Americans have always been famous for their can-do attitude, and for their willingness to take matters into their own hands when the Powers That Be are moving too slowly for them. Maybe that's why so many people bought into a crowdfunding project to privately build the border wall that #NotMyPresident Donald J. Trump has been promising to his xenophobic base for years. But now the leaders of that project, most recently known as We Build The Wall, are under federal indictment for defrauding hundreds of thousands of donors. The United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York has unsealed the indictments, as reported on the Department of Justice web site on August 20, 2020.
I first saw this matter reported on Axios, but it's all over the news media now.Brian Kolfage, Stephen Bannon, and Two Others Alleged to Have Funneled Hundreds of Thousands of Dollars From the Organization to Kolfage; All Four Defendants Allegedly Profited From Their Roles in the Scheme
Audrey Strauss, the Acting United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and Philip R. Bartlett, Inspector-in-Charge of the New York Field Office of the United States Postal Inspection Service (“USPIS”), announced the unsealing of an indictment charging BRIAN KOLFAGE, STEPHEN BANNON, ANDREW BADOLATO, and TIMOTHY SHEA for their roles in defrauding hundreds of thousands of donors in connection with an online crowdfunding campaign known as $25 million. The defendants were arrested this morning. “We Build the Wall” that raised more than KOLFAGE will be presented today before U.S. Magistrate Judge Hope T. Cannon in the Northern District of Florida. BANNON will be presented today in the Southern District of New York. BADOLATO will be presented today before U.S. Magistrate Judge Thomas Wilson in the Middle District of Florida. SHEA will be presented today before U.S. Magistrate Judge Kristen L. Mix in the District of Colorado. The case is assigned to U.S. District Judge Analisa Torres in the Southern District of New York.
Here is a link to the 24-page indictment.
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| A portion of page 2 of the Kolfage, Bannon et al. indictment |
If you're like me, you may be tempted to declare that the folks who poured their money into this scam in good faith completely deserved to be bilked, since they were consciously donating to a cause rooted in the hateful xenophobia and bigotry that form the very foundation of toxic Trumpism. As you'll see below, that's precisely the view I had when I first heard of this scheme, but in my more charitable moments I have made a (mostly futile) effort to view at least some of these donors as merely misguided and fearful rather than hateful. In any case, from a legal as well as arguably a moral standpoint, fraud is fraud, and people who commit fraud should be held accountable. And so far, it looks like there's at least an effort in that direction.
I am as (un)shocked as you probably are that malignant nihilist Steve Bannon, who infested the White House for a while early in the Trump "administration," is among those indicted. Bannon, who was arrested by US Postal Inspection agents while lounging off the the coast of Connecticut on a $28 million yacht owned by a Chinese businessman, has pleaded not guilty. (He called his arrest "a political hit job" -- an effort to stoke fear in people who support Trump's wall -- and he says he isn't going to back down.) Bannon was released on a $5 million bond and ordered not to travel abroad, or to haul his spotty, bloated carcass aboard a private plane or a yacht (such as the one he was arrested on), sans court approval.
Given Bannon's extraordinary arrogance, his massive upopularity, and his general repulsiveness, not to mention his ongoing threat to American democracy, it's not surprising that he has been the main focus of most of the reporting and unabashed schadenfreude. I totally get that. But I was particularly interested in this story not only because I think Bannon is a loathsome toad (absolutely no offense intended to toads), but also because as it happens, the man who actually started We Build The Wall, Brian Kolfage, was the subject of a blog post that I wrote and published back on January 12, 2019 about this project and its many red flags.
Don't go looking for it in the 2019 Whirled archives, though. Out of an (over)abundance of caution I took the post down a few hours after I had published it -- something I very rarely do. I put it back in my drafts folder, even though I continued to update it even after it had been removed from public view.
Why did I remove it? Simply because of Kolfage's fiercely litigious history and the fact that he had so many well-funded backers. Not that anybody reads this blog, but again... abundance of caution. Here's my post about that deleted post.
But in light of the current development, I feel moved to reinstate the original post here and now. You'll see a lot more about Kolfage's volatility and litigiousness in that post, as well as info about the history of his boondoggle, which began life as a GoFundMe called We The People Will Build The Wall, with a goal to raise a billion dollars, which would then be handed over to the government to help fund Trump's dream project. When that effort ran into glitches and logistical problems -- not to mention complaints -- Kolfage moved to Plan B, and the project was re-branded as We Build The Wall.
