Steve Bannon, You In Danger

He escaped accountability last time with a pardon, but the legal walls are closing in on him at last.

Image courtesy of PBS News Hour

It’s Schadenfriday, so let’s check-in on the nasty person we all love to see flailing, Steve Bannon.

Bannon really ought to be in prison by now. After all, his three co-conspirators in the “We Build the Wall” fraud—a scheme that bilked $25 million from gullible donors—are all serving years-long federal sentences.

The only reason Bannon is free is because Trump pardoned him.

Of course, that didn’t stop Bannon from later getting convicted and sentenced to four months in prison for contempt of Congress. He’s currently out while that verdict is under appeal, which is admittedly frustrating. And he’s still busily spreading election fraud and other conspiracies on his “War Room” podcast.

But the legal walls are finally closing in on Bannon. That federal, presidential pardon didn’t prevent Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg from charging Bannon under New York state law for those same illegal actions. That trial is set to begin in four months.

And Bannon’s primary financial benefactor, the shadowy Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui, is now under indictment for bilking anti-communist dissidents out of one billion dollars. Earlier this month, a superceding indictment alleged that Guo’s business entities, some of which included Bannon as a partner and co-founder, were part of a criminal organization. 

And it looks like Trump isn’t the only criminal defendant to stiff his lawyers. As The Daily Beast reported today, Bannon reportedly owes his attorneys nearly half a million dollars, and they are out to recover it. 

All this adds up to some pretty bad news for Bannon. So let’s review where things stand with him, and why it might not be long before Bannon is off that podcast and behind bars where he belongs.

We Build the Wall!

According to the Department of Justice, in December of 2018, Bannon’s three now criminally-convicted co-conspirators organized an online crowdfunding campaign called “We Build The Wall.” It raised $25 million from donations, purportedly earmarked to build a wall along the southern border with Mexico (yes, the one Trump said he’d build and Mexico would pay for). The defendants claimed they “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.”

Yeah, so that was a lie.

Bannon’s co-conspirators deployed a scheme to route money through entities they controlled, using sham contracts and fake invoices, in order to personally pocket hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Bannon’s fingerprints were also all over this scheme, and he was arrested and charged in August of 2020 for his role in it. But Trump gave Bannon a get-out-of-jail pardon in the final hours of his presidency on January 20, 2021. At the time, the trial was still months away at least, making the preemptive pardon before a guilty verdict highly unusual and unseemly.

State criminal charges

Bannon may have been happy about the early pardon, but it meant one other thing: Under New York state law, because he was actually never tried and convicted, “jeopardy” had never attached, and therefore Bannon could be indicted under the same facts without running afoul of the Double Jeopardy clause of the Constitution. Sorry, Steve.

So in September 2022, the Manhattan DA, Alvin Bragg, brought a number of state criminal charges against Bannon for the “We Built The Wall” scheme, including fraud, money laundering and conspiracy.

Specifically, the indictment alleges that Bannon and his fake charity defrauded 430 Manhattan-based donors out of $33,600. Across the whole state, there were allegedly more than 11,000 donors defrauded out of more than $730,000. The very serious money laundering charges carry a prison sentence of between five to fifteen years, which could be added to should he also be found guilty of fraud and conspiracy.

Gettr and other criminal enterprises

Then there’s that superceding indictment flying under most people’s radars. The original indictment had named Bannon’s primary benefactor, Guo Wengui, who also goes by the pseudonym of “Miles Kwok,” as a defendant in a crypto currency scheme that he used to illegally enrich himself.

The superceding indictment goes much further. It charges Guo with establishing, alongside Bannon, several dozen entities designed to defraud the overseas Chinese dissident community out of around one billion dollars. 

Guo and Bannon passed themselves off as anti-CCP crusaders who revealed abuses by Beijing. But they also used their networks to spread misinformation, including about the origins of Covid-19.

Like the “We Build the Wall” scheme, the alleged criminal consortium allegedly deployed non-profits, with serious sounding names like the Rule of Law Foundation and the Rule of Law Society, in conjunction with for-profit entities, to commit wire fraud, money laundering and securities fraud, according to the indictment. One of those for-profit enterprises was the social media app “Gettr,” which Guo funded and which was formerly run by Trump advisor Jason Miller.

Bannon is not named as a defendant in the superceding indictment. There are some possible reasons for this. For starters, the Justice Department’s earlier indictment against Bannon was undone by Trump’s pardon, and Trump is now a presidential candidate and nearly certainly the GOP nominee. The DoJ may be taking a wait-and-see approach this time. Further, Bannon’s state criminal trial could result in a serious sentence for Bannon, which many would like to see him serve out at a state prison upstate rather than in a minimum security federal facility.

Bannon vs. his lawyers

It wouldn’t be a MAGA criminal case if the lawyers didn’t get stiffed out of their money at some point. That’s what happened with Bannon and his former lawyer, Robert Costello.

Costello represented Bannon through his contempt case as well as the “We Build The Wall” charges. Costello is a partner in the firm of Davidoff, Hutcher and Citron, and sometime around January 2023, Bannon decided he wasn’t going to pay the $480,487 he owed in legal fees.

DHC sued Bannon and quickly obtained a judgment, then it came to collect. His former lawyers issued subpoenas to Bannon’s financial partners and banks to assess his wealth and liquidity. But this presented a big problem for Bannon: That same information could show a clear financial trail and incriminate him in his upcoming state trial. 

So Bannon has moved to quash the subpoenas on Fifth Amendment grounds, according to a recent court filing. That’s a stretch, but okay, we’ll see what the judge says. 

But no matter how you slice it, Bannon is in deep trouble. He’s facing a four month prison sentence if he loses his contempt appeal, as expected. In May, his state trial for money laundering, fraud and conspiracy begins, one that could put him behind bars for over a decade. He appears to be broke or near-broke, with his Chinese benefactor now in hot legal water himself and probably feeling pressure to rat out Bannon to get his own likely sentence reduced. Indeed, Bannon apparently is so broke that he can’t or won’t pay his own lawyers, who are now the plaintiffs in a nasty collections case, where discovery could criminally expose Bannon even further.

All this might explain why he is sounding even more unhinged than usual lately on his podcast. Accountability is finally upon Steve Bannon, after years of escaping it through the help of his pal, Donald Trump. And we may soon see some justice at last.

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