Steve Bannon, a long ally of President Donald Trump, has admitted that he was guilty of defrauding donors who paid a special plan for a wall on the border between the United States and Mexico.
Bannon, 71, has received a penalty of conditional discharge for a period of three years, which means that he will not serve the prison time under guilty acknowledgment agreement.
The US Department of Justice accused Panon and three others of defrauding hundreds of thousands of donors regarding the “We are building the wall”, which raised $ 25 million (19 million pounds).
Bannon’s lawyer said on Tuesday that he had not conducted any of the money.
Bannon launched the “We Build the Wall” campaign by Bannon and others to use donations to build slices of the border barrier – whose construction was a major promise in Trump during the 2016 elections – in private lands.
The four were accused of money laundering and conspiracy after accusing them of deceiving donors who contributed millions of dollars in a fundraising campaign in 2019.
According to the indictment, Bannon told the donors that it was a “type of volunteer” to create a non -profit wall, which raised more than $ 25 million (22 million pounds) from thousands of people.
Although he pledged that “not a penny” would fail him or others, he has converted hundreds of thousands of dollars into two colleagues, the prosecutor claimed.
Under the agreement, Bannon entered a guilt to the first -class scheme only to defraud a charge.
The sentence also means that he cannot work as a manager of any non -profit institution in New York or raise funds for charities with the assets in the state.
“This decision achieves our primary goal: protecting charitable institutions in New York and giving charitable giving from New York’s residents from fraud,” Alfin Prague, the lawyer for Manhattan Province in a statement.
Speaking to the correspondents on Tuesday, Bannon Prague and the Prosecutor of New York Littia James attacked them, describing them as “existential threats” to the Trump administration.
James did not participate in the Bannon case, but he filed a lawsuit against Trump on charges of civil fraud and won nearly a billion dollars against him.
Bannon also faced federal charges about the wall campaign after he was charged by a federal jury, but the prosecution stopped after Trump excused him in the last hours of the first White House term.
Some of the participating conspirators, who did not even receive amnesty, were sentenced to imprisonment.
The Pardon of the President does not apply only to federal issues, and charges have been brought in the current case in the New York State Court in September 2022.
Bannon, a former investment banker, was the driving force behind the right Breitbart News before working at the White House Trump as the largest strategists.
Its impact was clear on major decisions such as American withdrawal in mid -2017 from the Paris Climate Agreement.
He left the position in August 2017 and returned to Berbart. He stepped down from this position after I conveyed it in a book criticizing Trump and one of his sons.
At a time when Trump said: “Steve Bannon has nothing to do with me or my presidency. When he was expelled, he not only lost his job, but lost his mind.”
He also spent four months in a federal prison in 2024 after being convicted in 2022 of contempt for Congress for refusing to comply with a summons to appear before the committee investigating the January 6 attack on the American Capitol.