Back from the drafts folder: the original Whirled post
Although much has happened since January 2019 (boy, is that an understatement), I felt that this post nevertheless provides some pertinent background. Since the stories about his questionable fundraising first broke, Kolfage has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing and has offered details that he says counter some of the most damning reports. And I can't vouch for the functionality of all of the links in this post -- they were valid at the time I first published it -- but I'm keeping them intact anyway. With those disclaimers in mind, here is the original post in its entirety:
Big sale at Wall-mart: right-wing grifter gives donors another chance to squander their money
It really pains me to rag about a military veteran, particularly one who has been grievously wounded. In general I go out of my way to express compassion and support for the (mostly young) men and women who risk and all too often lose their lives in service to their country, though I have zero sympathy or empathy for the war profiteers and politicians who continually put these young people in harm's way in order to enrich themselves.
But Brian Kolfage is a veteran who, I think, richly deserves any ragging that comes his way. Kolfage is a decorated war hero and triple amputee who lost both legs and an arm after a rocket attack in 2004 during Operation Iraqi Freedom. So... thank you for your service and all that, Brian. Really. But being a wounded war hero -- even "the most severely wounded Airman ever to survive any war," as your promos continually remind us -- doesn't give a person moral or legal license to exploit that "war hero" persona in order to spread lies and scam people, which is what you, sir, have allegedly been doing. (I'll elaborate, with links, momentarily.)
Kolfage became part of the news cycle (again) last month when he started a GoFundMe campaign, We The People Will Build the Wall, to pay for #NotMyPresident Donald John Trump's extravagantly expensive (and useless) xenophobic-dogwhistle vanity project. The goal was to raise a cool billion of We The People's hard-earned dollars within one month, and then to somehow spirit those moneys over to the government to help build Donnie's wall. Kolfage wasn't really clear about how the getting it to the government part would work, but he assured his marks that he and his team would work it out somehow. And he promised that if the fund didn't reach the one bil goal, or come significantly close, 100 percent of the donations would be refunded. That was Plan A.
Well, now it seems that they're on to Plan B. While significantly more than 300,000 people who apparently have more money than sense have donated to the cause, raising more than $20 million and making it one of the most successful GoFundMe campaigns ever, that's pretty far short of $1 billion. So now GoFundMe is poised to issue refunds to donors. But wait, there's more! Instead of simply getting their money back and spending it on something useful, the suckers who donated have another chance to potentially get scammed while expressing their various fears and hatreds.
For Kolfage has announced a new 501(c)(4) nonprofit corporation, We Build The Wall, Inc., which is gladly accepting donations, and to which he will happily re-route any donations made to the GoFundMe page. (That GoFundMe page, by the way, is still up and running as of this writing, making the whole issue a little confusing at the moment.) The nonprof is based in Florida, where Kolfage lives, though the address for old-school rubes who want to send a check is a P.O. box in Houston.
By way of 'splaining the decision to form a nonprof, Kolfage insists that he and his team are much more capable of analyzing needs and getting the job done than any dumb ol' government analysts, and certainly more capable than those horrid obstructionist unpatriotic Democrats, who, according to Kolfage, will do anything in their power to thwart this patriotic endeavor. Which brings us to the part that is even more interesting than the decision to funnel everything into a nonprof: the lineup of folks who are part of that "team." Here's more on Gizmodo, from a writer, Rhett Jones, who minces no words.
At the moment, donations are still rolling in on the GoFundMe page (which complicates the official story of what triggered the refunds) and Kolfage is far from done. It remains to be seen just how many previous donors will choose to pass their money to the new effort, but Kolfage has assembled a rogues gallery of prominent conservative grifters to serve on his new border wall construction company’s advisory board. Some of the board members include:And here, straight from the grift horse's mouth, is the full lineup of Team Kolfage.
It seems the only person missing from Kolfage’s impressive board of imposters and sadists is Sebastian Gorka.
- David Clarke, the disgraced former sheriff of Milwaukee who is the subject of numerous lawsuits related to abuse of inmates. Clarke is also a big fan of wearing shiny trinkets that look like military medals, but are not.
