A day after his arrest on federal fraud charges related to a crowdfund campaign to build a private border fence, Trump’s former chief strategist told listeners of his daily podcast that the case was engineered to “intimidate” supporters of the president’s wall.
A day after his arrest on federal fraud charges related to a crowdfunding campaign to build a private border fence, former White House chief strategist Stephen Bannon on Friday dismissed the case as a “total political hit job” engineered to “intimidate” supporters of President Trump’s promise to build a wall along the United States border with Mexico.
Bannon and three others — Brian Kolfage, Andrew Badolato and Timothy Shea — were charged with defrauding donors to their crowdfunding We Build the Wall campaign, which raised $25 million to privately supplement Trump’s plan to build a fence along the southern border. Specifically, the 24-page indictment unsealed Thursday alleges that Kolfage “covertly took for his personal use more than $350,000 in funds that donors had given to We Build the Wall” to fund his “lavish lifestyle,” 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 invoked his reputation as a “honey badger,” a weasel-like animal native to Africa and Asia known for its ferocity. “When I read about it, I didn’t like it,” Trump said. “This is for government. This isn’t for private people. And it sounded, to me, like showboating.”“President Trump’s right, building the wall is a government function,” he said. “We’ve never questioned that at all.”“Look how much trouble President Trump has had, what he’s had to fight against,” Bannon said. “And not just progressive Democrats but people in his own party.
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