From Steve Bannon’s Twitter feed I got this link: Steve Bannon ‘under criminal investigation’ for voter registration fraud.
What do they expect the outcome to be?
Submitting false information on a voter registration form is a third-degree felony in Florida, punishable by up to five years in prison.
However, Mr Bannon did not vote in Florida which is likely to lower the odds of the investigation against him coming to prosecution.
He was later removed from Florida’s voter rolls because he was registered in two places.
So. A big nothing right? Maybe not.
I first saw the story at MadCow Productions. It has a publication date of 28 September 2017. Here is how that article started out:
When Donald Trump’s campaign manager Steve Bannon was recently exposed for using a vacant house in Miami as his legal residence, he hastily changed his legal address to a beach house in Sarasota, Florida owned by a writer at his Breitbart.com website.
So that is corroboration of the first bit in that article. What else have they got?
Bannon, who Bloomberg recently called The Most Dangerous Political Operative in America, had repaired to a beach house owned by Andy Badolato, who claims on his website to be an “entrepreneur, senior level executive, venture capitalist and seed stage investor” who has founded companies with a market cap of $26 billion dollars.”
However an investigation reveals that Bannon’s buddy and roommate Badolato has long-time links to a nest of financial fraudsters that raise questions of whether money taken from investors through Badolato’s series of stock scams — which operated on an almost industrial scale—had been pocketed by financiers of the Breitbart.com-led “alt-right.”
Well that is going to be embarrassing. And there is lots more at MadCow.
Will some one be saying soon, “I am not a crook” ?
OTOH this could all be Black Ops like the Deep State used against Nixon.
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2 responses to “What Else Do They Have?”
The FBI is building a case for a congress appointed special prosecutor:
Federal investigators are examining whether far-right news sites played any role last year in a Russian cyber operation that dramatically widened the reach of news stories — some fictional — that favored Donald Trump’s presidential bid, two people familiar with the inquiry say.
Operatives for Russia appear to have strategically timed the computer commands, known as “bots,” to blitz social media with links to the pro-Trump stories at times when the billionaire businessman was on the defensive in his race against Democrat Hillary Clinton, these sources said…
Russia also used “trolls,” hundreds of computer operatives who pretended to be Trump supporters and posted stories or comments on the internet complimentary to Trump or disparaging to Clinton. Sources close to the inquiry said those operatives likely worked from a facility in St. Petersburg, Russia, dedicated to that tactic…
An additional Russian tool was the news from its prime propaganda machine, Russia Today, with a global television and digital media operation and a U.S. arm, RT America.
Last Nov. 19, Breitbart announced that its website traffic had set a record the previous 31 days with 300 million page views, driven substantially by social media.
Breitbart, which has drawn criticism for pursuing a white nationalist agenda, was formerly led by Stephen Bannon, who became chief executive officer of Trump’s election campaign last August and now serves as Trump’s strategic adviser in the White House. The news site’s former national security editor, Sebastian Gorka, was a national security adviser to Trump’s campaign and presidential transition team. He now works as a key Trump counterterrorism adviser…
Bannon and Gorka have controversial profiles. Bannon has been accused of taking anti-immigrant and racist positions. Last week, the Jewish newspaper Forward reported that Gorka had taken a lifelong loyalty oath to a Hungarian far-right group that for decades was allied with the Nazi Party.
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/white-house/article139695453.html
As I pointed out here months ago in a comment following your very good article about Russian/Soviet espionage, the Russian use of websites leading up to the election was obvious. Zerohedge which has always had a sympathetic eastern Europe slant, RT which is little more than Russian propaganda, and others like Breitbart, Conservative Treehouse, and numerous alt-Right sites all played a part.
The target isn’t Bannon and the Russians of course. The groundwork is being set for impeachment.
One story after another now. It seems Paul Manafort, T’s campaign manager for 6 months, was an operative for a Russian oligarch close to Putin. He ended up stiffing him for $19 million – reason enough for the Russian to spill the beans. But Manafort’s business partner at the time, Rick Davis, now works for John McCain which could explain McCains knowledge of and antipathy toward T’s Russian connections. What a web of interlocking shit.
http://bigstory.ap.org/122ae0b5848345faa88108a03de40c5a