- Kris Kobach, the Kansas politician who spreads fantasies about voter fraud. Kobach oversaw Trump’s election integrity commission which was shut down without issuing a report after it failed to find evidence of widespread voter fraud.
- Erik Prince, the founder of the Blackwater security group. Prince is one of the shadiest people on the planet and oversaw Blackwater when its mercenaries were indiscriminately committing war crimes in Iraq. [Erik Prince is also Trump "Education" Secretary Betsy DeVos' brother. ~ CC]
Clearly, I'm not in sync politically with Kolfage and I do not share his goal for a walled-off southern border. That said, I can disagree with someone's politics without believing that the person in question is a scammer. (Then again, as I've observed ad nauseam on this very blog, in the Trump era the line between politics and Scamworld has been blurred almost beyond recognition.) Trump or no Trump, though, it appears that Kolfage has a history of deceptive marketing, to put it politely.
For instance, there are reports that in a 2015 GoFundMe campaign, Kolfage apparently pocketed more than $16,000 that was supposed to go to a veteran mentorship program. Despite Kolfage's naming of specific beneficiaries of his largess, GoFundMe spokesman Bobby Whithorne said the money went directly to Kolfage.
Kolfage in Facebook posts that have been deleted said that he was working with Walter Reed, Brooke Army Medical Center and Landstuhl Regional Medical Center. Representatives for the centers told BuzzFeed News that they don't have record of Kolfage working with veterans at their facilities.The Hill piece cited above sources a January 10, 2019 report from BuzzFeed, which not only mentions the veteran funding scheme but also Kolfage's documented history of running web sites and Facebook pages promoting right-wing conspiranoid and racist content. In other words, Kolfage pushed fake news, some of it racist, to line his own pockets.
“We do not have a record of Mr. Kolfage visiting Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in any official capacity after 2012,” Gia Oney, chief of public affairs at Landstuhl, told the online outlet. “We have no record of a donation made in his name to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center.”
One former employee of Kolfage's, Lindsay Lowery, aka Prissy Holly, worked for Kolfage's chief conservative news website, Freedom Daily, for about a year in 2017. But it appears that it was on Facebook rather than on the website that Kolfage really did his dirty work, according to Lowery.
"After I started challenging some of his business decisions that I felt were reckless for the company and for my career, the real Brian emerged,” she told BuzzFeed News. “Everything is only about his ‘war hero’ persona and money. If there’s a perceived slight on his part, he viciously attacks people...and, in my case, tries to destroy their life and livelihood.”Another former employee, who didn't want to be identified due to fear of retaliation, said that at first her work with Kolfage was going pretty well; the pay was fair, and she was able to pitch and write stories. But as time went by her work and the company's mission changed.
BuzzFeed News reviewed a cache of internal emails and text messages from several of Kolfage’s former employees and acquaintances that show how he pushed to sensationalize and fabricate right-wing content on Facebook to amass clicks, manipulate users, and in the process, make hundreds of thousands of dollars a month in advertising revenue. In one text, he claimed to run a “multi-million business.”
In addition to Lowery, three sources corroborated the documents and their experience with Kolfage, but were afraid to go on the record, citing his past behavior of lashing out and threatening legal action against those who have spoken against him.
Former employees told BuzzFeed News that Kolfage instructed his crew to produce Facebook content to more flagrantly convey a false narrative, in one instance photoshopping former president Obama’s head onto another body to make it appear as though he was having an affair, with the caption, “BREAKING!! OBAMA BUSTED!!! VIDEO LEAKED!!”
“He started creating more [Facebook] pages. I think he had around 10 when I was there and I remember I would see shares and be like, ‘Where did this page come from?’” she recalled. “He was very smart in how he would do it. He never wanted the truth. It was all just for clicks, and the more inflammatory, the better. I felt dirty writing the stuff.”Later on in the BuzzFeed piece we're told that in one email to employees, Kolfage warned them, “NEVER tell anyone who operates Freedomdaily. It’s a tightly guarded secret, and our LLC has a privacy veil set up to protect it. It allows us to operate without consequence where we can’t be sued or attacked by trolls.”
