(WASHINGTON) — The Senate confirmed Tulsi Gabbard to serve as director of national intelligence by a vote of 52-48 on Wednesday.
Former Republican Leader Mitch McConnell was the only Republican to break ranks and vote against Gabbard’s nomination. All other Republicans voted for Gabbard and all Democrats voted against her.
Prior to the vote, Majority Leader John Thune laid into Democrats for their unified efforts to block and oppose both her and Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s nominations, arguing that their lack of willingness to support Trump’s picks demonstrates how “out of step” with America the party has become.
Gabbard cleared a key Senate test vote Monday night and was expected to be confirmed.
Emily Curiel/The Kansas City Star/Tribune News Service via Getty Images
(TOPEKA, Kan.) — Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly has vetoed Senate Bill 63, which would have restricted gender-affirming care for transgender youth.
“Right now, the legislature should be focused on ways to help Kansans cope with rising prices,” Kelly said in a statement emailed late Tuesday. “That is the most important issue for Kansans. That is where my focus is.”
The bill would bar health care providers from administering gender-affirming medical care – including puberty suppressants and hormone therapies – for someone under the age of 18, only for the purposes of gender transitioning. The ban would also apply to gender-affirming surgeries.
“Infringing on parental rights is not appropriate, nor is it a Kansas value,” said Kelly in her veto message. “As I’ve said before, it is not the job of politicians to stand between a parent and a child who needs medical care of any kind. This legislation will also drive families, businesses, and health care workers out of our state, stifling our economy and exacerbating our workforce shortage issue.”
This is the third time Kelly has vetoed similar transgender youth care bills, but the bill may now have the support to pass.
The bill passed the state legislature with flying colors – passing the House 83-35 and the Senate 32-8.
In 2023, the attempt to override a past trans care ban veto lost in the House 82-43.
State Republicans quickly denounced Kelly’s veto.
“The governor’s devotion to extreme left-wing ideology knows no bounds, vetoing a bipartisan bill that prevents the mutilation of minors,” said State Sen. Ty Masterson in an online statement. “The Senate stands firmly on the side of protecting Kansas children and will swiftly override her veto before the ink from her pen is dry.”
Top national medical associations such as the American Medical Association, American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, and American Academy of Pediatrics and more than 20 others argue that gender-affirming care is safe, effective, beneficial, and medically necessary for transgender populations.
Kelly joins governors past and present in Ohio and Arkansas in vetoing bills that targeted gender-affirming youth care. However, both of their vetoes were overridden.
Across the country, trans youth care restrictions have faced legal hurdles in their enforcement.
The battle and debate has most recently made its way to the national stage, with the Supreme Court considering U.S. v. Skrmetti, which will decide if Tennessee’s law banning some gender-affirming care for transgender minors violates the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution.
(WASHINGTON) — A 25-year-old associate of Elon Musk and former Treasury Department employee was “mistakenly” given the ability to make changes to a sensitive federal payment system, officials with the Bureau of the Fiscal Service disclosed in a series of court filings late Tuesday.
Treasury Department officials said the “error” was quickly corrected, and a forensic investigation into the actions of Marko Elez — who resigned from his position last week after The Wall Street Journal unearthed a series of racist social media posts — remains ongoing.
“To the best of our knowledge, Mr. Elez never knew of the fact that he briefly had read/write permissions for the [Secure Payment System] database, and never took any action to exercise the ‘write’ privileges in order to modify anything within the SPS database — indeed, he never logged in during the time that he had read/write privileges, other than during the virtual walk-through — and forensic analysis is currently underway to confirm this,” wrote Joseph Gioeli III, a deputy commissioner at Bureau of the Fiscal Service.
The high-profile mistake at BFS — which effectively serves as the federal government’s checkbook by disbursing more than $5 trillion annually — comes as a federal judge in New York is weighing whether to continue to block individuals associated with Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency from accessing Treasury Department records.
Lawyers with the Department of Justice initially insisted that Elez was strictly given “read-only” access to sensitive records, but the affidavits submitted by BFS employees on Tuesday noted that the 25-year-old was inadvertently given the ability to “read/write” the sensitive system that agencies use to send “large dollar amount transactions” to the Treasury Department.
According to Gioeli, Treasury Department officials also provided Elez with copies of the “source code” for multiple payment systems that he could edit in a digital “sandbox.”
