Steve Bannon

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      Donald Trump pardons Steve Bannon amid last acts of presidency

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      Donald Trump has pardoned former senior adviser Steve Bannon, among scores of others including rappers, financiers and former members of Congress in the final hours of his presidency.Among the 73 people pardoned was Elliott Broidy, a leading former fundraiser for Trump who has admitted illegally lobbying the US government to drop its inquiry into the Malaysia 1MDB corruption scandal and to deport an exiled Chinese billionaire. Also on the list was Ken Kurson, a friend of Jared Kushner who was charged in October last year with cyberstalking during a heated divorce.Rappers Lil Wayne and Kodak Black – who were prosecuted on federal weapons offences – and former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, who is serving a 28-year prison term on corruption charges, were also pardoned. A further 70 people had their sentences commuted.Trump did not attempt to give himself a pre-emptive pardon, and has not pardoned members of his family or Rudy Giuliani, his former personal lawyer with whom he has fallen out. Julian Assange was another figure subject to speculation who was not on the list. Prosecutors and scholars have, however, said a grey area in the constitution means a president may be able to issue “secret” pardons, without notifying Congress or the public.The New York Times and CNN described the pardoning of Bannon, a former editor of Breitbart as a last-minute pre-emptive move to protect Bannon from his upcoming fraud trial. Bannon faces trial in May following his arrest in August last year on a luxury yacht off the Connecticut coast, accused of siphoning money from We Build the Wall, an online fundraiser for Trump’s contentious border wall with Mexico.Federal prosecutors allege Bannon used a non-profit he controlled to divert “over $1m from the … online campaign, at least some of which he used to cover hundreds of thousands of dollars in personal expenses”.Officials said We Build The Wall raised more than $25m. Bannon has denied one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and another of conspiracy to commit money laundering.The news on Bannon and Broidy brought swift outcry. Noah Bookbinder at legal watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington said: “Even Nixon didn’t pardon his cronies on the way out. Amazingly, in his final 24 hours in office, Donald Trump found one more way to fail to live up to the ethical standard of Richard Nixon.”Democrat Adam Schiff tweeted: “Steve Bannon is getting a pardon from Trump after defrauding Trump’s own supporters into paying for a wall that Trump promised Mexico would pay for. And if that all sounds crazy, that’s because it is. Thank God we have only 12 more hours of this den of thieves.”Bannon was recently banned from Twitter for calling for the beheading of Dr Anthony Fauci and the FBI director, Christopher Wray.He and Trump have been estranged since the former adviser left the White House and made critical remarks about the president in a tell-all book about the president called Fire and Fury by journalist Michael Wolff. Trump said his former consigliere had “lost his mind”.Despite Trump’s last-minute move on Bannon, reportedly delayed because the president was so torn on the issue, it would not protect his former adviser from charges brought by state courts.Trump has also been mulling future political ambitions, according to the Wall Street Journal, reportedly speaking to aides about the possibility of forming a new political party. The president favoured the name Patriot Party, it reported.Multiple Republican party figures defending Trump in his second impeachment, for inciting the Capitol attack on 6 January, counseled him not to offer pardons to any of the more than 100 people arrested as a result.Presidential pardons and acts of clemency do not imply innocence. Presidents often bestow them on allies and donors but Trump has taken the practice to extremes.Previous recipients include aides and allies Michael Flynn, Roger Stone, George Papadopoulos and Paul Manafort, all convicted in the investigation of Russian election interference and links between Trump and Moscow, and Charles Kushner, the father of Trump’s son-in-law and chief adviser, Jared Kushner.Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump were reportedly closely involved in the process deciding Trump’s final pardons.Trump is due to leave Washington on Wednesday morning, ahead of Joe Biden’s inauguration as the 46th president. He will fly to Florida, stripped of the legal protection of office.Trump faces state investigations of his business affairs and could face legal jeopardy over acts in office including his attempts to overturn election defeat and his incitement of the Capitol riot on 6 January, over which he was impeached a second time.If Trump is convicted in his second Senate trial, he could be barred from running for office again. More

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      Steve Bannon banned by Twitter for calling for Fauci beheading