Without consequence? Sounds like fun! Alas, Facebook did eventually suspend several of his pages, along with hundreds of others, during the Great Fake Account Purge of October 2018. Kolfage claimed that the pages that were suspended were indeed fakes but that he had nothing to do with them (see the sub-head, "Buzzfeed raises questions," in the linked article).
But the suspensions just prompted Kolfage to double down on his role as a crusader for "American values," most notably, free speech. One of the things he did to fight for free speech was to start another online fundraising venture called Fight4FreeSpeech, which raised more than $73,000 of a $100,000 goal in two months, with the money to be used for... well, beats the heck out of me. I think it's to sue Facebook for deleting his fake accounts that he had nothing to do with, or something like that. Anyway, he apparently has moved that campaign to a new web site.
Funny thing, though. Kolfage didn't seem to be so enamored of free speech from "radical left-wing extremists" whom he claimed were defaming him and whom he sued in 2014 in Maricopa County, Arizona superior Court. And once again he used to his crowdfunding skills, this time to pay his legal fees. (The suit was settled in 2015.) According to this earlier (December 2018) BuzzFeed article...
Ken Vanderzanden was one of [the people Kolfage sued]. In 2013, he came across one of Kolfage’s Facebook posts in which he dissected Obama’s birth certificate in an effort to prove it was fake. Amused, the 64-year-old sent him a private message pointing out some flaws in Kolfage’s analysis.Wow. The free-speech double standards... the right-wingnuttery... the litigious m.o.... the doxxing... Sounds a little like someone else I've blogged about on this Whirled.
“He turned my private statement into a public statement and made a photo of me a meme, telling the world what a horrible person I was,” Vanderzanden told BuzzFeed News by phone from his home in Portland. “I was endlessly harassed on Facebook and then started getting death threats to my house and had to change my phone number and go into hiding for a while.”
Kolfage published the retiree’s name, address, and phone number on his personal page, according to court documents. Vanderzanden repeatedly reported the harassment until Facebook finally shut down the veteran’s profile, prompting Kolfage to sue for defamation.
Ultimately, they reached a settlement in which both sides agreed to end any disparagement and pay their own legal fees, which Kolfage turned to GoFundMe and other fundraising efforts to cover.
According to the January 2019 recent BuzzFeed piece previously cited, former Kolfage employee Lindsay Lowery said that both she and her husband were threatened and harassed by Kolfage after she quit working for him. Two other former employees confirm this story. Lowery says that she'd seen her former boss go after others, but that being on the receiving end of his harassment was terrifying. "He thinks he's untouchable," she told BuzzFeed.
So I'm thinking that maybe Brian Kolfage isn't such a hero after all. And while I am normally sympathetic to people who get taken in by scammers, I will find it immensely difficult to work up any compassion whatsoever for those who choose to throw their money at any of his schemes -- either through GoFundMe campaigns or through web sites or nonprofits -- and who might subsequently feel that they've been had. I'm especially unsympathetic to folks who participate in this latest scam. Like those who voted for Trump, these Wall-mart shoppers deserve what they get. I'm out of patience.
UPDATE: On January 16 [2019], CBS News reported that GoFundMe donors to Kolfage's wall project have so far given $7 million to his new nonprofit -- or, rather, they have allowed their donations to the GoFundMe page to be redirected to the nonprof. Donors who take no action to have their funds redirected will have their money automatically refunded by April 11, and those who specifically ask for a refund should get it back within three business days. Kolfage also says he has received 3,500 mail-in donations so far, but hasn't yet totaled them. And in an email to CBS News, Kolfage disputed the BuzzFeed report that questioned his fundraising for the veterans' mentorship program. He claimed that he used the funds to travel to the hospitals where he conducted his "award winning mentor trips" to visit wounded veterans, and called the BuzzFeed piece a "fake article."
Two days previous to the CBS News piece, an investigative reporter for The Daily Caller -- which, I should note, is a conservative site -- wrote that Kolfage's new nonprofit org raises, in the words of Charity Watch president Daniel Borochoff, a "huge red flag." According to the article, Kolfage is refusing to answer basic questions about his new nonprofit, which was actually founded two weeks before it was announced. And though he claims that the bylaws of We Build The Wall, Inc. prevent him from taking any salary from donor funds that originate from GoFundMe, he refused to provide The Daily Caller News Foundation with a copy of the nonprof's bylaws to corroborate his claim.
