US President Donald Trump has pardoned former chief strategist Steve Bannon as part of a late flurry of clemency action benefiting nearly 150 people.

The pardons and commutations for 143 people, including Bannon, were announced after midnight on Wednesday in the final hours of Trump’s White House term.

A statement from the White House said: “Prosecutors pursued Mr Bannon with charges related to fraud stemming from his involvement in a political project.

“Mr Bannon has been an important leader in the conservative movement and is known for his political acumen.”

Bannon had been charged with duping thousands of investors who believed their money would be used to fulfil Mr Trump’s chief campaign promise to build a wall along the southern border.

Instead, he allegedly diverted over a million dollars, paying a salary to one campaign official and personal expenses for himself.

In August, he was pulled from a luxury yacht off the coast of Connecticut and brought before a judge in Manhattan, where he pleaded not guilty.

Mr Trump has already pardoned a slew of long-time associates and supporters, including his former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort; Charles Kushner, the father of his son-in-law; his long-time friend and adviser Roger Stone; and his former national security adviser Michael Flynn.

Besides Bannon, other pardon recipients included Elliott Broidy, a Republican fundraiser who pleaded guilty last autumn in a scheme to lobby the Trump administration to drop an investigation into the looting of a Malaysian wealth fund, and Ken Kurson, a friend of Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner who was charged last October with cyberstalking during a divorce.

Bannon’s pardon was especially notable given that the prosecution was still in its early stages and any trial was months away. Whereas pardon recipients are conventionally thought of as defendants who have faced justice, often by having served at least some prison time, the pardon nullifies the prosecution and effectively eliminates any prospect for punishment.

Wednesday’s list also includes rappers Lil Wayne and Kodak Black, both convicted in Florida on weapons charges.

Wayne, whose real name is Dwayne Michael Carter, has frequently expressed support for Mr Trump and recently met with the president on criminal justice issues.

Others on the list included Death Row Records co-founder Michael Harris and New York art dealer and collector Hillel Nahmad.

Other pardon recipients include former Representative Rick Renzi, an Arizona Republican who served three years for corruption, money laundering and other charges, and former Representative Duke Cunningham, who was convicted of accepting 2.4 million dollars in bribes from defence contractors. Cunningham, who was released from prison in 2013, received a conditional pardon.

Mr Trump also commuted the prison sentence of former Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, who has served about seven years behind bars for a racketeering and bribery scheme.

Bannon — who served in the Navy and worked at Goldman Sachs and as a Hollywood producer before turning to politics — led the conservative Breitbart News before being tapped to serve as chief executive officer of Mr Trump’s 2016 campaign in its critical final months.

He later served as chief strategist to the president during the turbulent early days of Trump’s administration and was at the forefront of many of its most contentious policies, including its travel ban on several majority-Muslim countries.

But Bannon, who clashed with other top advisers, was pushed out after less than a year. And his split with Mr Trump deepened after he was quoted in a 2018 book making critical remarks about some of Mr Trump’s adult children.

Bannon apologised and soon stepped down as chairman of Breitbart. He and Trump have recently reconciled.

Read more: Trump breaks with Bannon, says former White House aid ‘lost his mind’

Former Trump White House adviser Steve Bannon is helping to craft the curriculum for a leadership course at a right-wing Roman Catholic institute in Italy, stepping up his efforts to influence conservative thinking in the church.

Benjamin Harnwell, director of the Dignitatis Humanae Institute based in a mountaintop monastery not far from Rome, told Reuters Bannon had been helping to build up the institute for about half of its eight-year life.

Cardinal Raymond Burke, a leading Vatican conservative who is president of the Institute’s board of advisers, said Bannon would be playing a leading role there.

Burke told Reuters he looked forward to working with Harnwell and Bannon “to promote a number of projects that should make a decisive contribution to the defence of what used to be called Christendom”.

Bannon’s increased engagement with the Institute demonstrates how his involvement in Europe extends beyond electoral politics to an effort to build a populist faction inside the Catholic Church.

Bannon told Reuters this week that after Nov. 6 Congressional elections in the United States, he will spend “80-90 percent” of his time in Europe building up his Brussels-based populist “Movement”.

Bannon, who has visited the Institute’s home at the 800-year-old Monastery of Trisulti and addressed the organisation by video link, is helping to draw up the coursework for a training programme for conservative Catholic political activists and leaders, Harnwell said.

Bannon is also raising funds for the institute in both Europe and the United States, he added. The institute has set “very high academic standards”, Harnwell said.

Harnwell, a former European Parliament staffer, also is advising Bannon on his campaign to build a populist Movement across Europe that will support far-right parties in next year’s European Parliament elections, he and Bannon said.

Bannon and the Vatican did not immediately respond to requests for comment for this story.

EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT

Harnwell said he founded the institute while working as an aide to a British Conservative European Parliament member. At the time, one of the legislature’s committees was trying to block Rocco Buttiglione, a confidant of Pope John Paul II, from becoming European Commissioner for justice and security.

During a confirmation hearing, Buttiglione, who was nominated to the European Commission by then-Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, described homosexuality as a sin and said the principal role of women was to have children. Amid political uproar, Buttiglione withdrew from consideration for the Commission.