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      Twitter has banned the account of the former Donald Trump adviser and surrogate Steve Bannon after he called for the beheading of Dr Anthony Fauci and the FBI director, Christopher Wray, and the posting of their heads outside the White House as a “warning”.
      Speaking on his podcast, the War Room, which was distributed in video form on a number of social media outlets, the far-right provocateur appeared to endorse violence against Wray and the US’s most senior infectious diseases expert.
      “Second term kicks off with firing Wray, firing Fauci … no I actually want to go a step farther but the president is a kind-hearted man and a good man,” Bannon said.
      “I’d actually like to go back to the old times of Tudor England. I’d put their heads on pikes, right, I’d put them at the two corners of the White House as a warning to federal bureaucrats, you either get with the programme or you’re gone.”
      Twitter banned Bannon’s War Room account permanently, saying it had suspended the podcast account for violating its policy on the glorification of violence.
      The same video was on Facebook for about 10 hours before it was also removed.
      Later on Friday, William Burck, an attorney for Bannon in a fraud case in New York City, told a federal judge he was withdrawing. Bannon is accused of misappropriating money from a group which raised $2m from thousands of donors to build a wall on the border with Mexico, and has pleaded not guilty. Burck did not give a reason for his withdrawal.
      There has been mounting concern over the risk of violence following this week’s US elections, amid highly inflammatory rhetoric from Trump and his allies, who have falsely said Democrats are trying to “steal the election”.
      Philadelphia police arrested two men allegedly involved in a plot to attack the Pennsylvania Convention Center on Thursday night. Police were tipped off, possibly from a concerned family member of one of the men, who had driven 300 miles from Virginia.
      The moves against Bannon came hours after Facebook banned “Stop the Steal”, a group involved in organising protests this weekend throughout the US against the presidential vote count.
      One post, shared by the Center for Countering Digital Hate, declared: “Neither side is going to concede. Time to clean the guns, time to hit the streets.”
      The increasingly heated language around the election has also included interventions from more mainstream figures, including the former Republican House speaker Newt Gingrich, who appeared to call for election workers in Pennsylvania to be arrested.
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      Speaking to Sean Hannity on Fox News, Gingrich amplified Trump’s false complaints of election rigging and mused about what he believed was the solution.
      “My hope is that President Trump will lead the millions of Americans who understand exactly what’s going on,” Gingrich said. “The Philadelphia machine is corrupt. The Atlanta machine is corrupt. The machine in Detroit is corrupt. And they are trying to steal the presidency. And we should not allow them to do that.”
      “First of all, under federal law, we should lock up the people who are breaking the law,” he continued. “You stop somebody from being an observer, you just broke federal law. Do you hide and put up papers so nobody can see what you’re doing? You just broke federal law. You bring in ballots that aren’t real? You just broke federal law.” More

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      James Comey: ex-Trump adviser Steve Bannon 'in a world of trouble'

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      The former FBI director James Comey has said Steve Bannon is “in a world of trouble”, after the former Trump campaign manager and White House adviser was arrested on a charge of skimming donations from a fundraising campaign for a wall on the border with Mexico.“It’s another reminder of the kind of people this president surrounds himself with,” Comey told CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday.Bannon is the latest figure with close ties to the president to have found himself in trouble with the law. Others include former campaign chair Paul Manafort, former lawyer Michael Cohen and former national security adviser Michael Flynn.Comey is also a former US attorney for Southern District of New York, where Bannon was indicted last week.“At this point they could almost start their own crime family,” Comey told CBS, echoing the passage in his book A Higher Loyalty, released in April 2018, in which he famously likened Trump, who fired him in May 2017, to mafia chiefs including Sammy “the Bull” Gravano.“It’s a very serious case. The southern district of New York has laid it out in a very detailed indictment called a speaking indictment, and he’s in a world of trouble.”Bannon has pleaded not guilty and faces up to 20 years in jail if convicted.“It’s a very serious fraud case with a huge amount of money stolen from innocent victims,” Comey said. “That’ll drive up potential punishments.”Bannon was released on a $5m bond, backed by $1.75m in cash or real estate. He has until 3 September to find the collateral. Three other men, Brian Kolfage, Andrew Badolato and Timothy Shea, were also arrested in the alleged scheme to defraud the We Build the Wall campaign, which authorities said raised more than $25m.Kolfage, Badolato and Shea have not yet entered pleas. In a statement on his Facebook page on Saturday, Kolfage said he had “obtained one of the best super lawyers around who isn’t afraid to fight back at the politically motivated assaults against me”.Bannon, Comey said, was “in trouble because the indictment lays it out in such detail, including excerpts from texts. If you’re Steve Bannon [or] you’re his lawyers, you’re reading this saying, ‘I’m going down here.’“I don’t know what the next steps are for him and his co-defendants, but that’s what I meant by ‘world of trouble.’”Comey has proved a troublesome adversary for Trump, who sought unsuccessfully, and infamously, to secure a pledge of personal loyalty before deciding to fire him as FBI director.Comey recently announced a new book, Saving Justice: Truth, Transparency, and Trust, due for release in January. Also in January, after the presidential election, Showtime will release The Comey Rule, a two-part adaptation of A Higher Loyalty.Comey is played by Jeff Daniels, Trump by the Irish actor Brendan Gleeson. In published cast lists, Bannon does not appear. More

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      Steve Bannon's indictment tops a disastrous week for Donald Trump | Lloyd Green

