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Trump likely to pardon Steve Bannon, accused of defrauding donors
Trump could still change his mind, the people cautioned. They asked not to be identified because the White House hasn’t announced any clemency decisions.
President Donald Trump is leaning toward granting his former strategist Steve Bannon a pardon, according to people familiar with the matter, a move that would end the ex-aide’s federal prosecution for allegedly defrauding donors to a group that sought to build a wall on the Mexico border.
Trump could still change his mind, the people cautioned. They asked not to be identified because the White House hasn’t announced any clemency decisions.
The president’s term ends Wednesday at noon, and he’s expected to issue a number of pardons before leaving office. A White House spokesman declined to comment.
Bannon was among a group of four Trump supporters accused last year of using money donated to the “We Build The Wall” campaign for personal gain.
His indictment represented a remarkable fall from grace for the onetime leader of Breitbart News who was a key architect of Trump’s 2016 election victory and an adviser during the president’s first months in office. Bannon has denied the charges.
Despite portraying the “We Build the Wall” campaign as a volunteer effort, Bannon received more than $1 million from the group and used some of it to pay personal expenses, prosecutors said. Donations were used to pay a salary to the group’s founder, a disabled Air Force veteran named Brian Kolfage, who’d promised he would “not take a penny,” prosecutors said.
“The defendants defrauded hundreds of thousands of donors, capitalizing on their interest in funding a border wall to raise millions of dollars, under the false pretense that all of that money would be spent on construction,” acting U.S. Attorney Audrey Strauss said in a statement.
Bannon pleaded not guilty during an August court hearing and had been free on a $5 million bond while awaiting trial. He faced as many as 20 years in prison on each of the two counts against him, though it’s rare for the maximum sentence to be imposed.
Long before the arrests, the wall-building project had drawn criticism, including claims that sections were being constructed in floodplains and creating erosion. The project was backed by high-profile Trump boosters like Blackwater founder Erik Prince and former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach. Donald Trump Jr. once called it “private enterprise at its finest.”
The president had largely avoided commenting publicly on the case, saying only the project “sounded to me like showboating” and that the arrest was a “sad thing for Mr. Bannon.”
Trump’s relationship with Bannon turned frosty after his dismissal from the White House amid controversy over Trump’s handling of violent protests in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 and accusations that Bannon frequently leaked to the news media. But Bannon had found his way back into Trump’s circle by forcefully advocating against his first impeachment and for his re-election in a podcast, “War Room.”
The two men repeatedly discussed the president’s effort to overturn his election defeat in recent weeks, according to people familiar with the matter.