“Mr. Elez could review and make changes locally to copies of the source code in the cordoned-off code repository; however, he did not have the authority or capability to publish any code changes to the production system or underlying test environments,” the filing said.
Elez resigned from his role on Feb. 6, and Gioielli claimed that the 25-year-old former SpaceX and X employee was the “only individual on the Treasury DOGE Team” who was given direct access to payment systems or source code. A “preliminary review” of his digital activity suggests that Elez stayed within the permitted bounds of his role when accessing the payment systems.
“While forensic analysis is still ongoing, Bureau personnel have conducted preliminary reviews of logs of his activity both on his laptop and within the systems and at this time have found no indication of any unauthorized use, of any use outside the scope that was directed by Treasury leadership, or that Mr. Elez used his BFS laptop to share any BFS payment systems data outside the U.S. Government,” the filing said.
The filings also provided new insights into DOGE’s ongoing mission with the Treasury Department, including to identify fraud, better understand how the payments are fulfilled and to enforce Trump’s day-one executive order that significantly cut foreign aid.
According to Thomas Krause — a tech CEO and DOGE volunteer who is leading the cost-cutting effort at the Treasury Department — DOGE is engaged in 4-to-6-week assessment of the Treasury Department’s payment systems. He was placed at Treasury not only to identify potential fraud but also understand how to use the Department’s payment systems to potentially cut funding to other parts of the government, the filing said.
“BFS is well positioned to help agencies and the federal government holistically understand and take stock of the problems [Government Accountability Office] has reported on,” Krause wrote.
(WASHINGTON) — The Trump administration is gearing up for major changes to the Department of Education, which, among its other functions, oversees a $1.6 trillion portfolio of student loans — the third largest source of household debt in the U.S.
Those loans belong to over 44 million Americans, many of whom are wondering what it would mean to abolish the department that manages their debt.
It depends on which policies the Trump administration actually implements — and which survive legal challenges. But some of the policy plans that have been floated include moving the government’s student loan portfolio over to the Treasury Department, changing the repayment plans that are available to borrowers and, in the most extreme possible change, privatizing the entire student loan system.
Above all, borrowers should expect a halt to student debt relief programs implemented and expanded under former President Joe Biden. The former president’s efforts resulted in $188.8 billion in student loan forgiveness for 5.3 million borrowers during his presidency. Republicans have derided the efforts as an abuse of executive authority, and some have even argued for clawbacks of some of that relief — though that’s considered unlikely.
The relief was concentrated in expansions or fixes to forgiveness programs that already existed, like Public Service Loan Forgiveness and income-driven repayment plans, after efforts at wide scale debt relief were halted by Republican-led lawsuits.
Moving the student loan system to a new home Conservatives who advocate for the Department of Education to be dismantled often suggest moving the Office of Federal Student Aid (FSA) to the Treasury Department, where it would continue to carry out the regular duties of doling out federal loans and recouping them.
FSA, which is an office within the Department of Education, is where people apply for federal student loans, grants and work-study funds, using the Free Application for Student Aid, or FAFSA, and it’s also the office that manages the repayment process.
Some legal experts have posited that moving FSA into a different government agency would require congressional approval. But Trump could continue pushing the limits of executive authority, as he has with other agencies, to test that hypothesis, ultimately leaving it up to the courts to decide.
Rick Hess, a senior fellow and director focused on education policy at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, says FSA would be a better fit for the Treasury Department because it’s “essentially a mega-bank.”
“It’d make more sense to have it overseen by officials at Treasury who work closely with financial institutions and oversee federal revenue collection,” Hess wrote in a recent post.
Hess, in an interview with ABC News, said that he doesn’t predict any impact on student loan borrowers if FSA moved homes — the process would carry on, he said.
“I would be surprised if it’s noticeable in any way compared to anything the borrowers have experienced in the last 4 years,” Hess said, referring to the tumultuousness of the moratorium on payments during the pandemic, the restart, and then the stop-and-start that resulted from lawsuits over Biden’s forgiveness efforts.
That optimistic view would be a deviation from the learned experience of most borrowers, Persis Yu, deputy executive director and managing counsel of the Student Borrower Protection Center, which advocates for debt relief, said.
“No transitions in the student loan system have ever gone well, historically, and we have never tried to move the entire portfolio,” Yu said.
