Former Trump adviser admits to defrauding donors to We Build the Wall scheme. Steve Bannon has pleaded guilty to fraud in a deal with New York prosecutors that will keep him out of jail, admitting in a Manhattan criminal courtroom to bilking donors to a spurious campaign to build parts of Donald Trump’s U.S.-Mexico border wall. Bannon was accused of defrauding donors and pocketing tens of thousands of dollars as part of a U.S.-Mexico border wall scheme in 2019, which landed his co-defendants in a parallel federal case in prison with millions of dollars owed in restitution.
He will not face any jail time with a three-year conditional discharge sentence, and he will not have to pay any restitution of his own to donor victims. Trump’s former adviser, whose “flood the zone” mantra has fueled the president’s campaign and administration and reshaped a far-right media environment, appeared in Manhattan criminal court on Tuesday to enter a guilty plea to a single count of “scheme to defraud.”.
New York Judge April Newbauer asked Bannon whether he agrees that he acted “principally and in concert with others” to engage in a “scheme with intent to defraud” by “false and fraudulent pretenses, representations and promises.”. “Yes, your honor,” he said. Bannon had initially pleaded not guilty to charges of money laundering, conspiracy and scheme to defraud in the New York case. A deal was reached less than a month before a trial was set to examine whether Bannon deceived donors to the “We Build the Wall” campaign, echoing charges brought by federal prosecutors in a case that fell apart with Trump’s presidential pardon in 2021.
We Build the Wall raised more than $25 million to help privately construct a piece of wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, but prosecutors accused the group’s officers of funneling hundreds of thousands of dollars into their own pockets. In 2020, federal agents arrested Bannon while he was on a yacht off the Connecticut coast. Trump’s last-minute pardon before the end of his first term in the White House derailed the case against him.
Meanwhile, his co-defendant Brian Kolfage was sentenced to more than four years in prison after pleading guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud and money laundering, among other charges. In 2022, the Manhattan district attorney’s office charged Bannon in a scheme that prosecutors claim netted “$15 million from thousands of donors across the country based on false promises.”. Bannon did, however, spend four months in prison after he was convicted of contempt of Congress for dodging subpoenas from the House select committee investigating January 6, which spent months probing the events surrounding the Capitol attack fueled by Trump’s election lies.
