Steve Bannon’s trial on charges of duping conservatives into donating for a “border wall” project has been pushed back to February.
Bannon, 70, had been set to stand trial beginning Dec. 9, but state Supreme Court Judge April Newbauer moved the date to Feb. 25 in a hearing Monday morning.
The case against Bannon began in late 2020, when federal investigators accused him and three associates of fraud and money laundering. Bannon and his partners set up a charity called We Build The Wall, Inc. and encouraged conservatives and Donald Trump supporters to donate and help complete Trump’s promise of a border wall on the U.S.-Mexico border.
The group raised more than $25 million with a promise that “all the money” would go to a border wall, investigators said. But a lot of the money instead landed in the pockets of Bannon and his co-conspirators, according to authorities.
Trump, 78, pardoned Bannon in the final hours of his first term as president. However, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg brought state charges against Bannon in September 2022. Trump will not be able to pardon Bannon a second time because it is not a federal case.
The jury will be allowed to hear evidence that Bannon took $600,000 from We Build The Wall and used it to pay a credit card bill that he’d racked up at a different non-profit, Newbauer ruled Monday. Bannon’s defense team had sought to prevent the introduction of such evidence.
“Stephen Bannon acted as the architect of a multimillion-dollar scheme to defraud thousands of donors across the country – including hundreds of Manhattan residents,” Bragg said in a statement at the time.
Bannon, who has pleaded not guilty, was released in late October after four months at a federal prison in Connecticut. He had been convicted of contempt of Congress for refusing to testify in front of a House of Representatives committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
Though Trump pardoned Bannon in the original case, he left the co-conspirators on the hook. Brian Kolfage and Andrew Badolato pleaded guilty in April 2022, and Timothy Shea was convicted in October 2023. They each received prison terms of at least three years, and they were not charged in the New York state case.
With Molly Crane-Newman
