Steve Bannon is in a tight spot. He didn’t pay his lawyer, got sued, and now his finances might be subject to review. The problem is, there might be evidence of fraud there.
THE DAILY BEAST
Steve Bannon is in a maelstrom of his own making.
After failing to pay his lawyer nearly half a million dollars, he’s now clambering to halt a review of his personal finances—a situation that’s forcing him to admit something quite embarrassing: that there might be evidence of his border wall fraud scheme in his bank documents.
The conspiracy-spewing right-wing political agitator had the gall to stiff his lawyer, former federal prosecutor Robert “Bob” Costello, who stuck by him for years. Specifically, Costello was Bannon’s lawyer on a number of cases, including when he faced criminal charges for pocketing donor funds intended for a privately funded border wall between the United States and Mexico. So it was only a matter of time before the law firm of Davidoff Hutcher and Citron came knocking with a lawsuit, one that quickly resulted in a judge ordering Bannon to hand over the overdue $480,487.
But now, that miserly mistake is coming back to haunt him.
Bannon has asked a New York state judge to block Costello’s law firm from perusing through his bank statements and reviewing his assets, a request that has required Bannon to awkwardly concede that his personal finances likely have evidence that could bolster the Manhattan District Attorney’s case against him.
“DHC’s taking of post-judgment discovery from Mr. Bannon poses a significant risk of compromising Mr. Bannon’s Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination,” Bannon’s current defense attorney, Harlan Protass, said in a court filing earlier this month.
Protass also argued that subjecting Bannon to questions under oath from the aggrieved law firm’s attorneys “also poses a significant risk” for the same reason: he might say something damning that could bolster two ongoing criminal cases against him.
Bannon, who helped coordinate a key part of former President Donald Trump’s undemocratic plot to stay in power after losing the 2020 election, refused to testify about his so-called “Green Bay Sweep” to congressional investigators. As Bannon’s lawyer, Costello ran interference when the House Jan. 6 Committee issued a subpoena ordering the MAGA media figure to testify—and represented him when the Department of Justice followed up with criminal charges. Bannon was convicted by a Washington jury in 2022, but he remains out of prison while he appeals the judgment.
Then the Manhattan DA, who keeps reviving federal criminal cases that faltered during the Trump administration, developed a criminal case against Bannon over his involvement in “We Build the Wall”—a scammy, xenophobic project that raised crowdfunded money to purportedly build a privately sponsored border wall. The U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York criminally charged Bannon and his business partners over the ordeal in 2020, but the one-time Trump White House chief strategist managed to score a pardon from his former boss.