The student loan system is “messy” in its current state, Yu said. Millions of borrowers still haven’t started repaying their loans since the Covid-era pause ended, and a lawsuit holding up a Biden-era student loan repayment plan, called SAVE, has put nearly 8 million borrowers in forbearance while they await further guidance.
“Having a huge shift is certainly not going to make things better,” she said.
Yu also raised concerns that the Department of Education oversees the loan system with an emphasis on borrower rights, adhering to the Higher Education Act of 1965, while the Treasury Department would do so as a debt collector, which she said could create a “philosophical” difference in how borrowers will be treated.
“I am not here to defend [the Department of Education’s] track record because we’ve obviously had a lot of critiques of their performance in the past,” Yu said. “But this is a move that will in fact hand the portfolio to people even less qualified to run it.”
Changing the ways borrowers repay their loans There is also a subset of the Republican Party that wants much more significant changes to the student loan system beyond just rehoming offices to make the overall department smaller.
Project 2025, the conservative blueprint of policy ideas written for the Trump administration, calls for privatizing the student loan system entirely and moving all of the government-owned loans to private loan servicers.
Doing so would be a significant change in the way higher education is funded — more than 92% of people relied on federal loans in 2024, rather than private loans, according to the Education Data Initiative, and offloading the $1.6 trillion in federal student loans the government already has — or ceasing to offer loans going forward — would require congressional approval. (Project 2025 acknowledges that privatizing the system may not be “feasible.”)
It also calls for all federal loan repayment plans, of which there are many options, to be consolidated into just one option, and for an end to Public Service Loan Forgiveness, or PSLF, which grants relief to people who work in public service, like nurses and firefighters, after they’ve paid their loans for 10 years.
But the program, first introduced by Republican President George W. Bush in 2007, was authorized by Congress, and would have to be eliminated by Congress, too, which remains unlikely.
Trump could significantly reduce access to the program, though, returning it to its less-effective form during his first term.
The forgiveness plan was massively expanded under Biden, but at one point in Trump’s first term, the Education Department rejected 99% of PSLF applications, a report from the Government Accountability Office found.
When Biden was in office, the number of people who had qualified for PSLF throughout the program’s history rose from 7,000 to over 1 million.
(WASHINGTON) — A group of 191 House and Senate Democrats sent a letter to Russell Vought, the newly installed director of the Office of Management and Budget, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, calling on them to reverse course on actions targeting the nation’s consumer financial watchdog agency.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) was created by Congress in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis to safeguard Americans against unfair business practices. It has been brought to a virtual standstill after Vought, who last week was named the agency’s acting director, and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency took control of the agency. Vought has since issued a stop-work order to nearly all CFPB staff.
Democrats, in their letter, are calling for Musk’s DOGE employees, some of whom physically accessed the agency’s federal office and requested access to its industry and consumer data, to be pulled out of the CFPB.
“Your efforts to dismantle the CFPB are dangerous, and we will fight them at every turn. We ask that you remove Mr. Musk’s operatives from the CFPB, restore all internal and external systems and operations, and allow the CFPB to continue to do its job of protecting American consumers,” the Democrats wrote in their letter.
The letter is signed by all Senate Democrats and the two independents — Sen. Angus King, of Maine, and Sen. Bernie Sanders, of Vermont — who caucus with them.
During remarks on Monday from the Oval Office, President Donald Trump said the CFPB was “very important to get rid of” and that the organization was “set up to destroy some very good people.”
When asked if his goal was to completely get rid of the agency, Trump answered in the affirmative.
“I would say yeah, because we’re trying to get rid of waste, fraud and abuse,” Trump said.
Democrats in their letter allege that efforts to sideline the financial watchdog will harm consumers and are potentially illegal.
“The Trump Administration has effectively fired the financial cop on the beat and declared open season for predatory lenders and scam artists working to steal Americans’ money and threaten their financial security,” Democrats said in the letter.
“No matter how badly someone has been cheated and no matter how extensive the scam, the Administration has declared that the financial cops should simply stand by and watch while giant networks of lenders cheat American consumers,” the letter continued. “This is particularly costly for people whose claims of illegal foreclosures, car repossessions, or debanking are currently under investigation by the agency.”
The letter comes as congressional Democrats, who are in the minority in both the House and the Senate, have vowed to use their limited tools to challenge what they say is illegal overreach by the Trump administration and Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency across a number of agencies, including USAID, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the National Institutes of Health and the CFPB.
