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During his political rise, Stephen K. Bannon was a man with no fixed address

By Robert O'Harrow Jr.

In the three years before he became Donald Trump’s chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon lived as a virtual nomad in a quest to build a populist political insurgency.

No presidential adviser in recent memory has followed such a mysterious, peripatetic path to the White House. It was as though he was a man with no fixed address.

He owned a house and condo in Southern California, where he had entertainment and consulting businesses, a driver’s license and a checking account. He claimed Florida as his residence, registering to vote in Miami and telling authorities he lived at the same address as his third ex-wife.

At the same time, he routinely stayed in Washington and New York as he engineered the expansion of Breitbart News and hosted a live Breitbart radio program. By 2015, Bannon stayed so often at Breitbart’s townhouse headquarters on Capitol Hill that he kept a picture of a daughter on a mantle piece, beneath a portrait of Abraham Lincoln.

Bannon told a friend that year he was living in multiple cities, including Washington, New York, London and Miami, according to an email obtained by The Washington Post.

The issue of Bannon’s legal residency has been simmering since last summer, shortly after he became chief executive of Trump’s campaign. The Guardian reported in an Aug. 26 story that he was registered to vote at a then-vacant house and speculated that Bannon may have signed an oath that he was a Florida resident to take advantage of the state’s lack of state income taxes.

In California, where Bannon had lived and owned property for more than two decades, income tax can exceed 12 percent.

Bannon has not responded to repeated requests by The Washington Post to discuss the matter. Two Post reporters sought to independently verify his residency claims, using a wide array of publicly available information.

They obtained utility bills, court records, real estate transactions, state driver reports and the checks he wrote to pay municipal taxes in California. They interviewed neighbors, spoke with landlords and tracked his Breitbart-related activity.

In the digital age, when most Americans leave a clear footprint of their whereabouts, Bannon left a meandering trail filled with ambiguity, contradictions and questions. The Post found that Bannon left a negligible footprint in Florida. He did not get a Florida driver’s license or register a car in the state. He never voted in Florida, and neighbors near two homes he leased in Miami said they never saw him. His rent and utility bills were sent to his business manager in California.

Bannon’s former wife occupied the premises, according to a landlord and neighbors.

At the same time Bannon said he was living with his ex-wife, she was under investigation for involvement in a plot to smuggle drugs and a cellphone into a Miami jail, a law enforcement document obtained by The Post shows.

The Post learned that state prosecutors in Miami have an active investigation into Bannon’s assertions that he was a Florida resident and qualified to vote in the state from 2014 to 2016. In late August, investigators subpoenaed Bannon’s lease of a Coconut Grove home and other documents. They also contacted the landlords of that home and another that Bannon leased nearby, and sought information from a gardener and handyman who worked at one of the homes, according to documents and interviews.

Because state laws do not clearly define residency, making a false registration case can be difficult.

California connection

A former investment banker and Hollywood producer, Bannon lived in California when he took a turn toward politics nearly a decade ago.

Investigations

During his political rise, Stephen K. Bannon was a man with no fixed address

By Robert O'Harrow Jr. and

Shawn BoburgMarch 11, 2017

Stephen Bannon at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Feb. 23. (Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post)

In the three years before he became Donald Trump’s chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon lived as a virtual nomad in a quest to build a populist political insurgency.

No presidential adviser in recent memory has followed such a mysterious, peripatetic path to the White House. It was as though he was a man with no fixed address.

Meet Stephen Bannon, Trump's chief White House strategist

Here's what you need to know about the man who went from being Breitbart News's chairman to Trump's campaign CEO and now to chief White House strategist. (Video: Jenny Starrs/Photo: Danny Moloshok/The Washington Post)

Bannon told a friend that year he was living in multiple cities, including Washington, New York, London and Miami, according to an email obtained by The Washington Post.

In California, where Bannon had lived and owned property for more than two decades, income tax can exceed 12 percent.

Bannon’s former wife occupied the premises, according to a landlord and neighbors.

Because state laws do not clearly define residency, making a false registration case can be difficult.

Bannon is seen as President Trump meets with business leaders in the Roosevelt Room of the White House on Jan. 23. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)

California connection

A former investment banker and Hollywood producer, Bannon lived in California when he took a turn toward politics nearly a decade ago.

