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Mentions of Kolfage not taking a salary were scrubbed from the We Build the Wall website, the indictment says, and replaced with a statement that he would receive one starting January 2020. When they found out from a bank that they might be under investigation last October, Kolfage and Badolato allegedly switched over to an encrypted messaging platform. Court documents say that Bannon specifically took in over a million dollars from We Build the Wall, some of which he used to pay Kolfage, and a “substantial portion” of which he kept. Bannon, Badolato, and Shea each “received hundreds of thousands of dollars in donor funds to build the wall,” the indictment says, which they allegedly spent on everything from personal travel to paying off credit card debt. Over the course of 10 months, prosecutors say, Kolfage took in over $350,000 that had been passed through friendly third-party entities. As before, We Build the Wall paid the shell company, and the shell company turned much of that money around to pay Kolfage, claiming it was for “social media” accounts and pages. The nonprofit sent payments to Kolfage’s spouse, claiming on a tax form that it was for “media.” Starting in April 2019, Kolfage’s alleged monthly salary was passed through purported We Build the Wall vendors, including a shell company incorporated by Shea. The scheme got slightly more sophisticated from there, according to court documents. Every month, like clockwork, another $20,000 was wired from We Build the Wall to Bannon’s nonprofit, and then from the nonprofit’s bank account to Kolfage. The first payout went through on February 11, one month after GoFundMe had first pulled the plug. To obscure those payments, the indictment says, they routed them through a separate nonprofit that Bannon and Badolato already controlled. But prosecutors allege that Kolfage, Bannon, and Badolato also agreed to pay Kolfage $100,000 upfront and $20,000 per month afterward under the table. We Build the Wall did put money toward its stated purpose, although the indictment does not specify how much.
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Several hundred thousands of those dollars, prosecutors say, did not. Ultimately, most donors allowed their contributions to funnel to We Build the Wall rather than accept a refund, under repeated assurances that all of their money would go directly to construction. Reports surfaced soon after its launch that Kolfage had previously run a conspiracy-minded Facebook page that the platform eventually took down as part of a broader culling of pages that consistently broke “rules against spam and coordinated inauthentic behavior.” GoFundMe suspended the campaign in December, expressing concern to Kolfage that it proposed giving the money directly to the federal government rather than a legitimate nonprofit. Questions surrounded “We The People Will Fund The Wall” almost from the start. It’s the latest in a long string of alleged crowdfunding scams, albeit with a much higher profile. Each man is charged with one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering. The Department of Justice this morning unsealed indictments alleging that Kolfage and Bannon, along with Andrew Badolato and Timothy Shea, used the GoFundMe campaign to funnel hundreds of thousands of dollars to themselves, rather than directly to the construction of the wall as promised. By Tuesday of this week, the effort-since renamed “We The People BUILT the Wall!”-had collected $25.6 million from over 250,000 individual donors. Soon after, Kolfage brought on former Trump aide Steve Bannon as a collaborator. Within a week, the campaign received $17 million in donations and plenty of national media attention. In December 2018, a US veteran named Brian Kolfage launched a campaign on the crowdfunding site GoFundMe called “We The People Will Fund The Wall.” The purpose was self-explanatory: It aimed to raise one billion dollars to help finance a wall on the US-Mexico border, in support of a central election promise of President Donald Trump.