A political flimflammer has the innate ability to either con his targets by espousing their trampled causes, battered aspirations and nationalism or by conflating his personal agenda with conservatives and ultranationalists. While his targets play along mistaking him to be their messiah or propagator of their views, the hustler soon starts indulging in blatant self-aggrandisement.
Steve Bannon is the Great White Shark of such conmen—and his chicanery and thuggery has finally scripted the most ignominious chapter of his scandalous life in which he could be jailed for several years.
The former White House chief strategist and Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign-in-chief has been arrested for swindling donors of hundreds of thousands of dollars as part of a GoFundMe campaign titled ‘We The People Will Build the Wall’, which purportedly aimed to support Trump’s much-touted border wall with Mexico to stop the influx of immigrants.
Instead, Bannon and three other defendants—Brian Kolfage, Andrew Badolato and Timothy Shea—used the funds for personal expenses among other things.
According to the indictment by the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York (SDNY), Kolfage, a Purple Heart triple amputee Iraq vet who started the campaign, spent $350,000 of the donor amount on boats, an SUV, cosmetic surgery, jewellery, home renovation and credit card debt. Using a non-profit under his control, Bannon secretly paid more than $1 million to Kolfage and covered his own personal expenses running into hundreds of thousands of dollars.
They “orchestrated a scheme to defraud hundreds of thousands of donors... in connection with an online crowdfunding campaign ultimately known as ‘We Build the Wall’ that raised more than $25,000,000 to build a wall along the southern border of the United States. They repeatedly and falsely assured the public that Kolfage would ‘not take a penny in salary or compensation’,” the indictment reads. The four men have been charged with wire fraud and money laundering.
CNN legal analyst Elie Honig said Bannon “is in a lot of trouble. He could be going to many, many years in jail if he is convicted”.
“In a lot of ways, this is fraud 101 blown up because [of] the massive amounts we’re talking about here. This [evidence] should be very provable. You can pick up clues from the indictment. And in the indictment, the SDNY talks about how they have fake invoices and sham vendor arrangements. That tells me the SDNY has those documents.”
Bannon is a white supremacist with ingrained ethno-nationalism, lobbying tactics and vitriolic hatred towards immigrants whose shady past triggered discord even in the West Wing, which finally led to his sacking in 2017. He has often deployed a concoction of fake patriotism, ultra-nationalism, fear-mongering regarding immigrants and the farce of his abhorrence of the elite to lethal effect.
In an interview with The Wall Street Journal in 2017, the former editor of far-right syndicated news and opinion website Breitbart News offered a blustering narrative of his economic nationalism and advocacy of greater trade protectionism by presenting himself as a sympathiser of blue-collar workers, who were hit by the 2008 financial meltdown.
Mentioning how his father Marty Bannon sold all of his stock worth $1,00,000 in AT&T—where he worked all his life—at a loss in 2008 on the advice of CNBC’s Mad Money host Jim Cramer, who suggested to Americans to take out whatever money they needed for the next five years out of the stock market, Bannon said, “The government created this problem. The elites got bailed out. The Marty Bannons of the world were getting washed out to the sea, and nobody was paying attention to them.”
Bannon’s monstrous connivance with thugs, ultraconservatives, the Far Right and even criminals is as secretive as his goulash of T-shirts and button down shirts under a blazer or military jacket. Each layer of that sartorial conundrum has a dirty secret.
Ironically, one of his most dubious financial backings was unravelled when the 2015 New York Times bestseller Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich made headlines. The writer Peter Schweizer heads the conservative non-profit think tank Government Accountability Institute (GAI), which he formed with Bannon, who was the executive chairman of Breitbart.
Though Clinton Cash investigated the donation to The Clinton Foundation by foreign entities and paid speeches by former President Bill Clinton and his wife and former secretary of state and 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary, the book itself was funded by the Mercer Family Foundation.
The Foundation, which donated $2.6 million to produce the book, was founded by American hedge fund manager, Trump donor and Bannon patron Robert Mercer—who was the principal investor in the erstwhile Cambridge Analytica—and is headed by his Manhattan heiress daughter Rebekah. Leaked Paradise Papers exposed how “the billionaire Mercer family built a $60-million war chest for conservative causes inside their family foundation by using an offshore investment vehicle to avoid US tax”, according to The Guardian.
According to the Paradise Papers, “the offshore vehicle was part of a network of companies in the Atlantic tax haven of Bermuda”. Mercer “appears as a director of eight Bermuda companies in the Paradise Papers”. Some of the Bermuda companies “appear to have been used to legally avoid a little-known US tax of up to 39% on tens of millions of dollars in investment profits amassed by the Mercer foundation”, The Guardian further reported in 2017.
Between 2012 and 2016, Bannon received around $61,000 from GAI, $125,000 from Cambridge Analytica, and earned a $191,000 salary from Breitbart in 2016—all the three organisations are heavily funded by the Mercer Family Foundation—according to financial disclosures of senior staff members released by the White House in 2017.
What makes the ‘Build the Wall’ scam more sinister is co-accused Badolato, a mob associate. During the 2016 Trump campaign, Bannon claimed to have been residing at Badolato’s house—even after being appointed Trump’s chief strategist. According to court documents with The Herald Tribune—a local newspaper in Sarasota, Florida—Badolato had ties to financial crimes and mob families.
“According to a federal court document, for example, [Badolato] borrowed $12,500 at 500% interest in 2008 from Luis Caputo, a Sarasota resident who claimed ties to the Gambino organised crime family,” the report says. “He eventually helped the FBI bring down Caputo on extortion charges by taping their meetings and exchanging marked bills.” Bannon and Badolato started doing business together by overseeing penny stock companies with a company formed by latter listing former as a Board member, according to observer.com.
Hours after Bannon’s indictment, Bloomberg Businessweek senior national correspondent Joshua Green, who authored Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency, told The New Yorker in an interview that “anyone who knows Bannon has been anticipating his indictment at some point, on some charge”.
Green said that since Bannon was “someone who was in the centre of the Trump campaign, he was in the centre of the White House for seven months, he was in the centre of the Mueller investigation and the congressional investigations, he “figured that at some point they would catch him doing something. I think the irony is that it is like busting Al Capone for tax evasion, isn’t it”?
Bannon was supremely confident—rather overconfident—of his smartness to deflect controversies. Whenever Green asked Bannon whether he will be indicted in the various investigations in which his name cropped up, he would quip, “I am always smart enough not to be in the room.”
“That was his shorthand for saying he was too clever to get caught doing anything illegal. And, at least, according to the indictment today, that turned out not to be true,” Green said.
Finally, “Sloppy Steve”—a moniker Trump had bestowed on his most trusted confidant in a fit of rage in 2018—did skid.
The writer is a freelance journalist. The views expressed are personal.
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