He had a condo in Los Angeles and a house just to the south in Laguna Beach, in Orange County. In 2010, he told Orange County election officials that he wanted to become a “permanent absentee voter” and have all ballots mailed to his Laguna Beach home.

In 2011, Bannon produced and directed a political documentary about Sarah Palin for the Victory Film Project, a company in Sarasota, Fla. He is listed as a manager of the company in Florida corporate records.

In March 2012, with the death of founder Andrew Breitbart, Bannon became executive chairman of the Los Angeles-based Breitbart News, which was expanding its operations to Washington.

Bannon was still a resident of California, records show. In the November 2012 elections, he voted in Orange County by absentee ballot. That same month, he renewed his California driver’s license for five years.

But in his subsequent travels across the country, his living situation became more complicated. The details gathered by The Post create uncertainty about where exactly he was spending the bulk of his time.

On Feb. 9, 2013, Bannon and Diane Clohesy, his former third wife, signed a lease application for a three-bedroom house on Opechee Drive in a lush Miami neighborhood with palm trees and Spanish-style homes.

Bannon signed as “applicant,” and Clohesy signed as “applicant’s spouse.”

The two were married in 2006, when Bannon was 53 and Clohesy was 36. They divorced in California in 2009. She had moved to Florida in 2008, “starting a new life in Miami,” Bannon said in court papers during the divorce. But the two remained in touch, and she worked on three political documentaries he directed in 2011 and 2012.

Bannon told his new landlords that he would be splitting his time between California and Florida, according to interviews The Post conducted with the property owners. Bannon and Clohesy both signed the two-year lease, records show.

The lease application said Bannon was “relocating from California.” But Devin Kammerer, the real estate agent who represented Bannon and Clohesy, said he never met Bannon in person, and only sent him listings by email.

“It was Diane who made the decisions about where she wanted to be, and she’d send over listings to Steve for his approval,” Kammerer said. “Diane was very clear on what she wanted.”

The $4,900 monthly rent was a big jump for Clohesy, who declared on the lease application that her most recent apartment had cost her $950 a month, documents show. But by his own account, Bannon could afford it.

He stated on the application that he earned $750,000 a year as chairman of Breitbart News Network, a figure that has not been previously reported. He also earned $270,000 as executive chairman of Arc Entertainment, a film distribution company based in Santa Monica, Calif.

In addition, Bannon received about $100,000 in salary that year as part-time chairman of the Government Accountability Institute, a new nonprofit charity in Tallahassee, according to filings with the Internal Revenue Service. Bannon, two Breitbart writers and other conservative activists had launched the organization a year earlier and it produced reports and books that were promoted by Breitbart. Bannon claimed he worked 30 hours a week at GAI, according to IRS filings.

Just weeks after signing the Opechee Drive lease, Bannon launched “Breitbart News Sunday with Stephen K. Bannon,” a three-hour program broadcast live Sunday nights from SiriusXM studios in Washington.

In May 2013, Bannon opened an account in his name for municipal sewer and water service at the Opechee Drive residence, documents show.

The utility account is one of the few public indications of Bannon’s presence in Florida. But Bannon told utility officials to mail the bills to the office of his business manager on Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills, Calif., according to documents obtained through Florida public records laws.

Four neighbors told The Post they do not recall seeing Bannon at the house.

“I never saw him,” said Steven Chastain, who lived a few doors away on a nearby street.

“He wasn’t living there,” said Barbara Pope, a longtime resident who often walked her dog on Opechee Drive. “I would have recognized him.”

At the time Bannon was sharing the lease with Clohesy in Opechee, she was apparently involved with another man. Neighbors said they repeatedly saw a man they could not identify at the house.

She filed for a restraining order against Jose A. Cabana in 2012. He filed one against her in May 2013, court records show. She was granted a two-year injunction against him and his complaint was dropped after he failed to appear in court. Cabana was charged with cocaine distribution in November 2013 and sentenced to 10 years in prison. He could not be reached for comment.

In October 2013, Clohesy became ensnared in an undercover investigation of a jail guard suspected of smuggling drugs and other contraband to another man, a friend of hers in the Miami-Dade County Pre-trial Detention Center, according to an arrest warrant for the jail guard first reported by the the Miami New Times.

