Bannon crony: crony: It’s It’s baloney!
Fed Fed wall-$kim wall-$kim rap rap ‘blatantly ‘blatantly false’ false’
Brian Kolfage, the triple-amputee war veteran charged alongside Steve Bannon with conspiring to siphon money from a $25 million fund to build a US-Mexico border wall, says Manhattan federal prosecutors are on a witch hunt led by the president’s enemies.
In his first interview since the charges were handed down on Aug. 20, Kolfage, 37, called the indictment by the US Attorney in the Southern District of New York as reading like “a New York Times hit piece.”
“They made it up. It’s so blatantly false. If they can do this to us, they can do it to anybody,” he said by phone from his home in Miramar Beach, Fla. “Everyone knows that the Southern District is really the sovereign district. They do their own things. They went after Rudy [Giuliani]. They do what they want to do, and it’s political motivated.”
Bannon has publicly denied any wrongdoing, calling the charges he also skimmed cash off the fund for personal expenses a “political hit job.”
Kolfage, an Iraq war hero who lost both legs and right hand in a 2004 rocket attack, became a household name in December 2018 after launching a GoFundMe campaign with the goal of raising $1 billion toward funding Trump’s long-promised wall along the southern border.
The “We Build The Wall” effort — which has raised more than $25 million — promised donors that all funds would go toward construction and related costs and that Kolfage would take no salary.
Feds charge that Kolfage immediately began skimming off the top, with $350,000 going to fund his own “lavish lifestyle,” which included “home renovations, payments towards a boat, a luxury SUV, a golf cart, jewelry, cosmetic surgery, personal tax payments and credit-card debt.”
The 24-page indictment alleges Kolfage funneled fund money to a nonprofit controlled by Bannon that would secretly kick some of the money back to Kolfage. “Kolfage, working primarily with Bannon [and a third defendant, Andrew Badolato], reached a secret agreement whereby Kolfage would be covertly paid ‘100K upfront [and] then [$20,000 per] month.’ ”
The nonprofit received more than $1 million from Kolfage for his secret payments and a “substantial portion” also went to Bannon, the feds allege.
The wall-building campaign attracted movers and shakers nationally. Donald Trump Jr. spoke at an event for the group in July, 2019 — calling their efforts “amazing.” Former Kansas Secretary of State and close Trump ally Kris Kobach served as the group’s legal counsel.
“I’ve spoken to the president about this project on three occasions now,” Kobach said during a May 2019 Facebook Live interview. “And he said . . . ‘Tell the guys at We Build The Wall that they have my blessing.’”
Trump has since distanced himself from the effort. “I didn’t like that project. I thought that was a project that was being done for showboating reasons,” he said.
The feds further charged that Kolfage made the fraud a family affair, with his wife being paid by the nonprofit for unspecified “media.”
“That never happened,” Kolfage told The Post of payments to his spouse, Instagram influencer Ashley Kolfage.
He also denied spending We Build The Wall money on luxury items.