The National Treasury Employees Union filed two lawsuits this week against Vought, challenging both the takeover of the CFPB and DOGE’s access to its records.
The letter is led by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, of Massachusetts, who is the top Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee and helped create the CFPB after the 2008 financial crash. In the days since Elon Musk posted “RIP CFPB” on X, Warren has been a vocal defender of the agency.
Since it was established in 2011, the CFPB says it has clawed back nearly $21 billion for American consumers, addressing complaints over everything from bank fees to credit cards to student loans.
On Tuesday, Warren implored Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, who was appearing before the Senate Banking Committee, to work with Congress to keep Musk’s team out of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
“If the CFPB is not there examining these giant banks to make sure they are following the laws, are not cheating consumers, who is doing that job?” Warren asked Powell during the hearing.
“I can say no other federal regulators,” Powell replied.
“No one. In other words thanks to ‘co-president’ Musk and the CFPB Acting Director Vought, Wall Street banks no longer have to show the bank examiners that they’re not illegally opening accounts people didn’t ask for, like what happened with Wells Fargo, or charging illegal junk fees like Bank of America did,” Warren said.
But some Republicans on the panel pushed back on this line of questioning, saying laws that regulate banks haven’t changed and Elon Musk is simply carrying out the work Trump promised on the campaign.
“There’s been a lot of conversation, both in and out of this hearing room today, conversations about a co-president, referencing Elon Musk, referencing the work that DOGE is doing,” said Alabama Republican Sen. Katie Britt. “I think it’s important to remember that President Trump ran on this. I mean, he said we’re going to look for wasteful spending across our government.”
Democrats, in their letter, say they’ll fight to defend the agency.
“We beat back all prior efforts to gut this agency, and we will fight this latest attack in Congress, the courts, and the public,” the lawmakers wrote. “It will fail.”
(WASHINGTON) — Elon Musk joined President Donald Trump in the Oval Office on Tuesday, where he addressed reporters for the first time amid his controversial cost-cutting efforts across the federal government.
Musk defended DOGE as Trump asked him to speak about the team’s work. The Tesla billionaire brought his young son “X” and was wearing a black “Make America Great Again” hat.
“If there’s not a good feedback loop from the people to the government and if you have rule of the bureaucrat, or if the bureaucracy is in charge, then what meaning does democracy actually have?” said Musk, who is an unelected official himself.
Musk had not faced questions since taking the lead on Trump’s mandate to dismantle federal agencies. The White House has said he is classified as a “special government employee” and it’s unclear to whom he is accountable to, other than Trump.
ABC News Senior Political Correspondent Rachel Scott pressed Musk on what checks he faces and whether he is policing himself. Musk in response claimed his actions are “fully transparent.”
DOGE has faced early setbacks from the courts, with a federal judge temporarily blocking Musk and his team from accessing Treasury Department material, including sensitive information such as the Social Security numbers and bank account information of millions of Americans.
The administration and some key Republicans, including House Speaker Mike Johnson, have criticized the court action against DOGE. Johnson earlier Tuesday said the courts should “step back” and let DOGE work.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
(NEW YORK) — In his first appearance since the Justice Department moved to drop the case against him, New York City Mayor Eric Adams celebrated the end of what he called an “unnecessary ordeal.”
“As I said from the outset, I never broke the law, and I never would. I would never put any personal benefit above my solemn responsibility as your mayor,” Adams said during a public address Tuesday. He did not take questions.
In a letter Monday night, acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove instructed federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York to drop the bribery case against Adams.
Adams pleaded not guilty to a five-count indictment that accused him of accepting years of luxury travel gifts in exchange for, among other things, persuading the fire department to approve the opening of the new Turkish consulate in Manhattan despite the lingering safety concerns of inspectors.
Addressing the public on Tuesday, Adams decried what he called “sensational and false claims” against him, despite the case’s dismissal not involving any proclamation of his innocence.
The directive from Bove made no assessment on the strength of the evidence against Adams.
Rather, Bove’s letter questioned the timing of when the charges were brought, suggesting the case was part of the Biden administration’s weaponization of the Justice Department.
Bove also said the case adversely affected Adams’ ability to help the Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal immigration.
