces on a 2018 scheme to defraud Trump supporters of millions of dollars for their own personal gain.
On December 16, 2018, Bannon and Kolfage launched a GoFundMe campaign called “We Build The Wall” that asked Trump supporters to help fund the wall at the U.S.-Mexico border.
The campaign raised around $25 million, but the funds have been traced back to Bannon and Kolfage’s own pockets.
Bannon and Kolfage faked invoices and contracts with non-existent vendors to cover up that donations were used for their own purposes.
Bannon, who served in Trump’s 2016 campaign and White House, received over $1 million himself, using some to secretly pay co-defendant, Brian Kolfage, the founder of the project, and to cover hundreds of thousands of dollars of Bannon’s personal expenses.
According to the indictment, Bannon promised that 100% of the donated money would be used for the project, but the defendants collectively used hundreds of thousands of dollars in a manner inconsistent with the organization’s public representations.
Associated Press
The three miles of wall that the campaign claims to have built are actually the work of Fisher Industries, which has received around $2 billion in contracts to build Trump’s wall.
Bannon’s history with the “Build The Wall” slogan actually pre-dates Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. In 2014, he used his company Cambridge Analytica to test the usefulness of that and other infamous Trump phrases online.
Sources
https://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2020-08-20/ex-white-house-adviser-steve-bannon-arrested-in-fraud-scam
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/steve-bannon-arrested-fraud-charges-border-wall-scheme/
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/the-rise-and-fall-of-we-build-the-wall-catch-up-on-tpms-coverage
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/21/us/gofundme-wall-border-border-mexico.html
https://webuildthewall.us/optin/
Photo: Gage Skidmore