Investigators eavesdropping on a phone call between Clohesy and the inmate heard them arrange for her to deliver a “pop tart” — code for a cellphone — along with several ounces of marijuana to a prison guard, the warrant said. Clohesy, who was under surveillance, later met with the guard in a parking lot and handed over the marijuana, the phone and $700 in cash, the warrant said.

Clohesy was confronted by authorities and agreed to cooperate. She told investigators she had known the inmate for more than a year and “maintained a relationship with him through jail visits, correspondence and telephone conversations.”

Efforts to reach Clohesy were unsuccessful. Her brother, Declan, provided The Post with a statement Friday that Bannon had provided “emotional or financial support” to help her recover from drug addiction and depression.

“Steve is a caring and compassionate man and Diane is blessed to still have him in her life,” the statement said. “We appreciate the media respecting my sister’s privacy at this early stage of her recovery.”

Neighbors of the Opechee Drive home said they remember Clohesy vividly, in part because she had a steady stream of visitors, some of them disruptive. Four neighbors told The Post that they had a community meeting with police to complain about noise at the house and cars speeding from the premises at late hours.

Police records show that officers went to the Opechee address at least three times over several months in 2014. The officers were responding to reports about disturbances, including loud music. In one case, a woman at the home called police around midnight to express fears about an ex-boyfriend who was shining a bright light into the windows. Her name is redacted in the report.

Beatriz Portela, a real estate agent who represented the Opechee landlords, said she also received a call and text messages from neighbors who were anxious about troubling incidents at the house, including speeding vehicles and a car crash. “They were super upset,” Portela said.

A roving life

On April 2, 2014, more than a year after Bannon signed the lease on the residence in Coconut Grove, he registered to vote in Florida and listed the Opechee Drive address as his legal home. Bannon did not have to show an ID to register. He provided the last four digits of his Social Security number to verify his identity.

One of the allures of Florida is its zero income tax rate for in-state residents. The Post was unable to determine what state Bannon claimed as his primary residence for the purpose of income tax.

Accountants advise people who work in multiple states to carefully document the number of nights they spend in Florida and maintain records of travel, housing, even of meals. Registering to vote is considered one indication of residency, as is a driver’s license. Under state law, new residents must apply for a license within 30 days if they intend to operate a vehicle.

Phillip Sroka, a partner at the accounting firm of Morrison, Brown, Argiz and Farra in Miami, said he advises clients who split their time in multiple states to take care to document their presence in Florida for more than six months. That includes airline tickets, restaurant receipts and utility bills.

In an interview with The Post, Sroka said suspicions are raised when individuals have their bills sent outside the states where they claim their residences.

“It gets a little sketchy when you accept employment elsewhere,” he said. “Where it gets a little on the line and subject to interpretation is where you have a lot of other business dealings elsewhere.”

As 2015 approached, Bannon continued his roving life. He rented out his Laguna Beach home and, in January 2015, bought a townhouse as a second home in Pinehurst, N.C. The deed lists Bannon’s mailing address at his money manager’s office in Beverly Hills.

On Feb. 18, 2015, Bannon ended the water and sewer service at Opechee Drive and switched the service to Onaway Drive, less than a half mile away in Coconut Grove, records show. Five days later, Bannon changed his voter registration to Onaway Drive.

The Opechee house was left in disrepair, according to an email between the landlord and Bannon and interviews with the landlord.

Padlocks had been placed on interior doors — or the doors had been removed altogether. A hot tub was destroyed.

“[E]ntire Jacuzzi bathtub seems to have been covered in acid,” the landlord wrote in the February 2015 email to Bannon.

“I’m out of town,” Bannon replied. “is there any way u can talk with Diane and sort things out ???”

The damage was estimated at more than $14,000, according to an accounting by the landlords, who kept the $9,800 security deposit from Bannon and Clohesy.

Kammerer, their real estate agent, said he was troubled by the damage.

“I would not work with them after that,” he said. “I would not refer them again as clients of mine.”

Around this time, Bannon was becoming a fixture at the Breitbart News townhouse location in Washington, nicknamed “the Breitbart Embassy,” hosting parties, meeting with journalists and staying overnight.

In a Bloomberg Businessweek profile in October 2015, a reporter described interviewing Bannon multiple times in January and February at the Breitbart townhouse in Washington.