Federal prosecutors were instructed to dismiss the case without prejudice, meaning it could come up again. However, Bove said nothing could happen until after this year’s mayoral election.
Addressing New Yorkers on Tuesday, Adams denied ever committing a crime and touted his record as mayor.
“I never asked anyone to break the law on my behalf or on behalf of my campaign — never — and I absolutely never traded my power as an elected official for any personal benefit,” he said.
Adams thanked the Justice Department for its “honesty.”
“Now we can put this cruel episode behind us and focus entirely on the future of our city,” he said. “It’s time to move forward.”
Adams is the first New York City mayor to ever face criminal charges.
The dropping of the case comes after Adams has publicly cozied up to Trump, spending time with him at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort and attending his inauguration.
Trump recently made comments in support of Adams, and has suggested he would “take a look” at pardoning him.
“I think that he was treated pretty unfairly,” Trump said regarding Adams during in a December press briefing.
(WASHINGTON) — In a pair of lawsuits filed over the past 24 hours, several nonprofit groups that rely on government funds to provide healthcare and other services abroad are accusing the Trump administration of failing to disperse congressionally approved funds by freezing all foreign aid for 90 days.
One suit, brought by the American Bar Association on behalf of several nongovernment aid groups, claimed that President Donald Trump’s aid freeze amounts to an “unlawful and unconstitutional exercise of executive power that has created chaos” around the globe, according to the lawsuit brought Tuesday morning by the ABA.
The lawsuit alleged the foreign aid freeze is unlawful, exceeds Trump’s authority as president and is causing havoc.
“One cannot overstate the impact of that unlawful course of conduct: on businesses large and small forced to shut down their programs and let employees go; on hungry children across the globe who will go without; on populations around the world facing deadly disease; and on our constitutional order,” the ABA said in the filing.
The plaintiffs allege that Trump’s executive order, signed on his first day in office and titled “Reevaluating and Realigning United States Foreign Aid,” violated federal laws governing the administration of executive agencies and overstepped Trump’s authority as president.
“Neither the President nor his subordinates have authority to thwart duly enacted statutes and substitute their own funding preferences for those Congress has expressed through legislation,” the lawsuit said.
“One cannot overstate the impact of that unlawful course of conduct,” the ABA said in the suit. “On businesses large and small forced to shut down their programs and let employees go; on hungry children across the globe who will go without; on populations around the world facing deadly disease; and on our constitutional order.”
In a separate suit brought late Monday by the nonprofit advocacy group Public Citizen on behalf of the healthcare nonprofit AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition, the plaintiffs claimed that Trump’s executive order has affected “millions across the world” who rely on lifesaving HIV/AIDS medication backed by the U.S. Agency for International Development.
AVAC said in the suit that it has already had to lay off several members of its staff, which threatens to cripple its ability to operate even if its funding return.
“So when Defendants promise to ‘decide to continue [some] program[s] in the same or modified form’ … it is clear they have not grappled with the reality that those programs may not be able to be revived,” the suit claimed.
Both suits cited the Impoundment Control Act of 1974, which makes it difficult for a president to try to avoid spending money allocated by the legislative branch. Both suits requested the courts intervene to reinstate the federal funding and issue temporary restraining orders on Trump’s foreign aid freeze.
ABC News’ Karen Faulders, Peter Charalambous, Will Steakin and Ben Siegel contributed to this report.
(WASHINGTON) — The Trump administration is reigniting a legal fight over whether it can unilaterally freeze billions of dollars in funding in loans, grants and financial assistance.
Lawyers with the Department of Justice asked the Boston-based 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to stay a decision by a federal judge in Rhode Island who determined that the Trump administration likely violated the Constitution when it tried to block trillions in federal funding through a now-rescinded directive of the Office of Management and Budget.
That Rhode Island judge on Monday issued an order finding that the Trump administration, in its effort to “root out fraud,” was still cutting off funding in defiance of the court order. DOJ lawyers are now arguing that the district court is overstepping its ability to rein in the power of the president.
“This appeal arises from an extraordinary and unprecedented assertion of power by a single district court judge to superintend and control the Executive Branch’s spending of federal funds, in clear violation of the Constitution’s separation of powers,” they wrote in an emergency application to the 1st Circuit.
DOJ attorneys argued the court’s decision effectively requires the federal government to get “preclearance” from the district court for any decision relating to funding.