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      Trump University may be gone but its spirit lives on. On Thursday, federal prosecutors for the southern district of New York announced the indictment and arrest of Steve Bannon, the mastermind behind Donald Trump’s 2016 upset victory, and three others on a single count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Prosecutors allege that defendants allegedly bilked more than $25m in a crowdfunding campaign, and as part of the scheme, Bannon purportedly funneled $1m through a separate non-profit with more than a few golden crumbs used to “cover hundreds of thousands of dollars” in personal expenses.In case anyone forgot, Bill Barr, Trump’s attorney general failed in his attempt to make the SDNY an extension of Main Justice, and the SDNY has investigated and prosecuted close allies of the president. Regardless, having persuaded nearly 63 million Americans four years ago into voting for a reality TV star with a string of corporate bankruptcies to his name, it was time for one more score by the president’s erstwhile allies.So this is what “law and order” means in the age of Trump: corruption at society’s highest levels, wholesale contempt for the constitution, and crime in the streets. To be sure, this is the same crew that made “lock her up” a campaign rallying cry and convinced a portion of the electorate that Mexico would pay for the wall.Indeed, over the course of a morning, Bannon gained one more thing in common with Mike Flynn, Trump’s disgraced national security adviser who like Bannon was exiled from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue’s island of broken toys. For now, Flynn is a convicted felon; Bannon may yet become one.Regardless, the news could not have come at a worse time for the president. There are only 75 days to the election, Joe Biden’s lead is fairly steady, and Hillary Clinton is not on the ballot. In other words, the indictment of Bannon & Co is one more rancid cherry sitting atop a disastrous week for Trump.Minutes after federal prosecutors unsealed the criminal charges, a federal judge dismissed Trump’s latest lawsuit, which again sought to block the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus Vance Jr, from obtaining the tax returns and business records of Trump and his company.As for the merits of Trump’s arguments, the court observed, they are “as unprecedented and far-reaching as it is perilous to the rule of law and other bedrock constitutional principles on which this country was founded and by which it continues to be governed”.It wasn’t enough that the US supreme court had previously refused to buy what the president was selling. Apparently, fear of his own indictment weighs heavily on the ageing one-time real estate developer.In turn, all this comes on the heels of the US Senate’s intelligence committee report that confirmed that Trump had lied to Robert Mueller, the special counsel, and that Paul Manafort worked hand in glove with a Russian intelligence asset to help elect Trump. Yes, there really was collusion.Indeed, Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, could not have made things any clearer about how the president and his minions view re-election. As Barack Obama was warning the US of the danger posed by Trump to the country and democracy, Kushner proclaimed on Fox News: “In the Democratic convention, I’m hearing a lot of lecturing moralists … in this administration, we have a lot of doers, we have businessmen, we have people who are held accountable.”Accountable? Facing a burgeoning pandemic back in March, Trump had this to say, “I don’t take responsibility at all.” Also for the record, Kushner received his White House security clearance the same way he got into Harvard – “Daddy” pulled some very expensive strings.Once upon a time, Kushner even predicted that the US would be “rocking” come July. Instead, Covid’s death toll hovers at the 175,000-mark, first-time unemployment claims are rising, and the president has designated QAnon, the hate-filled conspiracy movement as a de facto Republican party adjunct.Predictably, Trump has contradicted himself even as he seeks to distance himself from Bannon. Asked about the latest charges, Trump said he didn’t “know anything about the project at all” and that he “didn’t like that project” because he thought it was “being done for showboating reasons”.So was Trump ignorant or did he have a problem with We Build the Wall for its lack of modesty? Try none of the above.Rather, Trump again appears to be dancing around the truth, ie, lying. In January 2019, Kris Kobach, Kansas’s ex-state attorney general and immigration hardliner, told the New York Times that Trump had bestowed his “blessing” on the project.Bannon was hauled into custody by the US Postal Inspector Service. While the US Postal Service refuses to guarantee that absentee ballots will be delivered on time, it still had the manpower and money for a few more arrests. Irony abounds, the indictment also seeks asset forfeiture. More

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      in Elections

      Steve Bannon indicted by federal prosecutors, charged with defrauding ‘We Build the Wall’ donors – live

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      Bannon and three others arrested for leading online campaign
      Kamala Harris accepts vice-presidential nomination on historic night
      Obama delivers searing Trump attack
      Trump tacitly endorses baseless QAnon conspiracy theory
      1.1m Americans made claim for unemployment last week
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      Bannon aims to make a comeback in circle of Trump influencers ahead of election

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      As an election approaches, Steve Bannon and his allies are trying to return the former chief White House strategist to media circles known to influence the president’s thinking. An investment banker who became chairman of Breitbart News and led Donald Trump’s campaign in 2016, Bannon has extensive links to global far-right nationalist movements. He was […] More

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      Malcolm Turnbull on Donald Trump: 'You don't suck up to bullies'

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      Malcolm Turnbull on Donald Trump: ‘You don’t suck up to bullies’ Donald Trump and Malcolm Turnbull meet for the first time onboard the USS Intrepid in New York in May 2017. Photograph: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images In this extract from his memoir, the former Australian prime minister recounts his deals and negotiations with the US president […] More