Steve Bannon Finally Admits to Border Wall Grift in Guilty Plea

MAGA muse Steve Bannon pleaded guilty to fraud in New York Tuesday morning.

Bannon is taking a plea deal for defrauding New Yorkers who gave money to his “We Build the Wall” online fundraiser, which was allegedly pooling money from normal civilians for Trump’s border wall during his first term.

“Nobody lost money, find one,” Bannon told New York Daily News’s Molly Crane-Newman when asked how the Trump supporters he scammed felt, even though he had just confessed to the fraud.

Bannon will avoid jail time completely for this second criminal conviction, instead receiving a three-year conditional discharge after pleading guilty to one count of defrauding donors. He was originally facing five felony counts and up to 15 years in prison. The War Room host is likely to blame this all on corruption and cast himself as a political prisoner rather than admit that his “We Build the Wall” program was as flimsy as Trump’s original promise to construct it.  

This story has been updated.

Trump’s Justice Department is dropping its corruption case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams—not because the charges aren’t credible, but because Adams could help MAGA’s extreme immigration agenda.

Acting Attorney General Emil Bove told New York prosecutors to dismiss the charges against Adams on Monday, while openly admitting that the Justice Department “reached this conclusion without assessing the strength of the evidence or the legal theories on which the case is based.”

Instead, the memo notes that a criminal trial against Adams might restrict his ability to “devote full attention and resources to the illegal immigration and violent crime that escalated under the policies of the prior administration.”

“The Eric Adams memo doesn’t even pretend to be dropping the prosecution for a legitimate reason,” researcher Will Stancil wrote on X. “It says he shouldn’t be prosecuted because he’s running for reelection (?) and so he can carry out the president’s agenda (??). OPEN corruption: ‘MAGA politicians are above the law.’”

This isn’t just obvious and blatant corruption. It’s also a sign that the Justice Department has fully transformed into nothing more than a political tool for the president.

Adams has been begging for a pardon for months, and he bet on Trump giving it to him if he started acting like he was auditioning for a role in the administration. In December, the New York City mayor cast his indictments as political targeting akin to that of Trump and Hunter Biden. “Those who are here committing crimes, robbery, shooting at police officers, raping innocent people … I would love to sit down with the border czar and hear his thoughts on how we are going to address those who are harming our citizens,” Adams bizarrely said at the time. “This is not a new position. In the era of cancel culture, no one is afraid to be honest about the truth. Well, cancel me.”

That same month, he requested a meeting with Trump’s draconian border czar Tom Homan to help him crack down on immigrants who “snuck in” to New York City. In January, he met with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, and days later he was sitting down with Tucker Carlson talking about how the Democratic Party “left him.” The quid pro quo agreement has been cooking for some time now, and Adams got the best outcome possible. He gets off scot-free, and Trump and Homan get to run rampant through New York City.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s decision to withdraw Army recruiters from the nation’s top Black engineering event has ushered blunt criticism from military leadership.

“It’s fucking racist,” one active duty Army general told Military.com on the condition of anonymity. “For the Army now, it’s ‘Blacks need not apply’ and it breaks my heart.”

The Baltimore-based Black Engineer of the Year Awards (BEYA) has historically been a key event for the Pentagon to recruit high-caliber STEM talent. One Army recruiter told the servicemember news outlet that BEYA is one of the “most talent-dense events we do,” and that the branch “need[s] the talent.” BEYA, in turn, recognizes on its website that the “U.S. military is one of the largest STEM employers in the nation.”

But despite its abundance of talent, recruiters were concerned that attending the event could infringe on Donald Trump’s anti-diversity, equity, and inclusion executive order. Hegseth has, from the jump, been totally on board with the radical shift, making the dissolution of long-standing diversity efforts a priority of his tenure.

On January 31, Hegseth declared that Black History Month, Women’s History Month, and other heritage month observations were officially “dead” and would no longer be recognized by the military. And on Monday, Hegseth made the first move in implementing Trump’s transgender ban on the armed forces, initiating a pause on integrating new trans troops.

“I think the single dumbest phrase in military history is, ‘Our diversity is our strength,’” Hegseth said Friday in an address to Pentagon staff. “I think our strength is our unity. Our strength is our shared purpose, regardless of our background, regardless of how we grew up, regardless of our gender, regardless of our race. In this department, we will treat everyone equally.”

“We will treat everyone with fairness,” he continued. “We will treat everyone with respect. And we will judge you as an individual by your merit and by your commitment to the team and the mission.”

Recruiters that would have attended BEYA weren’t left with nothing to do. Instead, they were redirected to participate in a National Rifle Association-sponsored event in Pennsylvania, which Military.com described as a “predominantly white gathering that recruiters acknowledge is less likely to yield high-quality applicants.”

Donald Trump is continuing to pretend that being a blathering fool is impressive.

During an interview with Fox News’s Bret Baier, which aired in full Monday evening, Trump went on several unwieldy tangents, skirting around answering simple softball questions that the interviewer offered on a silver platter.

At one point, in the middle of a thought, Trump diverted his answer to congratulate himself on just how obtuse he was being.

“And you know, let’s go back over there, because I’m the weaver,” Trump said, abruptly switching topics. “I’m the great weaver, you know that right? OK? I’m the great weaver.”

“Trust me,” Baier replied. “I get it.” The Fox News host put one hand up as if to physically stop the president from getting off track, but Trump chugged along like a runaway train.

“Somebody said, ‘Oh, he rambles,’ no, no. Only the fake news says that,” Trump said. “To weave you have to be brilliant; to ramble you don’t have to be brilliant at all.”

A smiling Baier interjected again, gently corralling the ranting president back toward coherence. “I’ll just get back in the weave there. I have to get you back in,” he urged.

“But I like the weave because it covers a lot of territory, and it covers it much more quickly,” Trump continued, before segueing back into a point about Israel.

Over the course of the chaotic interview, Trump tactlessly sidestepped a question about whether he was actually capable of lowering inflation, and went way off course when responding to a softball question about uniting the country. Trump also took the opportunity to throw Vice President JD Vance so far under the bus you could hear the bones crunch.

Donald Trump fumed over the state of New York’s fraud judgment against him in a Truth Social post Tuesday morning.

The president used to call New York his home, but in his post, he said it “is the most corrupt State in the Union.”

“We need great Judges and Politicians to help fix New York, and to stop the kind of Lawfare that was launched against me, from falsely valuing Mar-a-Lago at $18 Million Dollars, when it is worth, perhaps, 100 times that amount (The corrupt judge was replaced by another judge, only to be immediately put back on the case when the Democrat political leaders found out that a change of judges was made. It has become a great embarrassment for the New York Judicial System!),” Trump’s post read.

Last year, a New York state court ruled that Trump had to pay $454 million in fines for fraudulently inflating the value of his properties (including Mar-a-Lago). He had to scramble to come up with a reduced $175 million bond for his appeal, benefiting from the help of a shady surety company. But Ol’ Donny Trump might wriggle out of this jam again, as an appeals court seemed skeptical of the massive sentence against him in oral arguments in September. Regardless of that court’s judgment, Trump isn’t likely to stop crowing about it online, as the judgment against him now stands at over $500 million.