Steve Bannon Admits Bank Account May Have Evidence of Fraud

Photo Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast/Getty

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.

That pardon, however, didn’t stop Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg Jr. from going after Bannon for breaking state laws in 2022. That case is set for trial in May.

Bannon bizarrely ghosted his own lawyers when the DA’s case got rolling in January 2023, the first signs that he was worsening his own situation. And his refusal to pay Costello seemed like a particularly stinging insult, given that Costello found himself on the wrong end of an FBI surveillance effort for working with Bannon.

Steve Bannon, talk show host and former White House advisor to former President Donald Trump, arrives to U.S. District Court. Elizabeth Frantz/Reuters

Meanwhile, Bannon is louder than ever—outright rejecting the American democratic system on his War Room podcast and calling for a vengeful and violence-laden dictatorial return for Trump in the White House—even as his legal woes are mounting.

Last year, federal law enforcement indicted a major Bannon benefactor, the billionaire Guo Wengui, for enriching himself by allegedly defrauding a Chinese-American community of anti-communist dissidents. Earlier this month, a superseding indictment claims that several businesses that Bannon founded with Guo, including the social media app Gettr, were actually part of a criminal enterprise.

And that’s where Bannon’s ill-fated decision to stiff Costello comes in.

In November, one of Costello’s colleagues at the firm sent Gettr a subpoena demanding that a company officer there answer questions about Bannon’s involvement with the company—details that Bannon is now admitting could cause him legal peril in ongoing criminal cases.

Joseph N. Polito, a senior counsel at the firm, sent Gettr a questionnaire asking how Bannon has been paid by the company since the start of 2021, how exactly he owns any share of the company, and even whether he operates through cut-outs and “aliases.”

Costello’s law firm has sent legal demands to the political consulting firm Winning Republican Strategies, the War Room LLC that Bannon uses to operate his podcast, and others tied to the right-wing agitator. According to court filings, Costello’s law firm sent several restraining notices—legal instruments that formally require an entity to stop paying someone—in its ongoing attempt to put Bannon through a financial colonoscopy.

Both sides have agreed to slow down this ongoing feud until mid-February while they trade legal arguments back and forth.

Neither Protass nor Polito immediately responded to requests for comment.

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