YOU JOKE, BUT...

Video: Bannon Joked in 2019 About ‘Build the Wall’ Founder Stealing Funds to Buy Luxury Boat

Spoiler alert: That’s exactly what Brian Kolfage did, according to federal prosecutors.

Little more than a year before his arrest on Thursday for fraud, former Trump campaign chief Steve Bannon seemingly admitted his “We Build the Wall” organization’s fraudulent activity in a joke during a YouTube livestream last year. “We’re off the coast of Saint-Tropez in southern France, in the Mediterranean,” Bannon said on June 24, 2019, during a live-streamed event from near the U.S.-Mexico border. The footage was unearthed Friday by Media Matters. “We’re on the million-dollar yacht of Brian Kolfage, and uh, Brian Kolfage, he took all that money from Build the Wall,” he deadpanned as Kolfage, seated next to him, uncomfortably smiled.

While Bannon played the line off as a joke, as it turns out, according to the feds, Kolfage—the triple-amputee vet who founded the privately funded border-wall project—used some of the $25 million he raised to fund a “lavish lifestyle,” including the purchase of a 40-foot yacht named Warfighter.