The article, headlined “This Man Is the Most Dangerous Political Operative in America,” described the building as a “14-room townhouse that [Bannon] occupies.”

“Ordinarily Bannon’s townhouse is crypt-quiet and feels like a museum, as it’s faithfully decorated down to its embroidered silk curtains and painted murals in authentic Lincoln-era details,” the article said.

On Oct. 26, 2015, SiriusXM announced that Bannon’s weekend radio show would expand its live broadcasts to weekday mornings from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. from studios in Washington and New York. Donald Trump was a guest on the inaugural show Nov. 2.

Five months later, Bannon shut off sewer and water service at the Onaway address in Miami. The house remained uninhabited for months.

Three neighbors interviewed by The Post said they were confident Bannon had not lived at the home.

“I often saw Diane,” said Joseph “J.L.” Plummer, a prominent Miami resident who lived next door and was a city commissioner for nearly 30 years. “I never saw him.”

In mid-August, Bannon became chief executive of the Trump campaign. As he was assuming control, Bannon changed the address on his Florida voter registration records. On Aug. 19, he signed an oath that he now lived at the home of a longtime business associate in Nokomis, Fla., in Sarasota County.

The questions about Bannon’s residency emerged Aug. 26, when the Guardian wrote that Bannon had been registered to vote at a vacant house — the Onaway address in Miami.

The local NBC station in Miami reported that the state attorney’s office had requested Bannon’s voter records from county election officials.

At least two people filed complaints about Bannon with the Florida Department of State, claiming he had committed voter fraud by asserting he was a resident, documents show. In October, the department said the complaints did not merit an investigation.

That month, Bannon registered to vote in New York from a Manhattan condo overlooking Bryant Park and later cast an absentee ballot in the presidential election. Because he was registered in two places, he was later removed from Florida’s voter rolls.

Under Florida law, it is a third-degree felony to provide false information on a voter registration application. It is punishable by up to five years in prison. First-time offenders are rarely given more than probation, something that could also lead to the loss of a security clearance.

Officials from the State Attorney’s Office for Miami-Dade County, which is led by an elected Democrat, declined to provide details about their probe into Bannon’s residency claim. In denying a Post request for documents about the investigation, officials cited confidentiality rules for “active criminal investigative information.”

Spokesman Ed Griffith said, “At this point it is not over.”

But proving wrongdoing in Bannon’s case could be difficult because state law does not clearly define residency, according to an official who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

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yourtidthings · 5 years ago

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As Steve Bannon Rose to Power, His Ex-Wife Struggled With Drugs and Violence in Miami

Steve Bannon, President Donald Trump's senior counselor and chief strategist, lashed out at reporters this week, claiming "the media should be embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut."

The comments came after journalists discovered Bannon was registered to vote in both Florida and New York — an embarrassing revelation that happened just as Trump called for a massive investigation into baseless claims of voter fraud by Clinton supporters.

But it turns out Bannon's ties to Florida are even stranger than his voter registration woes. Court records obtained by New Times reveal that in 2013, one his ex-wives, Diane Clohesy, was caught trying to smuggle marijuana and a cell phone to an accused burglar in the Miami-Dade jail at a time when Bannon was reportedly paying her monthly rent at a Coconut Grove home.

The documents raise new questions about Bannon’s relationship with Clohesy and the multiple felonious men with whom she associated after their 2009 divorce. At the same time Bannon was rising as a central figure in the alt-right, his ex-wife was arrested for domestic violence and accused of using drugs in a low-rent condo building on Miami's Upper Eastside.

Neither Bannon nor Clohesy responded to multiple emails seeking comment for this story. But Clohesy's brother Declan tells New Times that Bannon helped his sister through her battles with substance abuse and mental illness.

"My sister Diane is one of millions of Americans that suffer from drug and alcohol abuse and depression," he said in a statement. "Steve has always been there for my sister, whether it be providing emotional or financial support as she battles this horrible disease. The family can't thank him enough. We appreciate the media respecting my sister’s privacy at this early stage of her recovery."

