Steve Bannon faces ‘build the wall’ fraud and conspiracy charges

Donald Trump’s former chief strategist pleads not guilty to counts, which include he diverted $US1m for personal expenses.

Steve Bannon speaks to the media after his arrangement in New York. Picture: AFP

One of Donald Trump’s closest aides was on Thursday indicted on money laundering and conspiracy charges over the former president’s bid to build a wall on the Mexican border.

Steve Bannon, who arrived in the White House in 2016 and served for eight months as his chief strategist, was charged with two counts of money laundering, three counts of conspiracy and one count of scheming to defraud.

The charges relate to what prosecutors claim was a private $US25m ($36.4m) fundraising effort to help finance the wall, a core tenet of Mr Trump’s presidential agenda to limit illegal immigration.

The indictment alleges that Mr Bannon kept secret that hundreds of thousands of dollars were being diverted to pay the fund’s chief executive, Brian Kolfage, despite donors being told that he would not draw a salary.

In April, Mr Kolfage pleaded guilty to federal wire fraud conspiracy and tax charges. He is awaiting sentencing.

Mr Bannon has pleaded not guilty to that indictment, which includes charges he diverted about $US1m for personal expenses.

“Stephen Bannon acted as the architect of a multimillion-dollar scheme to defraud thousands of donors across the country,” the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, said. “It is a crime to turn a profit by lying to donors.”

The office of the New York attorney-general Letitia James worked with Mr Bragg’s office on the probe. Ms James and Mr Bragg are Democrats.

“This is an irony,” Bannon said on Thursday. “On the very day the mayor of this city (New York) has a delegation down on the border, they’re persecuting people here (for trying to) stop them at the border.”

He said Joe Biden was an “illegitimate” president and that the 2020 election had been stolen from Mr Trump. The former president, who is expected to declare his intention to run for the Republican nomination for 2024, is facing his own legal problems.

William Barr, who served as attorney-general in Mr Trump’s administration, said on Thursday that he expects the Department of Justice to charge the former president over allegations that Mr Trump took hundreds of classified documents to his home in Florida after leaving the White House. The FBI found them at Mar-a-Lago on August 8.

Prosecutors must decide whether they will be able to “make a technical case” against Mr Trump and whether they have the evidence to indict, Mr Barr said. “That’s the first question, and I think they’re getting very close to that point, frankly,” he told Fox News.

He said that the second question carries political risk: “Do you indict a former president? What will that do to the country? What kind of precedent will that set? Will the people really understand that this is not, you know, failing to return a library book, that this was serious?”

It transpired this week that among the hundreds of classified and secret documents were details of a foreign country’s nuclear weapons capabilities.

An indictment against Mr Trump would hamper his chances of standing for the presidency in 2024, although since the FBI search, polls have shown growing support among Republican voters.

Some Democrats are not waiting for the legal process. Lawsuits are being prepared to bar Mr Trump from holding office, some using a clause in the US constitution that would cast him as an insurrectionist.

The Times