Steve Bannon, the former White House chief strategist was arrested on Thursday, August 20, 2020, after being charged with defrauding hundreds of thousands of donors through his “We Build the Wall” fundraising campaign.
Bannon and three associates were indicted in a federal investigation in the Southern District of New York. Prosecutors allege the four defrauded donors by raising “more than $25 million to build a wall along the southern border of the United States,” but some of that money was used for personal gain.
The United States Postal Inspection Service assisted in the investigation.
Others in the indictment are Timothy Shea, a 49-year-old from Colorado accused of owning a shell company, Brian Kolfage, a disabled Iraq war veteran, and Andrew Badolato, who according to his own website was a contributor to Breitbart News, the conservative publication Bannon used to run.
The campaign was intended to raise money to help President Donald Trump fulfill a campaign promise to build a border wall. Instead, prosecutors allege that Bannon and his team profited off the arrangement.
The indictment said the defendants “collectively received hundreds of thousands of dollars in donor funds from ‘We Build the Wall,’ which they each used in a manner inconsistent with the organization’s public representations.”
“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,” Acting U.S. Attorney Audrey Strauss said in a statement. “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. We thank the USPIS for their partnership in investigating this case, and we remain dedicated to rooting out and prosecuting fraud wherever we find it.”
The White House declined to comment. A spokeswoman for Bannon did not return a request for comment.
Kolfage, a 37-year-old triple amputee, launched the crowdfunding campaign in late 2018 on GoFundMe to build the wall. His effort came amid a stalemate over government funding on Capitol Hill, where Trump demanded that any spending package include billions of dollars to go toward the border barrier. The deadlock culminated in the longest partial government shutdown in U.S. history.
Kolfage’s effort quickly went viral and raised millions of dollars from hundreds of thousands of donors – but GoFundMe threatened to suspend the campaign unless he “identified a legitimate non-profit organization into which those funds could be transferred,” according to the indictment.
Prior to his campaign to crowdfund the border wall, Kolfage had been involved in a string of far-right news blogs and groups, one of which had been scrubbed from Facebook for allegedly using fake accounts to drive up website traffic. Some of the sites peddled false conspiracy theories and racist content. As his wall-funding campaign gained national attention, Kolfage had frequently appeared on Fox News and Fox Business, where he defended Trump and slammed his critics for suffering from “Trump Derangement Syndrome.”
Badolato notes on his own website that he has been an “infrequent freelance contributor in the past to Breitbart News,” a conservative news outlet Bannon used to run. Badolato also says on his site that he was involved with a number of other conservative publications linked to Bannon including Clinton Cash and The Undefeated: The Rise of Sarah Palin.
Source: CNBC