“It is self-evidently unworkable for the defendant agencies to be required to seek targeted relief from the district court every time they wish to withhold funds based on their own authorities,” they said in the filing.
Lawyers representing the 23 state attorneys general are aggressively pushing back on the appeal, arguing that allowing the funding freeze will irreparably harm millions of people who rely on federal money.
“This case challenges defendants’ implementation of a policy imposing across-the-board blanket freezes on payments to all recipients of federal funding associated with nearly all federal programs across the Nation, ranging from (for example) healthcare funding to education funding to critical energy and infrastructure grants — a policy that had severe and destabilizing consequences for Plaintiff States and their residents,” they said in the lawsuit.
The attorneys general also argued it is procedurally improper for the Trump administration to appeal a temporary restraining order, which generally can’t be stayed.
“If the Court were to issue an administrative stay, defendants would immediately be free to resume this sweeping and illegal policy, harming Plaintiff States and the many recipients of federal funding that reside within their jurisdictions,” they said.
The Trump administration is asking for an immediate administrative pause as well as a stay pending appeal by Friday.
(NEW YORK) — Steve Bannon, the confidant of President Donald Trump, pleaded guilty Tuesday to defrauding New Yorkers who donated to “We Build the Wall,” an online fundraiser for Trump’s signature project during his first term, in exchange for a sentence without prison time.
“The parties have worked out a plea agreement. Mr. Bannon will plead guilty to count 5 of the indictment, which is scheme to defraud in the indictment. He will receive a conditional discharge,” prosecutor Jeffrey Levinson said.
The guilty plea to the felony charge represents Bannon’s second criminal conviction after he served prison time for contempt of Congress.
Bannon showed up to court in a brown barn jacket, his brushed-back gray hair spilling over the upturned collar. He sat at the defense table signing papers before Judge April Newbauer affirmed that Bannon now wanted to plead guilty.
“Is that what you wish to do?” Newbauer asked.
“Yes, your honor,” Bannon replied, before acknowledging he acted to defraud multiple donors.
“Do you now plead guilty to count 5, scheme to defraud?” the court clerk asked. “Yes,” Bannon responded.
The judge imposed the agreed upon sentence of a three-year conditional discharge, during which time Bannon cannot serve as a director of a charity or fundraise for a nonprofit. He is also barred from using data gathered from “We Build the Wall” donors.
Bannon said after the hearing that he would call on new Attorney General Pam Bondi to prosecute New York Attorney General Letitia James and investigate Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg, both of whom brought successful cases against Trump.
“Letitia James is the existential threat to the Trump administration,” Bannon said.
Defense attorney Arthur Aidala said he counseled Bannon to plead out because he did not think Bannon could get a fair shake from jurors in Manhattan.
“This is a spectacular disposition with him,” Aidala said, noting the conditional discharge puts no real limitations on Bannon other than charitable work.
Bragg released a statement after the plea agreement, saying, “This resolution achieves our primary goal: to protect New York’s charities and New Yorkers’ charitable giving from fraud. With this felony plea, the defendant will not be able to serve as an officer, director, or in any fiduciary position, or fundraise for, any charitable associations with assets in New York State, nor can he use or sell WBTW donors’ information. New York has an important interest in rooting out fraud in our markets, our corporations, and our charities, and we will continue to do just that.”
“We Build the Wall” promised 100% of donations would fund a wall along the U.S. southern border, but Bannon redirected money elsewhere.
Bannon, who served as a senior adviser to Trump during his first term, was indicted in September 2022. He previously pleaded not guilty and the trial was scheduled to begin on March 4.
Bannon was initially charged in federal court with three co-defendants. However, Trump pardoned Bannon, but not the co-defendants, whose asset forfeitures through prosecution recouped money for defrauded donors.
Bannon defrauded donors to the nonprofit by falsely promising that none of the money they donated would be used to pay the salary of “We Build the Wall” president Brian Kolfage, while secretly funneling hundreds of thousands of dollars to him by laundering it through third-party entities, prosecutors said.
The campaign represented that “We Build the Wall” would use the money to privately construct the border wall, and prosecutors said a “central piece of the public messaging in support of this fundraising effort was that Kolfage was not taking a penny of compensation.” Financial records show Kolfage was paid, according to a secret salary arrangement, an upfront payment of $100,000 and monthly payments of approximately $20,000.