Born in Norfolk, Virginia, in 1953, Bannon served as an officer in the Navy for several years before attending Harvard Business School at the age of 29. After stints as an investment banker and a Hollywood producer, he became a founding member of Breitbart News in 2007, helping to tailor the site's coverage to the whims of the alt-right, an audience eager for pro-white, anti-immigration content.

Now 63 years old, Bannon has been married and divorced three times, though the timeline of those relationships is fuzzy. In the '80s, he wed Cathleen Suzanne Houff, who gave birth to their daughter in 1988. After the couple divorced, Bannon married Mary Louise Piccard in April 1995, three days before she gave birth to twin girls.

Not long after that, Piccard claimed Bannon violently grabbed at her neck and wrist during an argument about money. Police responded to the couple's California home and later charged Bannon with domestic violence in the January 1996 incident. The case was dropped several months later, and Piccard filed for divorce at the beginning of the new year.

Clohesy is an especially hazy figure in Bannon's story. His third wife began studying marketing at the age of 24 at New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology, according to her LinkedIn profile. She finished her studies four years later in 1998, the same year Bannon reportedly moved to New York after his media investment firm was acquired by a Wall Street bank. Records indicate Bannon and Clohesy began living together in Laguna Beach, California, sometime around 1999.

In August 2003, Clohesy moved to Florida and registered to vote as a Republican. Though it’s unclear where she was living at that time, she listed addresses at a Sarasota office building and a Lincoln Road condo in Miami Beach as residences on early forms.

In 2006, she and Bannon moved into a $1.3 million apartment in a luxury Manhattan high-rise. The couple sold the home in 2008 and divorced the next year.

That divorce file isn't available, but Miami-Dade court records suggest Clohesy might have been dating another man since 2007. Describing himself as Clohesy’s boyfriend of two years, a Miami man named Pedro Garcia Jr. twice accused her of domestic violence in 2009. Following a physical altercation that March, Clohesy was arrested and ordered by a judge to stay away from Garcia. Court records show prosecutors ultimately dismissed the misdemeanor battery charge.

The two apparently patched things up, and in October 2009, Clohesy moved into Garcia’s condo on the third floor of a building off the 79th Street Causeway, just east of Biscayne Boulevard. But only two weeks later, Garcia filed for a restraining order, saying Clohesy had smashed a bottle on his head in a drunken rage. The case was dismissed ten days later when Garcia failed to show up in court.

Soon after the couple broke things off, Clohesy began dating one of Garcia's neighbors. In 2012, she moved into an apartment just one floor up with Jose Cavana, a muscular 33-year-old with a joker tattooed on his stomach. The couple had been dating about nine months when they had an argument that ended in violence in July 2012. On July 24, Clohesy claimed Cavana accused her of cheating and then made various attempts to extort money.

"Pay me now or it’s on," he said in a text message, according to Clohesy’s petition for a restraining order. "If you don’t have my stacks [of] at least fifty thousand dollars, I am going to the internet and ruin your reputation."

Over the next two days, the quarrel turned violent, and Cavana was arrested by Miami-Dade Police July 26 after Clohesy said he strangled her inside the apartment. Cavana was charged with three felonies and ordered to undergo a mental health evaluation, but the case was dismissed later in 2012. In 2013, he filed a counter-petition against Clohesy, claiming she kept trying to contact him in violation of the restraining order she had sought. His petition also said Clohesy had a problem with crystal meth, Ecstasy, and marijuana.

Despite her tumultuous personal life, Clohesy continued to work with Bannon. The two collaborated on several conservative films, including The Undefeated, a documentary about Sarah Palin released in 2011, and Occupy Unmasked, a 2013 film about Occupy Wall Street that's been described by viewers as “blatant propaganda” and "right-wing, corporate-funded slander."

After their divorce, Bannon also reportedly continued to pay for Clohesy's housing. From 2013 to 2016, he rented two Coconut Grove homes for his ex-wife, according to an August report from the Guardian .

Records show Clohesy lived at an address on Opechee Drive from 2013 to 2015. Citing a source with direct knowledge of the rental agreement, the British newspaper reported that Bannon paid Clohesy’s $5,500 monthly rent through his accountants in Beverly Hills. Bannon did not live at the home but would visit a couple of times a year, according to the source and a neighbor.

