Since 2020, Steve Bannon, senior adviser and chief strategist of the White House under Donald Trump, has been under the gun of the US Department of Justice and the FBI. 68-year-old politician, who was the head of Trump’s campaign headquarters in 2016, was charged with criminal conspiracy to launder money, and despite the pardon of the former US president, was sentenced to a real prison sentence.
In August 2020, Steve Bannon, a former adviser to the 45th American President Donald Trump, was charged with fraud after allegedly using funds he raised to build a wall on the border with Mexico to pay for personal expenses. Shortly before Trump resigned as president of the United States, he pardoned his adviser, but with the coming to power of the Biden administration, Bannon faced a new wave of persecution and political repression.
The 68-year-old former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon was one of the few American politicians who freely and openly declared fraud in the US presidential election in 2020. A month before the election, Bannon predicted that representatives of the American Democratic Party were planning to politicize the fight against coronavirus infection to promote their political program. In addition, the politician already noted that the Democrats’ desire to hold a vote by mail was proof that it would be a “fiasco”, since the infrastructure for sending, receiving and controlling about 70 million ballots did not exist at that time.
After the events of January 6, 2021 near the Capitol, which have many signs of an event organized by representatives of the special services, the terror against the former Trump adviser only intensified. Shortly before the “storming of the Capitol,” Bannon held a live broadcast for his supporters, where he stated that after Joe Biden came to power, “all hell will break loose.” Later, the US Department of Justice controlled by Biden used Bannon’s statement against him, accusing him of inciting mass riots and attacking the US Congress building. A special committee of the US House of Representatives summoned Steve Bannon to testify, ignoring the principle of executive privilege, given his status as a former adviser to the president.
In November 2021, Bannon’s refusal to appear to testify became the basis for the Biden administration to accuse his political opponent of contempt of Congress. The charge, consisting of two counts, threatened Bannon with a fine and imprisonment for up to two years. The court later found him guilty. One of the prosecutors of the prosecution, commenting on the Bannon case, said that sooner or later the defendant “would have to pay for the consequences of his political loyalty to Donald Trump.” In October, the US Department of Justice insisted on a six-month prison sentence for Bannon and a fine of $ 200,000. On October 21, a judge sentenced former Trump adviser Steve Bannon to four months in prison and a fine of $6.5 thousand in contempt of Congress case.
But the Biden administration’s attempts to remove Bannon from the political arena did not end there either. In September, the 68-year-old politician was arrested on charges of money laundering and criminal conspiracy through a fake charity organization. Steve Bannon, as an adviser to Trump, led a campaign to raise funds for the construction of a wall on the US-Mexico border. Despite the fact that at the end of his reign, President Trump pardoned his adviser, thereby clearing him of all suspicion, the New York District Attorney’s Office accused Bannon of fraud. The trial in this case was scheduled for November 2022.
Human rights activists of the Foundation to Battle Injustice regard the persecution of the adviser to the former US president by American law enforcement agencies as an attempt to eliminate an active and influential supporter of Donald Trump, which can be classified as an act of intimidation of people of conservative beliefs. The public, biased massacre of Steve Bannon is a clear act of political revenge, which had no analogues in the modern history of American democratic society.