The We Build the Wall website is still up and running. Visitors are still being urged to donate, although I get the feeling the money is not exactly going to be pouring in through the doors now. You can still purchase bits of the old wall, fashioned into commemorative Trump coins ($US49.99) or a steel credit card bottle opener ($US29.99). Classy.
Click on the Our Team page and the first two names that appear, Brian Kolfage and Steve Bannon, have been charged with wire fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering.
Nowhere to be found on the site but also charged in the two-count conspiracy indictment are Andrew Badaloto from Sarasota County, Florida and Timothy Shea from Castle Rock, Colorado.
Rumours circulated that two other members of the We Build The Wall board, general counsel Kris Kobach and a member of the advisory board, former MLB pitcher Curt Schilling had been arrested but at time of writing, the two men have not had their collars felt.
Kobach has declared that Trump had given the not-for-profit “his blessing” but there is no record of this.
Trump said earlier today that he believed Kobach et al were “grandstanding” and that the wall was and should remain a government project.
Kobach, an immigration hardliner in the GOP, has had a mixed political career at best. He was secretary of state in Kansas between 2011 and 2019. But more recently his political aspirations have fallen flat.
He failed to win the support of GOP voters in the 2018 Kansas gubernatorial primary. On August 4 this year, he lost the GOP primary for a senate spot despite claiming he had the endorsement of Trump after a phone call he says was made to the President on July 4. The White House remained silent on whether the call took place or not. No official endorsement was made.
Kobach’s political career is now in tatters.
How much of the wall has been built by the not-for-profit is not properly understood. The board claims to be building a section of the wall around where Juarez in Mexico meets El Paso in Texas.
Trump stated last night that he had been led to believe that the not-for-profit had encountered significant problems with construction and that parts of their wall had fallen down. Credit card bottle openers and minted coins for future sales possibly.
The indictment reveals the investigation into alleged misappropriation of funds from the not-for-profit began as early as 2018 and somehow or other those now indicted became aware of it. During Timothy Shea’s arrest yesterday, agents sifted through a rubbish bin outside his home.
According to Shea’s neighbours, the bin was full but after US postal agents sorted through it, tagging and bagging items of interest, Shea’s bin was empty.
It is thought Shea who is alleged to have played the role of treasurer, dispatching cash to himself and his three co-accused through a network of shell companies, may also face charges of destruction of evidence.
Bannon’s career is well known. Investment banker, media executive and former executive chairman at Breitbart, he was an adviser to Donald Trump during the 2016 campaign and briefly was appointed Trump’s chief strategist in the White House. Bannon claims to have resigned in 2017 when clearly Trump had given him his marching orders.
Andrew Badolato is a colourful character to say the least. There are stories of mob ties, albeit with him cast as a victim after taking out a loan from a member of the Gambino crime family at staggering interest rates and being unable to pay the vig. There are allegations of him committing sexual assaults on his property. Prior to his arrest yesterday, he has not been charged with any serious crimes. He is a two-time bankrupt.
Brian Kolfage is the founder and president of We Build the Wall. He is a war hero and triple amputee, his two legs and right hand blown off when a rocket landed at his feet in 2004 in Iraq.
Since then he has been active on social media, especially Facebook where he has courted donors and sought to establish a large database of potential GOP donors. It is alleged that Kofage received payments of $US20,000 a month and a $US100,000 upfront payment extracted from the viral GoFundMe drive which raised $US25 million for We Build The Wall.
The timing of the indictment is spectacular, less than a week before the GOP Convention, where Trump and a host of Republicans were going to celebrate the building of the wall, which according to Trump, now extends for 300 of the 2000 mile border between the US and Mexico.
300 miles in a little under four years. At that rate it should be finished around 2050.
How Trump and the GOP will now spruik the wall as part of its hard-line immigration credentials in the Republican convention next week and beyond is not clear. Certainly, the arrests of the We Build the Wall gang puts a rather nasty blemish on it.
Back in 2016 immigration was a front and centre issue and a major voting determinant. Now during a pandemic will it have the same pull with voters?
The indictments highlight why appeals to symbolism as a measure of policy progress can so easily fail. In the 2016 presidential campaign, building the wall was a clarion call issued by Trump on an almost daily basis and in no small way contributed to his election. Mexico was even going to pay for the wall. Or be sent the bill. Or something. It was never made clear. Remember that?
I wrote after Trump’s election that the wall would never be completed, not least of all because it is a logistical nightmare requiring great swathes of federal seizure of private property that a) will necessarily upset landowners and b) be subject to long and protracted legal challenges. We’re not talking a parcel of land here and there. 1250 of those 2000 miles run along the Texas-Mexico border. Almost all of the land north of the Rio Grande is privately owned.
Back in 2016 Trump’s wall existed only in the imagination of Trump. After four years in public office, there is little to show for it and now a great heaving scandal surrounding it.
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