Former Donald Trump aide Steve Bannon surrendered to authorities Thursday in New York City, where he was expected to face new state charges related to a fundraising scheme to build a private border wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.
He is expected to make his first appearance in court in Manhattan Thursday afternoon.
The Washington Post was first to report that Bannon, who was convicted in Washington, D.C., federal court last month of criminal contempt of Congress, had been indicted on state charges Tuesday night. The indictment remained sealed as of Thursday morning, but the state charges are reportedly based on a federal indictment from 2020, which alleged that Bannon and other associates defrauded donors to an online fundraising campaign called "We Build the Wall," which raised $25 million dollars to fund construction of a wall along the southern border.
Bannon pleaded not guilty to federal fraud charges in that earlier case, before receiving a last-minute pardon from Trump on his way out of the White House.
But presidential pardons only apply to federal charges and do not preclude prosecutions at the state level. Shortly after Trump pardoned Bannon, the Manhattan District Attorney's Office began investigating his alleged involvement in the border wall scheme.
Bannon did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Yahoo News Thursday, but in a statement published by several news outlets Tuesday night, he accused District Attorney Alvin Bragg, a Democrat, of pursuing "phony charges against me 60 days before the midterm election," suggesting that he was targeted because his podcast is popular among Trump supporters. The state's probe into Bannon's involvement in the crowdfunding scheme initially began under Bragg's predecessor, Cyrus Vance Jr.
"The SDNY did the exact same thing in August 2020 to try to take me out of the election," Bannon said.
Bannon's arraignment in Manhattan state court comes just over two years after federal authorities arrested him on a luxury yacht off the coast of Connecticut. Federal prosecutors in New York's southern district had charged Bannon, along with We Build the Wall founders Brian Kolfage, Andrew Badolato and Timothy Shea, with conspiracy to commit wire fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering. The 24-page federal indictment outlined a cynical scheme in which Bannon and the others allegedly sought to capitalize on Trump supporters' desire to fund a border wall - a core tenet of Trump's 2016 campaign - in order to enrich themselves.
While on the campaign trail in 2016, Trump frequently stoked anti-immigrant sentiments with his pledge to build a wall between the United States and Mexico and make Mexico pay for it. But once in office, Trump found that neither Mexico nor Congress would agree to foot the bill for his project.
Kolfage, a disabled Air Force veteran who'd previously helmed a collection of now defunct right-wing websites that trafficked in conspiracy theories and fake news, first created the GoFundMe campaign that would become We Build the Wall in the winter of 2018, after a stalemate over Trump's demands for billions in federal funding for a border wall caused a government shutdown. The goal of the original campaign was to raise $1 billion, which Kolfage promised would be given entirely to the government for the purpose of constructing Trump's border wall.
Though the campaign quickly went viral, receiving more than $13 million from over 213,000 people within roughly a week of its launch, it eventually became clear that neither the $1 billion goal nor the plan to give the funds directly to the federal government would be feasible.
According to the indictment, and confirmed by a GoFundMe spokesperson in a statement to Yahoo News at the time, the crowdfunding site informed Kolfage he would have to identify a legitimate nonprofit to which he would transfer the funds he'd raised for the wall campaign, or the money would have to be refunded to the donors.
That's when Bannon and the others allegedly got involved, creating a new nonprofit organization called We Build the Wall, Inc., to which they could transfer the money that had been raised by Kolfage's original GoFundMe campaign.
According to the indictment, "Within days of becoming involved, [Bannon] and [Badolato] took significant control of the fundraising campaigns organization and day-to-day activities, including its finances, messaging, donor outreach and general operations."
Kolfage remained the face of the campaign, and messaging and donor outreach efforts centered on the promise that he would "not take a penny of compensation," ensuring that all of the money raised would go to funding border wall construction.
The new campaign proceeded to raise $25 million and amassed an advisory board of high-profile Trump supporters and associates, including Blackwater USA founder Erik Prince and Kris Kobach, the aggressively anti-immigrant former Kansas secretary of state. Back in 2019, Yahoo News reported that the group had skirted local and federal regulations, and used intimidation and threats to quickly construct its first section of border wall on private property in Sunland Park, N.M., near El Paso.
But despite Kolfage's frequent assurances that "100% of the funds raised ... will be used in the execution of our mission and purpose" to build a border wall, prosecutors charged that all four men "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."
Specifically, the indictment alleged that "Kolfage covertly took for his personal use more than $350,000 in funds that donors had given to We Build the Wall," while Bannon received over $1 million through another unnamed nonprofit under his control, "at least some of which" was used to pay for hundreds of thousands of dollars in his personal expenses.
Bannon, however, was the only one to receive a presidential pardon for their alleged scheme. Earlier this year, Kolfage and Badolato pleaded guilty to fraud charges in federal court. Shea's case ended in a mistrial in June.
Tom LoBianco contributed reporting.