Harnwell said Buttiglione was a “founding patron” of the Dignitatis Humanae Institute, whose mission he described as “defending the Judeo-Christian tradition” and promoting “human dignity based on the image of God”. Harnwell added: “If you don’t have a culture of religious principle, we no longer have a credible basis for life.”

Buttiglione, who described himself as a convinced pro-European, said there were some differences between him and Harnwell. “I am interested in a cultural dialogue with the so-called Populists but I am not one of them and, first and foremost, I am a Catholic and I stand by the pope,” he said in statement to Reuters.

Harnwell said the Institute was setting up two training programmes: a leadership course that Bannon is helping to design, which Harnwell described a an “academy for the Judeo-Christian West”, and the Cardinal Martino Academy, named after a former papal ambassador to the United Nations, which will promote pro-life Catholic social teachings.

RABBLE-ROUSING

Bannon, a rabble-rousing conservative media entrepreneur and activist popular with Trump’s base, was fired from the White House a year ago, but the former adviser remained a Trump ally.

Bannon returned to the right-wing Breitbart News website, which he had headed before running Trump’s presidential campaign. In January, Bannon quit as Breitbart’s executive chairman after angering Trump by harshly criticizing his eldest son.

Leaving Breitbart threatened Bannon’s dream of leading a new political movement that supports his “America First” agenda of tougher trade deals and immigration laws.

Harnwell said the Institute expects to present its first courses next year. The monastery is large enough to accommodate 250-300 students at a time.

Burke, the former Archbishop of St. Louis, has been a leading light at the Institute since 2013 and is an outspoken critic of some policies of Pope Francis.

Since Francis’ election in 2013, Burke has led the charge by conservatives who have sharply criticised the pope, saying he has left many faithful confused by pronouncements that the church should be more welcoming to homosexuals and divorced Catholics and not be obsessed by “culture war” issues such as abortion.

Burke is president of the Institute’s “advisory board”, Harnwell said. The cardinal has condemned Islam as a threat to the West, a position that strongly parallels one of the principal political campaign themes of both Bannon and Trump.

In 2014, Pope Francis removed Burke as chief of the Vatican’s Supreme Court, the Apostolic Signatura, and demoted him to become patron of the Order of Malta, a charitable organisation.

Bannon is in “communication” regularly with Burke, although Harnwell acknowledges that the three-times divorced Bannon “doesn’t pretend to be a model Catholic”. Harnwell said the institute itself “takes no view on the pope” or his policies.

Burke has met several times with Matteo Salvini, Italy’s far-right deputy prime minister, Harnwell said. Earlier this summer, Salvini ordered Italian ports to stop allowing landings of ships carrying refugees fleeing Middle East strife.

After meeting Bannon in Rome last weekend, Salvini announced that he was joining the populist Movement Bannon was setting up aimed at disrupting the European Union.

]]> 7952 https://www.faith-matters.org/germany-far-right-leader-sceptical-of-bannons-anti-eu-push/ Mon, 13 Aug 2018 09:34:52 +0000 https://www.faith-matters.org/?p=7697

A leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party has poured cold water on plans by Steve Bannon, U.S. President Donald Trump’s former political strategist, to forge a wide populist alliance to undermine the European Union.

“We’re not in America,” Alexander Gauland, one of two co-leaders of the anti-immigrant party, told the Funke Mediengruppe newspaper chain in an interview published on Saturday.

“The interests of the anti-establishment parties in Europe are quite divergent,” he added in comments that amounted to a blunt rebuff of Bannon from one of Europe’s most influential far-right parties.

The former Trump strategist last month announced he had created a Brussels-based political organization called The Movement to rally nationalist and populist voters in European Parliament elections next May, with a goal of undermining and paralysing the bloc.

But Gauland said that while his co-leader Alice Weidel had met once with Bannon, he saw no possibility of cooperating with him. “Mr Bannon will not succeed in forging an alliance of the like-minded for the European elections.”

He said the AfD only had close contacts with Austria’s far-right Freedom Party (FPO), junior party in Austria’s coalition government. Former AfD leader Frauke Petry had always wanted to work with France’s National Front, but that had not worked out.

Raheem Kassam, a spokesman for The Movement, said of Gauland’s comments: “The Movement is a clearing house of ideas, not a campaigning organisation that would seek to have anything to do with AFD’s national policy or election campaigns. We are content that senior AFD figures understand the project and are in touch with us every day. We look forward to working alongside those who want to do so, for the causes we all believe in.”

Gauland told Funke Mediengruppe that his party was polling at 17 to 20 percent in recent surveys, and its support could grow beyond that as long as Chancellor Angela Merkel remained in power.

The party won 12.6 percent of the vote in national elections last September, making it the third largest party and catapulting it into the German parliament for the first time.

Gauland said the AfD needed to become stronger, but he expected it to be ready to take on a governing role in the medium-term.

Political experts say the party could become the strongest party in the eastern German states of Saxony and Brandenburg in regional elections next year, raising the question of whether mainstream parties will reverse course and agree to form coalitions with it.