Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon has been arrested and charged with fraud over a fundraising campaign to build a wall on the US-Mexico border.
Mr Bannon and three others defrauded hundreds of thousands of donors in connection with the “We Build the Wall” campaign, which raised $25m (£19m), the US Department of Justice (DoJ) said.
Mr Bannon received more than $1m, at least some of which he used to cover personal expenses, the DoJ said.
He is due to appear in court later.
Mr Bannon was a key architect of Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential election victory. His right-wing anti-immigration ideology fuelled Mr Trump’s “America First” campaign.
Responding to Mr Bannon’s arrest, Mr Trump said he felt “very badly” about it. He also said he had had no involvement with “We Build the Wall”.
“I said ‘This is for government; this isn’t for private people’ and it sounded to me like showboating and I think I let my opinion be very strongly stated at the time,” he said.
It is no secret that President Donald Trump and Steve Bannon have been feuding for years.
In January 2018, Steve Bannon was quoted in The book “Fire & Fury” calling Ivanka Trump “dumb as a brick” and called a June 2016 meeting between a group of Russians and top Trump campaign officials, including Donald Trump Jr, “treasonous” and “unpatriotic”.
In response Donald Trump released a written statement distributed by then White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders. In it Trump said:
Steve Bannon has nothing to do with me or my Presidency. When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind. Steve was a staffer who worked for me after I had already won the nomination by defeating seventeen candidates, often described as the most talented field ever assembled in the Republican party.
Now that he is on his own, Steve is learning that winning isn’t as easy as I make it look. Steve had very little to do with our historic victory, which was delivered by the forgotten men and women of this country. Yet Steve had everything to do with the loss of a Senate seat in Alabama held for more than thirty years by Republicans. Steve doesn’t represent my base—he’s only in it for himself.
Steve pretends to be at war with the media, which he calls the opposition party, yet he spent his time at the White House leaking false information to the media to make himself seem far more important than he was. It is the only thing he does well. Steve was rarely in a one-on-one meeting with me and only pretends to have had influence to fool a few people with no access and no clue, whom he helped write phony books.…
Michael Wolff is a total loser who made up stories in order to sell this really boring and untruthful book. He used Sloppy Steve Bannon, who cried when he got fired and begged for his job. Now Sloppy Steve has been dumped like a dog by almost everyone. Too bad! https://t.co/mEeUhk5ZV9
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 6, 2018
There is this article from January 3rd 2018 as well “Trump eviscerates Steve Bannon in a blistering statement: ‘He not only lost his job, he lost his mind‘
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