Former White House chief strategist and MAGA warrior Steve Bannon has been criminally charged in New York in a sealed indictment and is expected to surrender to state prosecutors on Thursday, according to the Washington Post and other outlets.
Bannon confirmed the indictment on Tuesday in a fire-and-brimstone statement ranting that an unnamed district attorney in New York “has now decided to pursue phoney charges against me 60 days before the midterm election because WarRoom is the major source of the Maga grassroots movement.”
Most of the news outlets that reported on the new indictment didn’t have details on the charges.
However, CNN and the Guardian reported that the charges are connected to Bannon’s infamous “We Build the Wall” scam that got him indicted for fraud by the federal government before Trump pardoned his former crony in the final hours of his presidency.
Additionally, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office began investigating Bannon’s role in the scheme after Trump’s pardon, which only applies to federal charges.
“We Build the Wall” was a crowdfunding project headed by Bannon and three other organizers with a purported aim to raise money for a privately built wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. The campaign had raised at least $25 million before a federal grand jury in Manhattan charged Bannon and the other organizers with conspiracy to commit wire fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering in August 2020.
Bannon is already entangled in a separate criminal case in which he was convicted of contempt of Congress for refusing to cooperate with the House Jan. 6 Committee’s investigation into the Capitol insurrection.
Bannon’s sentencing hearing in that case has been scheduled for Oct. 21.
