Life is pretty challenging for Americans right now. We’re still enduring a serious pandemic of a deadly virus, most schools won’t be reopening for classes in the fall and God only knows when they will, riots and looters have trashed some of America’s greatest cities, and our economy is continuing a long climb out of an economic hole. It’s easy to feel pretty down as summer approaches its close.
But no matter how bad your Thursday is going, no matter how glum you feel, no matter what problems you’re facing right now . . . at least you weren’t just arrested and indicted on one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering, each of which carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison, the way former Breitbart news chair, White House adviser, and Trump campaign consultant Steve Bannon was today.
Bannon, along with three co-conspirators, allegedly “received hundreds of thousands of dollars in donor funds from We Build the Wall, which they each used in a manner inconsistent with the organization’s public representations.” Federal prosecutors charge that Bannon, “through a non-profit organization under his control, received over $1 million from We Build the Wall, at least some of which [he] used to cover hundreds of thousands of dollars in [his] personal expenses.”
I wonder if at any point, the prosecutors will argue that Bannon could have gotten away with the scheme if he hadn’t gotten . . . “sloppy.”