It was during this time that Clohesy was caught trying to smuggle contraband to inmate Victor Ramirez at the Miami-Dade jail. Investigators first began sniffing around in September 2012 after finding a cell phone on another inmate, Benson Cadet, a known member of a gang called the Terrorist Boys. Shakedowns at the jail kept turning up phones, and detectives suspected a number of correctional officers were responsible. But the investigation dragged into 2013 with no resolution.

Investigators were stumped until they came across several recorded jailhouse calls from Ramirez to Clohesy in September 2013. In the recordings, Ramirez and Clohesy coordinated for her to meet with Lavar Lewis, a 27-year-old correctional officer known to inmates as the “Love Doctor” due to the service he facilitated between incarcerated men and their girlfriends and wives. During her conversations with Ramirez, Clohesy was given instructions to purchase a "pop tart" — code language for a cell phone — as well as several ounces of weed and some molly, according to an affidavit by Sgt. Rene Vila, an internal affairs investigator.

For weeks, detectives followed Lewis, and they were on his trail as he left his West Perrine home Friday, September 20, 2013. After stops at Burger King and Walgreens, Lewis pulled into a parking space at a Taco Bell on South Dixie Highway and waited. At 10:46 p.m., Clohesy drove up in a blue Mercedes-Benz and slid into the next parking spot over. Lewis hopped into the passenger seat of her car, and the two headed to a nearby Walgreens, where Clohesy took out $700 to pay Lewis.

During their ride, Ramirez called Clohesy from jail. Telling him she was “shopping,” she then handed the phone to Lewis, who asked Ramirez about a promise he'd made to allow Lewis sex with one of his girlfriends. The arrest affidavit outlining what happened that night doesn't say whether the rendezvous ever occurred.

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yourtidthings · 5 years ago

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James Comey: ex-Trump adviser Steve Bannon 'in a world of trouble'

The former FBI director James Comey has said Steve Bannon is “in a world of trouble”, after the former Trump campaign manager and White House adviser was arrested on a charge of skimming donations from a fundraising campaign for a wall on the border with Mexico.

“It’s another reminder of the kind of people this president surrounds himself with,” Comey told CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday.

Bannon is the latest figure with close ties to the president to have found himself in trouble with the law. Others include former campaign chair Paul Manafort, former lawyer Michael Cohen and former national security adviser Michael Flynn.

Comey is also a former US attorney for Southern District of New York, where Bannon was indicted last week.

“At this point they could almost start their own crime family,” Comey told CBS, echoing the passage in his book A Higher Loyalty, released in April 2018, in which he famously likened Trump, who fired him in May 2017, to mafia chiefs including Sammy “the Bull” Gravano.

“It’s a very serious case. The southern district of New York has laid it out in a very detailed indictment called a speaking indictment, and he’s in a world of trouble.”

Bannon has pleaded not guilty and faces up to 20 years in jail if convicted.

“It’s a very serious fraud case with a huge amount of money stolen from innocent victims,” Comey said. “That’ll drive up potential punishments.”

Bannon was released on a $5m bond, backed by $1.75m in cash or real estate. He has until 3 September to find the collateral. Three other men, Brian Kolfage, Andrew Badolato and Timothy Shea, were also arrested in the alleged scheme to defraud the We Build the Wall campaign, which authorities said raised more than $25m.

Kolfage, Badolato and Shea have not yet entered pleas. In a statement on his Facebook page on Saturday, Kolfage said he had “obtained one of the best super lawyers around who isn’t afraid to fight back at the politically motivated assaults against me”.

Bannon, Comey said, was “in trouble because the indictment lays it out in such detail, including excerpts from texts. If you’re Steve Bannon [or] you’re his lawyers, you’re reading this saying, ‘I’m going down here.’

“I don’t know what the next steps are for him and his co-defendants, but that’s what I meant by ‘world of trouble.’”

Comey has proved a troublesome adversary for Trump, who sought unsuccessfully, and infamously, to secure a pledge of personal loyalty before deciding to fire him as FBI director.

Comey recently announced a new book, Saving Justice: Truth, Transparency, and Trust, due for release in January. Also in January, after the presidential election, Showtime will release The Comey Rule, a two-part adaptation of A Higher Loyalty.

Comey is played by Jeff Daniels, Trump by the Irish actor Brendan Gleeson. In published cast lists, Bannon does not appear.

