Steve Bannon Is Charged With Fraud

Former White House adviser Steve Bannon has been indicted on charges he defrauded donors to a $25 million campaign to build a border wall, federal prosecutors in Manhattan said Thursday.

Bannon and others are accused of ripping off donations to the “We Build the Wall” online fundraiser.

Audrey Strauss, acting US attorney for the Southern District of New York, said 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.”

Bannon, the former chief strategist to President Trump, personally pocketed $1 million in contributions meant for construction of the border wall, funneled through a nonprofit under his control, prosecutors alleged.

Meanwhile, “We Build the Wall” founder Brian Kolfage, 38, promised donors he wouldn’t take a single penny from the pot — but Bannon and their cohorts “secretly schemed to pass hundreds of thousands of dollars to Kolfage, which he used to fund his lavish lifestyle,” Strauss said.

Bannon, Kolfage and two other men — Andrew Badolato, 56, and Timothy Shea, 49 — allegedly hid the payments to Kolfage by passing them through Bannon’s nonprofit and a shell company that Shea controlled.

They created fake invoices and bogus “vendor” arrangements to make the payments seem legitimate, prosecutors said.

They are each charged with one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering.

Each charge carries up to 20 years in prison.

All four were arrested Thursday morning, with Bannon, 66, scheduled to appear in Manhattan federal court later in the afternoon.