Steve Bannon surrenders to New York authorities in border-wall fraud case – live | US politics

Here’s my colleague Hugo Lowell’s account of Steve Bannon’s surrender to authorities in New York this morning:

Top former Trump strategist Steve Bannon surrendered himself at the Manhattan district attorney’s office on Thursday morning to face expected state fraud charges connected to his role in the “We Build the Wall” fundraising effort.

Bannon arrived shortly after 9am and criticized the anticipated indictment as a political prosecution coming 60 days before the 2022 midterm elections.

Bannon and his lawyer, David Schoen, are expected to meet with the district attorney’s office for around five hours and then cross over to the courthouse to make an initial appearance, where he will probably be released on his own recognizance.

The move by the Manhattan district attorney’s office was quietly communicated to Bannon in recent days, sources said of the indictment, which remains under seal.

Bannon is expecting to face fraud charges alleging that he siphoned off more than $1m for personal expenses from the “We Build the Wall” fundraising effort that promised to send all proceeds towards underwriting the completion of the US-Mexico border wall.

The state charges are expected to mirror a previous federal indictment that also charged three others – disabled veteran Brian Kolfage, Andrew Badolato and Timothy Shea – for defrauding donors to the online crowdfunding scheme that raised more than $25m, according to court filings.

Bannon received a presidential pardon from Donald Trump in the last days of his administration that expunged the federal charges. But pardons do not apply to state-level prosecutions and the New York state charges mark significant legal peril for the architect of Trump’s 2016 election win.

Read the full story:

Donald Trump’s second attorney general, William Barr, is stupid, a liar, a bully and a thug, according to a hard-hitting new book by Geoffrey Berman, the US attorney for the southern district of New York whose firing Barr engineered in hugely controversial fashion in summer 2020.

“Several hours after Barr and I met,” Berman writes, “on a Friday night, [Barr] issued a press release saying that I was stepping down. That was a lie.

“A lie told by the nation’s top law enforcement officer.”

Trump’s politicisation of the US Department of Justice was a hot-button issue throughout his presidency. It remains so as he claims persecution under Barr’s successor, Merrick Garland, regarding the mishandling of classified information, the Capitol attack and multiple other investigations.

Berman describes his own ordeal, as Barr sought a more politically pliant occupant of the hugely powerful New York post, in Holding the Line: Inside the Nation’s Preeminent US Attorney’s Office and its Battle with the Trump Justice Department, a memoir to be published next week. The Guardian obtained a copy.

Berman testified in Congress shortly after his dismissal. He now writes: “No one from SDNY with knowledge of [his clashes with Barr over two and a half years] has been interviewed or written about them. Until now, there has not been a firsthand account.”

Berman describes clashes on issues including the prosecution of Michael Cohen, Trump’s former fixer, and the Halkbank investigation, concerning Turkish bankers and government officials helping Tehran circumvent the Iran nuclear deal.

Barr was also attorney general under George HW Bush. He has published his own book, One Damn Thing After Another: Memoirs of an Attorney General, in which he discusses SDNY affairs but does not mention Berman. Promoting the book, Barr told NBC he “didn’t really think that much about” his former adversary.

Berman calls that “an easily disprovable lie”.

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Steve Bannon gave a thumbs-up to supporters as he arrived at the Manhattan district attorney’s office this morning, and criticized his anticipated indictment as a political prosecution.

He shouted out “60 days” as he entered the building, a presumed reference to the number of days before November’s midterm elections.

He also said it was an “irony, on the very day the mayor of this city has a delegation down on the border, they’re persecuting people here”, a reference to New York mayor Eric Adams’s decision to send officials to the southern border to discuss Texas governor Greg Abbott’s policy of busing migrants to Democratic-run cities and states.

Bannon and his lawyer, David Schoen, are expected to meet with the district attorney’s office for around five hours, and then cross over to the courthouse to make an initial appearance, where he will likely be released on his own recognizance.

According to CNBC, one heckler yelled at Bannon: “Stop hurting America, you greasy, two-bit grifter!”

Bannon released a defiant statement earlier this week, calling his indictment “phony” and a “partisan political weaponization of the criminal justice system”.

His statement said: “They are coming after all of us, not only president Trump and myself. I am never going to stop fighting. In fact, I have not yet begun to fight. They will have to kill me first”.

Bannon is also awaiting sentencing after being convicted in July of contempt of Congress charges after refusing to cooperate with the January 6 House committee investigating Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 election defeat to Joe Biden.

New York’s attorney general Letitia James and Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg say they will host a press conference this afternoon to announce the indictment of Steve Bannon.

A press release from James’s office says the prosecutors will host the briefing on Bannon’s “We Build the Wall” alleged fundraising scam at the Manhattan district attorney’s office at 1pm, followed by Bannon’s arraignment at 2.15pm.

The Manhattan district attorney’s office started examining whether to pursue a case against Bannon almost immediately after he received a federal pardon from Donald Trump shortly before he left office last year.

That pardon carries no weight in the New York state case against Bannon.

Steve Bannon has turned himself in to authorities in New York to face fraud charges over an alleged fundraising scam.

Donald Trump’s former chief strategist arrived at the Manhattan district attorney’s office shortly after 9am, and is expected to be arraigned soon.

Bannon is facing fraud charges alleging that he siphoned off more than $1m for personal expenses from the “We Build the Wall” fundraising effort that promised to send all proceeds towards underwriting the completion of the US-Mexico border wall.

The state charges mirror a previous federal indictment that also charged three others – disabled veteran Brian Kolfage, Andrew Badolato and Timothy Shea – for defrauding donors to the online crowdfunding scheme that raised more than $25m, according to court filings.

Bannon received a presidential pardon from Trump in the last days of his administration that expunged the federal charges. But pardons do not apply to state-level prosecutions.

The expectation is that Bannon will be released on his own recognizance. We’ll bring you more as we learn it.

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Good morning US politics followers and welcome to Thursday’s live blog.

Donald Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon is expected shortly to turn himself in to authorities in Manhattan, New York, where he is facing state charges over an alleged fundraising scam involving the former president’s infamous border wall.

Prosecutors say Bannon siphoned around $1m in “personal expenses” from $25m of donations from Trump supporters who thought they were contributing to the construction of the wall.

Yes, that’s the same border wall that Trump said Mexico would be paying for.

Bannon, whose pardon by Trump for similar federal charges carries no weight in the New York state case, is expected to surrender at about 9am and be released on his own recognizance shortly after.

We’ll bring you developments as they happen. While we wait, here’s my colleague Hugo Lowell’s story.

Here’s what else we’re watching:

• The Senate is running short on time to get a same-sex marriage bill passed before senators disperse for midterm election, but there are signs of optimism that a bipartisan alliance is building to reach the necessary 60-vote threshold in the equally divided chamber.

• Joe Biden will give a lunchtime address about Covid-19 vaccines in which he is expected to push the new bivalent booster shots ahead of an expected fall surge in coronavirus cases, and repeat his calls for Congress to fund more vaccines, tests and therapies.

• White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre will deliver her daily briefing at 12.30pm.