While Steve Bannon is serving a four-month prison sentence, the conservative strategist now has a trial scheduled for December in New York, where he is accused of defrauding donors who gave money to build a border wall with Mexico.
Now that Bannon is out of court due to his imprisonment, a judge on Tuesday scheduled jury selection for Dec. 9 in the “We Build the Wall” case.
The trial was expected in September. It was delayed because Bannon, a longtime ally of the former President Donald Trumpis in a federal prison in Connecticut after being convicted of ignoring a congressional subpoena in connection with the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
With his release expected in late October, Judge April Newbauer said she wanted to give Bannon enough time afterward to meet with his attorneys and discuss the case, the evidence and issues she described as “difficult to discuss during attorney visits in jail.”
After the jury is selected and opening statements are made, it is expected to take about a week before testimony is presented.
Bannon’s attorneys, John Carman and Joshua Kirshner, declined to comment after the trial.
Prosecutors allege Bannon helped funnel more than $100,000 to a co-founder of the nonprofit WeBuildTheWall Inc., who received an undisclosed salary. However, Bannon and others had promised donors that every dollar would be used to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.
“All the money you give will go to building the wall,” Bannon said at a fundraiser in June 2019, according to the indictment, which does not accuse him of pocketing any money himself, but rather of facilitating the secret payouts.
Bannon, 70, has pleaded not guilty to money laundering and conspiracy charges, calling them “nonsense.”
Still, the allegations have followed him from court to court, initially facing federal charges until those prosecutions were dropped when Trump pardoned Bannon in the final hours of his presidential term.
But presidential pardons apply only to federal charges, not state charges. And Bannon found himself facing state charges when Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg took on the “We Build the Wall” case.
Three other men were not pardoned and are serving federal prison sentences in the case. Two pleaded guilty; a third was convicted at trial.
Meanwhile, Bannon was convicted by a federal jury in Washington in 2022 of contempt of Congress after he refused to answer questions under oath or provide documents to the House of Representatives investigation into the Capitol riot.
Bannon’s lawyers argued that he had not refused to cooperate, but that there was uncertainty about the dates by which he would be required to do so.
An appeals board upheld his conviction and the Supreme Court rejected his last-minute request to stay his prison sentence while his appeal was heard.
He turned himself in on July 1 to begin serving his sentence, calling himself a “political prisoner” and criticizing Attorney General Merrick Garland.
