Bannon stumbles in bid for relevancy
Arrest is the latest misstep for ex-White House strategist
Since he left the White House in 2017, Steve Bannon has promoted himself as a political provocateur still fighting for an underclass left behind by open borders and free trade, even as he forged a financial relationship with a fugitive Chinese billionaire and traveled the world to dole out advice on running populist movements.
Bannon also stayed connected to President Donald Trump, giving the impression he was quietly counseling the commander in chief from afar in recent months as his reelection campaign stumbled.
But Bannon’s self-made image as a champion of people the president has called “the forgotten men and women” was shattered Thursday when he was arrested on charges of defrauding donors to a campaign to privately fund a wall on the United States’ southern border with Mexico, one of Trump’s signature political promises.
Pledging publicly not to take any of the proceeds for themselves, Bannon and the other suspects instead siphoned hundreds of thousands of dollars to pay for travel, hotels, personal credit card debt and other expenses, federal prosecutors in Manhattan said.
Bannon was arrested on the yacht of Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui off the coast of Connecticut early Thursday, becoming the latest person linked to Trump to be indicted during his presidency. Bannon pleaded not guilty in a hearing Thursday afternoon in Manhattan.
“This entire fiasco is to
stop people who want to build the wall,” he told reporters afterward.
Bannon’s arrest — nearly four years to the day after he became the head of Trump’s presidential campaign — was the latest ignominious turn in his search for political relevance following his ouster from the White House in August 2017.
Bannon left the White House after repeated power struggles with other senior officials, including the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, and his daughter Ivanka Trump. Bannon has said he left on his own; Donald Trump and other advisers have said he was fired. The president eventually tagged Bannon with the type of nickname he reserves for rivals — “Sloppy Steve,” a reference to Bannon’s disheveled appearance.
Shortly after he left the West Wing, documents show, Bannon entered into a financial relationship with Guo, a onetime member of Trump’s private club Mar-a
Lago who also goes by the name Miles Kwok. That arrangement eventually led to a $1 million contract between Bannon and a media company bearing Guo’s name. Both men have said they forged a rapport based on a shared disdain for the Chinese Communist Party.
Around the same time, Bannon also returned to far-right website Breitbart, attempting to ignite a Trump-style populist movement that targeted moderate Republican senators.
But that fizzled in December 2017 after he went all in on Roy Moore, the former judge accused of sexually abusing teenage girls who was running in a special election for one of Alabama’s Senate seats. Bannon scoffed at the allegations, sent Breitbart writers on a mission to discredit the accusers and campaigned more enthusiastically for Moore, who went on to lose in one of the reddest states in the country, than almost any high-profile Republican.
In January 2018, he was pushed out of Breitbart, which he took over after the sudden death of its founder, Andrew Breitbart, in 2012.
Its billionaire funders, the reclusive Mercer family, told friends they had grown tired of Bannon’s impulsive and attention- seeking antics and, according to one associate, said they were concerned about his spending on travel and private security. Bannon was also quoted in a book by author Michael Wolff disparaging the president’s son (“treasonous”) and daughter (“dumb as a brick”), another major contributing factor to Bannon losing his Breitbart job, according to people familiar with the events, and prompting Trump to disavow him publicly as having “lost his mind.”
Bannon has maintained relationships with other wealthy people, including billionaire Bernie Marcus, founder of Home Depot. He also visited the town house of Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted pedophile who offi
cials say killed himself in jail, according to reports.
Bannon served as the government’s star witness at the trial of Roger Stone, Trump’s longest-serving political adviser, who was convicted last year on charges stemming from the special counsel’s investigation.
In an email Thursday, Stone noted contradictions between Bannon’s testimony at trial and what he told House Intelligence Committee investigators examining ties between the Trump campaign and Russia, and said his lawyers should have been informed that Bannon was under investigation.
He cited “karma” as accounting for Bannon’s arrest before adding, “I will still be praying” for him.
This year had seemed to offer Bannon his best hope yet at public redemption. He began hosting a podcast focused on the health and economic hazards of the coronavirus from the basement of the Capitol Hill town house where he once ran Breitbart. “War Room: Pandemic” attracted sponsorships from top-tier advertisers like Oracle and was picked up by Newsmax TV, which airs a video feed of it at 11 p.m. five nights a week.
Bannon has told friends recently that Trumphas told others that he watches the program and that the president was familiar enough with it to cite specific interviews he had seen when the two men spoke this summer. Trump, who has periodically asked advisers for Bannon’s opinion about different issues, insisted Thursday after the arrest that he had not dealt with Bannon in some time.
It was unclear whether Bannon had any information to offer prosecutors in any plea deal to avoid prison time. He has been caught up in the swirl of investigations into Trump and his administration, and questions have emerged about whether he was forthcoming about ties between Russia and Trump’s transition team.
Prosecutors for the special counsel grew skeptical about Bannon’s insistence to them that he knew little about the Trump campaign’s links to Russia and expressed concern about deleted text messages of his. Investigators eventually were satisfied that Bannon had not destroyed the messages after his lawyer hired forensic technicians to show that the messages were instead not backed up because of a technical problem.
In an interview this summer, Bannon suggested he had been vindicated about making apocalyptic warnings early in the Trump administration that the country was ill-equipped to handle a global catastrophe. But he seemed wistful for the days when he was able to speak to the president in the Oval Office.
“The world’s not perfect,” he said. “That’s why Bannon’s in his basement doing a podcast.”