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yourtidthings · 5 years ago

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Steve Bannon Is Charged With Fraud in We Build the Wall Campaign

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/20/nyregion/steve-bannon-arrested-indicted.html

Stephen K. Bannon,

President Trump’s former adviser and an architect of his 2016 general election campaign, was charged on Thursday with defrauding donors to a private fund-raising effort called We Build the Wall, which was intended to bolster the president’s signature initiative along the Mexican border.

Mr. Bannon, working with a wounded Air Force veteran and a Florida venture capitalist, conspired to cheat hundreds of thousands of donors by falsely promising that their money had been set aside for new sections of wall, according to a federal indictment unsealed in Manhattan.

The fund-raising effort collected more than $25 million, and prosecutors said Mr. Bannon used nearly $1 million of it for personal expenses.

Despite the populist aura he tries to project, Mr. Bannon is known to enjoy the high life, and he was arrested at 7:15 a.m. on a $35 million, 150-foot yacht belonging to one of his business associates, the fugitive Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui, law enforcement officials said.

Working with the Coast Guard, special agents from the United States attorney’s office in Manhattan and federal postal inspectors boarded the yacht off Westbrook, Conn., the officials said. Mr. Bannon, 66, was on deck, drinking coffee and reading a book, when the raid occurred.

The criminal charges, filed a week before Mr. Trump was to accept the Republican nomination for a second term, marked a stark turn of fortune for the flamboyant political strategist. Mr. Bannon first came to prominence when he was in charge of the right-wing media outlet Breitbart, where he had aligned himself with the alt-right, a loose network of groups and people who promote white identity.

As chief strategist, Mr. Bannon was one of the most powerful figures in the White House early in the Trump administration, but he stepped down in August 2017 after frequently clashing with other aides.

With the indictment, Mr. Bannon became the seventh Trump associate to have been charged with federal crimes, a list that includes Paul Manafort, Mr. Trump’s former campaign manager; Michael T. Flynn, the former national security adviser; and Michael D. Cohen, Mr. Trump’s onetime lawyer and fixer.

The 24-page indictment, unsealed in Federal District Court in Manhattan, is by far the most politically sensitive case that Audrey Strauss, the acting United States attorney in Manhattan, has handled since she assumed her job after her predecessor, Geoffrey S. Berman, was fired in June by Mr. Trump.

At a brief arraignment on Thursday, Mr. Bannon, sunburned and his hair unbrushed, pleaded not guilty to charges of wire fraud conspiracy and money laundering conspiracy, each of which carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison. The government agreed to release him from custody on a $5 million bond.

Walking to his car after being freed, Mr. Bannon said, “This entire fiasco is to stop people who want to build the wall.”

Shortly after the charges were announced, Mr. Trump had sought to distance himself from Mr. Bannon and the fund-raising initiative, though the president also expressed sympathy for his former adviser.

“I feel very badly,” Mr. Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “I haven’t been dealing with him for a very long period of time.”

The president said he knew nothing about the multimillion-dollar We Build the Wall campaign but quickly contradicted himself.

“I don’t like that project,” Mr. Trump said. “I thought it was being done for showboating reasons.” He called paying for the border wall privately “inappropriate.”

One of Mr. Trump’s sons, Donald Jr., publicly promoted the We Build the Wall effort at an event in 2019, calling it “private enterprise at its finest.”

Donald Trump Jr. said in a statement on Thursday that he had no involvement with the effort beyond praising it at that one event.

A White House official said that President Trump did not know Mr. Bannon would be arrested, and that he was told by aides after it happened.

Attorney General William P. Barr was briefed on the investigation several months ago, according to a Justice Department official, and the federal prosecutor’s office in Manhattan gave him notice that the indictment would be unsealed on Thursday.

According to the authorities, Mr. Bannon hatched the plot to defraud the donors with three other men: Brian Kolfage, a 38-year-old Air Force veteran and triple amputee from Miramar Beach, Fla.; Andrew Badolato, 56, a venture capitalist from Sarasota, Fla.; and Timothy Shea, 49, of Castle Rock, Colo.

Mr. Kolfage and Mr. Badolato were arrested in Florida on Thursday, and Mr. Shea, who prosecutors said funneled money for the group through a shell company he owned, was arrested in Denver.

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