Will Donald Trump pardon former ally Steve Bannon? POTUS to announce 'two batches' of names days before WH exit
President Donald Trump is reportedly thinking of granting a pardon to his former aide Steve Bannon who has been accused of swindling donors to a private crowdsourcing effort to build the wall that the former has been promoting for years. Politico reported this citing two sources informed over the matter.
The potential pardon to the 67-year-old conservative would come in the wake of several reprieves Trump has recently granted to his political allies who have been either convicted, charged or are reportedly under federal investigation. The Politico report cited one of the sources to say that “two additional batches of pardons are expected — one on Friday night and one Wednesday morning” before Joe Biden is sworn in as the next president.
Trump, who had a controversial stint at the White House as the 45th president, is likely to exit Washington in the morning of the inauguration day. Bannon was one of four men who were indicted by a federal grand jury in New York in August on charges of conspiracy in connection with their roles in the non-profit organization We Build the Wall.
Trump tried to distance himself from the project at the time of the arrest of the former executive chairman of Breitbart News saying it was “done for showboating reasons”. He also said paying for the wall privately was “inappropriate”. Bannon pleaded not guilty to the charges against him and is due to appear in a trial in May this year.
Bannon’s tenure as White House chief strategist and senior counselor to the president did not last even seven months starting January 2017 and Trump had even boasted once that he had dumped the former “like a dog”. Last summer, he even pretended that he did not know Bannon.
But as the Republican’s term nears its conclusion, he has apparently patched up with Bannon. Bloomberg News reported on Friday, January 15: “President Donald Trump has repeatedly spoken by phone in recent weeks with once-estranged White House adviser Steve Bannon, who's facing federal criminal charges, for counsel on his campaign to overturn his re-election defeat, according to people familiar with the matter."
"One person familiar with the matter said the president has sought out allies who would tell him what he wants to hear as he promulgated false claims that the election was stolen from him.” Bannon had worked as a de facto campaign manager during the concluding months of the 2016 presidential election. Trump said following Bannon’s ouster that he had “lost his mind”.
The embattled incumbent president, who has been impeached for the second time by the Democratic-controlled House in 13 months on charges of instigating his supporters to storm the Capitol Hill building on January 6, has been considering granting preemptive pardons to as many as 20 allies and members of his family even though his children have not been charged with any crime.