Don’t Forget
About the Steve Bannon Indictment
I prosecuted the
Watergate scandal. Here’s why Trump and his ally are in legal peril.
September 5, 2020
The sheer number of Donald Trump’s cronies
indicted, convicted, or still under investigation partially explains why this
summer’s fraud and money laundering indictment of Stephen K. Bannon, Trump’s
2016 campaign manager, and White House Chief Strategist, didn’t get the
attention it deserved. Bannon is, of course, only the latest member of Trump’s
inner circle to face criminal charges – a group that includes Paul Manafort who
Bannon replaced at the campaign; Manafort’s Deputy, Rick Gates; National
Security Advisor Michael Flynn; Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen; Roger
Stone, the Republican trickster.
But there are many reasons that make what
Bannon did worth following closely even if his trial is not scheduled until May
2021.
Bannon was indicted for a terrible crime that
we cannot let be normalized. What he did mimics Trump’s fraud against students
at Trump University and Trump’s misuse of donations to his Trump Foundation.
Did Bannon learn from Trump or did Trump hire Bannon because he knew he shared
his views of what is acceptable? We’ll never know but we do know that Bannon’s
indictment along with that of all the others working for Trump’s campaign and
administration is just one more reflection of the (im)moral climate the
President has set for his administration. It’s a tone that has diminished our
position as a world leader and that should influence how each of us votes.
It is also a predictor of more to come,
possibly something broad enough to encompass a number of Trump hires and
volunteers. Indeed, more seems imminent. The Washington Post and
other news outlets are reporting that Elliott Broidy, a California venture
capitalist who raised millions for Trump’s inaugural and served as Finance
Chair of the RNC, may be charged soon with violating lobbying laws for his
efforts on behalf of China to get the Chinese Guo Wengui, extradited to
China. Prosecutors are also reportedly interested in Broidy’s work on behalf of
a Malaysian client to end a federal criminal investigation. Guo links Broidy to
Bannon because Bannon was staying aboard Guo’s luxury yacht when he was
arrested for fleecing the donors to, We Build The Wall. The reported case
against Broidy may indicate that Bannon’s arrest was step one of a larger case.
In addition to Guo giving Bannon use of his yacht, he allowed
Bannon to use his private jet to promote Republican
congressional candidates in 2018. That arrangement could violate campaign
finance laws banning foreign donations.
Is there a larger money laundering case that
federal prosecutors in the SDNY and Hawaii are putting together? Can Bannon
and/or Broidy be flipped to build a case against higher-ups? Rumor is that
Broidy may be cooperating, but he and Bannon can wait for a post-election
pardon regardless of who wins the election since Trump can hand them out until
Jan. 20. Even so, flipping seems entirely possible. Bannon and three
co-defendants are charged with enriching themselves at the expense of hundreds
of thousands of donors to an alleged not-for-profit, “We Build The Wall,” by
falsely promising that the founder would receive no compensation and 100% of
all contributions would go to building a wall on our southern border (a wall
that Trump said Mexico would pay for before diverting Pentagon funding to that
purpose when Congress refused to fund it when Mexico didn’t). The indictment
also mentions that they didn’t create an actual nonprofit organization until
they got caught saying they were one but weren’t, and they didn’t get legally
required building permits until they got caught at that too. And, The
Texas Tribune and ProPublica report that engineers
have said that the three-mile wall built by We Build the Wall will fail due to
erosion.
We Build the Wall raised $25 million and,
despite its promises to donors, the indictment alleges WBTW used $1 million for
other purposes. They paid its founder hundreds of thousands and diverted even
more for the personal benefit of Bannon and the other defendants. They covered
up those expenditures for luxury items including a boat, an SUV, travel, and
even cosmetic surgery by laundering the funds through shell companies and a
second suspicious nonprofit founded by Bannon, Citizens of the American
Republic.
While personal enrichment is odious enough, it
may be the flow of money to Bannon’s political operations that prove to be more
damaging to Trumpworld. The indictment refers to “Non-Profit-1” which may be
Bannon’s nonprofit Citizens of the American Republic, created to promote
“economic nationalism.” The California-based nonprofit serves as a platform for
Bannon’s films and podcasts that promote Trump’s ideology. Federal
prosecutors reveal that they intend to seize the assets of “non-profit-1. If,
as suspected, it is Bannon’s CAR, one can only imagine who else might be
ensnared in that web.
The Democrats don’t talk about Russia or
Ukraine that much anymore. But it’s important to remember that there are still
a lot of legal loose ends out there before the election. In addition to
Bannon’s indictment and Broidy’s possible one, the D.C. Circuit Court of
Appeals kept alive the case against former National Security Adviser Michael
Flynn, at least for now. Flynn, you’ll remember was fired for lying about his
phone call with the Russian ambassador to the U.S. in the days leading up to
Trump’s inauguration. He pled guilty to lying to the FBI and obstruction of
justice and accepted a plea deal but later unsuccessfully tried to withdraw his
guilty plea. Then, while awaiting sentencing, AG William Barr had the DOJ move
to dismiss the case on what I consider flimsy grounds—a move that led to the
resignation of at least one career prosecutor. When the lower court refused to
toss it out, Barr ordered the Justice Department to appeal it and has now lost
that appeal in an en banc decision by the DC Circuit. (NOTE: I am a plaintiff
in a suit by my fellow Assistant Watergate Special Prosecutors to be amicus in
the case.) Could Bannon who was at the top of the Trump White House at the time
of Flynn’s crime and a regular National Security Council participant for a time
offer any insight on this case or other prosecutions?
If all this wasn’t bad enough, we learned this
week that Rod Rosenstein, who oversaw the Mueller investigation, may have
constricted it so tightly that the special counsel was prohibited from
investigating what might have been the full extent of the Trump campaign’s ties
to Russia in 2016.
I’ve been a prosecutor going back before
Watergate. I see a legal morass that is still getting larger for the president.
That’s true weeks before the election and ever truer afterward whether he’s
still in office or not.
