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The Justice Department announced Thursday that Stephen Bannon, a former guru of President Trump’s crusader and White House aide, was arrested and charged for his role in a scam to defraud donors of a crusade to fund a border wall between the United States and Mexico.
Bannon, one of four men accused of embezzleing the budget raised for a $25 million “Building the Wall” crusade presented through Brian Kolfage, a disabled Air Force veteran.
According to the Justice Department’s announcement, Bannon and Kolfage pocketed thousands of dollars from the campaign, although Build the Wall had continually been described as a “voluntary” operation, while Kolfage relied on donors “who would not accept a penny of salary. compensation. »
The men were charged with conspiracy to devote electronic fraud and conspiracy to dedicate cash laundering, of which a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison.
The indictment is a fall of grace for Kolfage, who had presented himself as a selfless war hero, and for Bannon, a wealthy Washington, D.C. force broker and former Goldman Sachs investment cabinet, who was a key adviser to the president in the early days of the Trump administration.
“This case serves as a warning to other fraudsters that no one is above the law, not even an invalid war veteran or a millionaire political strata,” Chief Inspector Philip R. Bartlett of the U.S. Postal Inspection Service said.
The deal also includes a number of colorful main points on how Bannon and Kolfage spent their winnings and how they were captured. Here are five of them.
In a news press, a U.S. attorney especially appreciated the U.S. Postal Inspection Service (USPIS).
The USPIS is the law enforcement arm of the U.S. Postal Service. And it conducts investigations similar to postal service-related crimes, as well as bank and monetary fraud. In a recent high-profile case, USPIS played a key role in removing the online drug known as Silk Road.
The indictment does not provide the main points on how the USPIS discovered Build the Wall fraud, but it does imply that a monetary establishment told Bannon and Kolfage that the crusade was the target of a federal criminal investigation. This suggests that the USPIS may have learned of fraud as a result of suspicious bank transfers.
The prosecution does not say which platform the Build the Wall crusade used to raise funds, referring only to a “crowdfunding website.” But other documents show that the site in the GoFundMe query.
According to the indictment, GoFundMe had “concerns” about Kolfage and his plan to donate more than $20 million that he had raised to the U.S. government. As a result, they suspended the crusade and said they would reimburse the donations unless Kolfage knew a nonprofit that would get them.
GoFundMe’s considerations, in turn, led Kolfage to turn to Bannon and create a program to reallocate cash to a variety of nonprofits and phantom companies.
The Justice Department said some donors to the Build the Wall crusade told Kolfage that they didn’t have much cash and that they distrusted the online fundraising. In response, he entrusted them that one hundred percent of the cash would be used for the wall.
In fact, Kolfage embarked on a shopping spree that included home renovations, a golf cart, a boat, a luxury SUV and plastic surgery. He also used the campaign mailing list to urge donors to buy coffee from a company he ran at the same time, saying coffee sales were the way to feed his family.
The Justice Department, in its reaction to the scam, said it had seized a number of bank accounts, as well as a Land Rover pickup truck and a “2019 Jupiter Marine ship called Warfighter.” Twitter users recently circulated a photo of what is believed to be the same boat, taken on a recent crusade by the president.
Things are getting better: Kolfage used a boat he bought with the illegally diverted “We Build the Wall” budget to navigate the July 4 Trump boat parade in Destiny, Florida https://t.co/eyK1WOvWWf (seen through @ZacAlf) peak. twitter.com/uEUuQx0Yle
– Evan Hill (@evanchill) 20 August 2020
Once GoFundMe plans the group to donate donations to the U.S. government of passage, the Crusade had to return to the original donors and ask them to give cash to a commercial entity “We Build the Wall”. Most of them have.
To raise the funds, Bannon had We Build the Wall pay the expenses to a nonprofit organization he controlled. This nonprofit, along with other on-screen entities, made fictitious invoices to the defendants.
To hide the fake bills, Bannon even created the 1099 fiscal bureaucracy to pay Kolfage’s wife for her “media work,” as to document unspecified bills for “social networks.”
The Build the Wall case is an example of text messages from suspected criminals who return to hang out. According to the indictment, Bannon texted one of his friends to “send a cash transfer” to the nonprofit he controlled, and also sent a “no deal, no approve” text message.
Meanwhile, his co-recipients texted “as the public knows, no one gets paid” and, like the tax obligations Bannon’s nonprofit would incur, “better than you or I lol.”
The Department of Justice does not imply how it downloaded text messages, but, based on past investigations, the firm most likely used a subpoena to download them from Apple or some other phone manufacturer. The indictment also notes that Bannon and his alleged accomplices launched encrypted messaging applications after learning that a federal investigation was underway.
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This story was originally featured in Fortune.com