“Democrats love a good political witch hunt before the elections,” he wrote.īannon picked up on that charge on his politics podcast, “War Room,” on Friday, hardly sounding like someone who only hours earlier was charged with fraud and money laundering, crimes that carry up to 20 years in prison. Hours after his arrest Thursday, he took to Facebook, portraying the case as an underhanded attempt to kill Trump’s reelection chances. “We will soon have a revolution in this country.” “We need to elect stone-cold killers,” he posted on Twitter last month. “Him thinking he wasn’t going to get caught – and if he did, that he would be pardoned – may have factored a little bit into why he was involved.”Īt the head of the We Build The Wall venture was 38-year-old veteran Brian Kolfage of Miramar Beach, Florida, who since losing both legs and an arm in a rocket attack in Iraq has become a conservative activist, motivational speaker and constant presence on social media, haranguing the left, praising Trump and provoking others.
Weinstein, a former federal prosecutor in Miami. “This cast of characters was using Bannon as a front to get the people behind them,” said David S. Some court observers believe at least some of the participants believed they could get away with it because their man was in the White House. Prosecutors say their promises not to take even a penny from the more than $25 million in donations turned out to be lies, allowing them to make such purchases as a luxury Range Rover, a fishing boat, home renovations and cosmetic surgery.
The men charged along with former White House strategist Steve Bannon in a scheme to skim hundreds of thousands of dollars from a crowd-funded project to build a border wall came together through a shared devotion to Trump and a rich, sometimes checkered, history of trying to make money off his political movement. And the third is an ex-columnist for Breitbart and an entrepreneur who has left a trail of failed businesses. Another owns a company that sells Donald Trump-themed energy drinks. One is a triple-amputee Iraq war veteran who ran news sites stoking right-wing rage, often with exaggerated stories.