Guiliani’s Personal Lawyer to Represent Steve Bannon After Prior Attorney Threatens Fauci and Withdraws from Case
The former adviser to President Trump and co-founder of Breitbart Steve Bannon is now fighting criminal fraud charges with a new attorney: Steve Costello, who also happens to represent Rudy Giuliani, the personal attorney for the president.
Bannon’s prior attorney, William Burck, withdrew from the criminal case on November 5 after posting an online comment that suggested Dr. Anthony Fauci and FBI Director Christopher Wray be “beheaded” for not supporting Trump.
Burck did not state why he withdrew from Bannon’s case, though attorneys do remove themselves from cases if their behavior somehow harms their client’s legal prospects.
Bannon has been battling criminal charges since August, and now his change of attorneys is official. Costello is a well-known attorney who has represented noted clients such as the late George Steinbrenner, the owner of the New York Yankees, and the deceased New York real estate icon Leona Helmsley.
Bannon, along with three co-defendants, is being charged with defrauding donors in August in a crowdfunding campaign that proposed to complete President Trump’s infamous wall along the Mexico-US border. Touted as a “volunteer organization,” the campaign to build the wall quickly grew to raise over $25 million.
Court papers allege Bannon, along with crowdfunding leader Brian Kolfage and two others, Andrew Badolato and Timothy Shea, “orchestrated a scheme to defraud hundreds of thousands of donors…in connection with an online crowdfunding campaign ultimately known as “We build the Wall.”
The successful campaign quickly raised over $25 million to build the US-Mexico southern border wall. Both Bannon and Kolfage, as alleged in the lawsuit, “repeatedly and falsely assured the public that Kolfage would not take a penny in salary and compensation” and that 100 percent of all funds raised would be used to build the wall.
Co-defendants Bannon, Kolfage, Badolato, and Shea are now facing charges of keeping hundreds of thousands of dollars for their personal use. In particular, Kolfage is accused of keeping $350,000 for his own use while Bannon is charged with paying over $1 million to a non-profit he controls for alleged personal use and other payouts.
Once Bannon paid himself over $1 million, the lawsuit charges, he then paid Kolfage and himself hundreds of thousands of dollars to pay for personal expenses.
Court papers state Bannon and Kolfage allegedly devised a scheme to “route these payments from We Build the Wall to Kolfage indirectly through Non-Profit-1 and a shell company under Shea’s control, among other avenues."
The alleged scheme involved “fake invoices, sham vendor arrangements” and more, as per the filing.
The self-enrichment scheme is headed for federal court in the U.S. Southern District of New York as a wire fraud violation under Title 18 of the United States Code.