The Daily Caller also noticed the interesting fact that I mentioned in my original post above: check donations are being directed to an entirely different organization with a P.O. box in Houston. Kolfage has ignored multiple inquiries from The Daily Caller asking why he is directing check donations to an org in a different state (We Fund the Wall, Inc.), and whether donations sent to that org can be used to compensate him in any manner. Another big question The Daily Caller had was why Kolfage waited over two weeks to inform his donors of his intention to transfer their contributions to his new nonprof. He has ignored multiple inquiries about this point as well.
Here's a link to info about Kolfage's Florida nonprof.
And here's a link to the founding documents, which were signed on December 27, 2018. The stated purpose of the nonprof is "to promote social welfare within the meaning of Section 501(c)(4) of the Internal Revenue Code, including but not limited to funding, construction, administering, and maintaining a United States Southern Border Wall and the processes associated therewith." Seems to me that this give Kolfage a lot of leeway to do whatever he wishes with We The People's hard-earned bucks.
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I will of course continue to follow this developing story, and I hope you will too. Politico has reported that in the wake of Bannon's arrest Trump has distanced himself from Bannon, calling private funding of The Wall "inappropriate." Actually, as ProPublica reported on an August 1, 2020 update to an article originally published on July 2 in partnership with The Texas Tribune, Trump initially distanced himself from the We Build The Wall project after it was revealed that the wall is unsound and could be in danger of falling into the Rio Grande. He said that the project was built to embarrass him.
But Trump has a habit of changing his tune and contradicting himself; he may be condemning the project today, but who knows what he'll say tomorrow? After all, as Politico also noted, last summer The New York Times reported that Trump (according to one of the project's backers, Kris Kobach) had given the project his blessing. So there's that. As well, Donald Trump Jr. has also praised the group behind We Build The Wall, gushing that it is "what capitalism is all about." So there's that. (After the arrests were made public, however, DJTJ hastened to distance himself from Kolfage's project too.)
And even though Trump Sr. now claims that he knows nothing about Kolfage's project, Forbes noted these interesting points:
Trump also “personally and repeatedly” lobbied for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to award a $1.28 billion wall-building contract to Fisher Industries, a politically-connected firm that was also helping We Build The Wall build a private portion of the wall, according to the Washington Post.And I imagine that scads of Wall fans and xenophobes will dismiss this whole case either as "fake news" or as an overblown political witch hunt -- or "hit job," as Bannon put it -- and that they will support Brian Kolfage as the hero/martyr he so wants us to believe that he is. I'm guessing that they'll see this case not as an indictment of Kolfage and his project but rather as an indictment of the Southern District of New York, which has remained unafraid of going after Trump's dodgy business dealings and other related matters.
The company, which is not mentioned in the indictment, is run by GOP donor and frequent Fox News guest Tommy Fisher and won the contract after it “captured Trump's attention” and was “repeatedly touted” by him, according to CNN.
The White House declined to comment on whether Trump knew of the connection between Fisher and We Build The Wall.
But even if those charged are tried and ultimately convicted, which at this point is far from a certainty, it's anyone's guess how this will end. You only have to think of Michael Flynn, or Roger Stone, to know that these days, anything goes. In Trumpistan, you're guilty until proven innocent if you're a critic of Trump, and innocent even after proven guilty if you're a Trump crony or sycophant.
So as delightful as the vision of Steve Bannon in handcuffs may be, maybe hold off on the celebration for now.
Update, August 21, 2020: I have added several links and other content to this post since I first uploaded it on August 20. ~ CC
Related on this Whirled:
- February 19, 2020: Department of Just-Us (And Screw Everyone Else):
Kevin Trudeau, Donald Trump, and (Lack of) Accountability
More reasons not to take anything for granted, and to approach the concept of "justice" in the Trump era with more than a pinch of skepticism. - October 7, 2016: Back into the black hole of politix...
Kris Kobach, one of the thus-far-unindicted principals behind We Build The Wall, is most notorious for his obsession with nonexistent voter fraud. While this post doesn't discuss Kobach, it does cover the voter-fraud myth on which Trump capitalized during the 2016 campaign. (Some things never change: he has doubled down on that obsession in 2020.) - May 31, 2016: Donald Trump's Scamworld playbook isn't unique
Though the Trump University cases have been settled since this post was written, there's still a lot of info about Trump's scammy background and the cultural context in which he was and is allowed to get away with scamming and lying. - August 17, 2020: Oleandrin: Are Trump and cronies trying to
crapitalize on a new phony COVID-19 cure?
Whether it's a wall scam or a phony COVID-19 cure scam, Trump can't seem to get the sticky scam ooze off of himself. But there's little evidence that he really wants to.
- August 20. 2020:
Steve Bannon, Kris Kobach, and the 'We Build the
Wall' Scandal
Writing for investigative journalist Greg Palast's site, Zach D. Roberts sheds some much-needed light on We Build The Wall principal and founding attorney Kris Kobach, who, though as mentioned above was not named in the current indictment, is a scoundrel who's just as much of a threat to American democracy as Trump is. (Also be sure to read the linked excerpt about Kobach, taken from Greg Palast's new book, How Trump Stole 2020.) - August 20, 2020:
Bannon Grifter Indictment: More Steel Bracelets
for Team Trump
Amanda Carpenter, writing for The Bulwark, is a writer after my own heart (of snark). She really nails Trump and the rogue's gallery of grifters with whom he has long surrounded himself. - August 20, 2020:
Trump struggles to explain the 'culture of
lawlessness' around him
Spoiler alert: The best he could come up with, when cornered by a reporter, was, "There was great lawlessness in the Obama administration. They spied on our campaign illegally." But don't let the spoiler keep you from reading Steve Benen's short but link-filled piece on the utter hypocrisy of the man who claims to be "tough on crime" and "the law and order president." - August 21, 2020: Prosecutors Arrest 'We Build The Wall' Leaders For Convincing Donors They Weren't Taking Cash
A good capsule summary of the whole saga, from Snopes. Includes background about specific accusations leveled against Brian Kolfage in 2019, and his denial of the accusations, and explanations about where he really got the money to buy his expensive toys. - August 19, 2019: Brian Kolfage; A Pattern of Cons
From The Weird Turn Professional blog (the name of the blog is apparently derived from a quotation by the late "gonzo journalist," Hunter S. Thompson). The blog's author, whose name doesn't seem to appear on his blog (maybe I'm just overlooking it?), claims to have originally broken the story of Kolfage's scammery. Whether he did or not, his post is filled with exhibits and links that seem to reinforce the narrative of Kolfage as a serial huckster. Embedded in the post is this video, dated August 6, 2019, stating that Kolfage's project was under criminal investigation in the state of Florida. If I had seen that vid when it was first posted, I would have reinstated my back-burnered January 2019 blog post then and there. - Ongoing: Wikipedia entry on Brian Kolfage
- August 23, 2020: Trump Claims He Rejected Wall Scam, But Sponsors Boasted
Of His Support
Not to belabor the point, but Trump's attempts to distance himself from this scam and these scammers are about as credible as his tan. - August 24, 2020: Federal Prosecutors Have Steve Bannon's Murky
Nonprofit In Their Sights
ProPublica highlights details in the 24-page indictment that seem to be describing Bannon's group, Citizens of the American Republic. - Ongoing: The Brian Kolfage Facebook "fan" page, which publishes whiny posts appearing to be from
Kolfage himself (going on and on about "witch
hunts" and whatnot). The right-wing followers and fans are just eating it up.
Facebook's transparency info states that the confirmed page owner of the Brian Kolfage page is the above-mentioned Citizens of the American Republic in Mclean, Virginia. The page was originally created in November 2014, under the name, "Fans Of Brian Kolfage -- American Patriot." At the time this link is being posted here (on August 25, 2020), 584,065 people "like" this page, and 630,184 folks are following it. Kolfage's latest post at this time compares the SDNY action against him to the court action against the National Rifle Association (NRA). He writes:"I gave 3 limbs defending this freedom, and I'd proudly give another to fight back at this injustice to preserve the future of this nation."
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So... don't expect the hero/martyr narrative, either from Bannon or Kolfage, to let up any time soon. And as I noted in my post above, it would be a mistake to assume that any of these con artists will see a moment of jail time.
