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Arrest Disrupts Bannon’s Efforts to Stay Relevant After Leaving White House

Since leaving the Trump administration, the former senior adviser was caught up in federal investigations and lost command of the far-right arena he once ruled.

Stephen Bannon leaving Federal District Court in Manhattan on Thursday. He was arrested on charges of defrauding donors to a campaign to privately fund a border wall.Credit...Jefferson Siegel for The New York Times

Since he left the White House in 2017, Stephen K. Bannon has promoted himself as a political provocateur still fighting for an underclass left behind by open borders and free trade, even as he forged a financial relationship with a fugitive Chinese billionaire and traveled the world to dole out advice on running populist movements.

Mr. Bannon also stayed connected to Mr. Trump, giving the impression he was quietly counseling the president from afar in recent months as his re-election campaign stumbled.

But Mr. Bannon’s self-made image as a champion of people the president has called “the forgotten men and women” was shattered on Thursday when he was arrested on charges of defrauding donors to a campaign to privately fund a wall on the United States’ southern border with Mexico, one of Mr. Trump’s signature political promises.

Pledging publicly not to take any of the proceeds for themselves, Mr. Bannon and the other suspects instead siphoned hundreds of thousands of dollars to pay for travel, hotels, personal credit card debt and other expenses, federal prosecutors in Manhattan said.

Mr. Bannon was arrested on the yacht of the Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui off the coast of Connecticut early Thursday, becoming the latest person linked to Mr. Trump to be indicted during his presidency. Mr. Bannon pleaded not guilty in a hearing on Thursday afternoon in Manhattan. “This entire fiasco is to stop people who want to build the wall,” he told reporters afterward.

The president sought to distance himself from the ill-fated wall fund-raising campaign that led to Mr. Bannon’s indictment. “I didn’t like that project,” Mr. Trump told reporters on Thursday in the Oval Office. “I thought that was a project that was being done for showboating reasons.”

Mr. Bannon’s arrest — nearly four years to the day after he became the head of Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign — was the latest ignominious turn in his search for political relevance following his ouster from the White House in August 2017.

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The border wall crowd-funded through the “We Build the Wall” campaign was under construction in New Mexico last year.Credit...Jose Luis Gonzalez/Reuters

Mr. Bannon left the White House after repeated power struggles with other senior officials, including the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, and his daughter Ivanka Trump. Mr. Bannon has said he left on his own; Mr. Trump and other advisers have said he was fired. The president eventually tagged Mr. Bannon with the type of nickname he reserves for rivals — “Sloppy Steve,” a reference to Mr. Bannon’s disheveled appearance.

Shortly after he left the West Wing, documents show, Mr. Bannon entered into a financial relationship with Mr. Guo, a onetime member of Mr. Trump’s private club Mar-a-Lago who also goes by the name Miles Kwok. That arrangement eventually led to a $1 million contract between Mr. Bannon and a media company bearing Mr. Guo’s name. Both men have said they forged a rapport based on a shared disdain for the Chinese Communist Party.

Mr. Guo moved to a $68 million Manhattan apartment overlooking Central Park in 2017 and turned against the Chinese government, accusing family members of the country’s top anticorruption official of secretly controlling a stake in a major conglomerate. The charges were never substantiated, and Mr. Guo became China’s most-wanted man, accused of a battery of crimes, including bribery and rape.

In New York, Mr. Guo lived a life of luxury, plying guests with Opus One wine and posing with his white bichon frise puppy. His constant attacks against the Chinese Communist Party won him the attention of many conservatives, including Mr. Bannon, as well as the admiration of Chinese people opposed to the party’s hold on power.

Around the same time, Mr. Bannon also returned to the far-right website Breitbart, attempting to ignite a Trump-style populist movement that targeted moderate Republican senators.

But that fizzled in December 2017 after he went all in on Roy S. Moore, the former judge accused of sexually abusing teenage girls who was running in a special election for one of Alabama’s Senate seats. Mr. Bannon scoffed at the allegations, sent Breitbart writers on a mission to discredit the accusers and campaigned more enthusiastically for Mr. Moore, who went on to lose in one of the reddest states in the country, than almost any high-profile Republican.

In January 2018, he was pushed out of Breitbart, which he took over after the sudden death of its founder, Andrew Breitbart, in 2012.

Its billionaire funders, the reclusive Mercer family, told friends that they had grown tired of Mr. Bannon’s impulsive and attention-seeking antics and, according to one associate, said they were concerned about his spending on travel and private security. Mr. Bannon was also quoted in a book by the author Michael Wolff disparaging the president’s son (“treasonous”) and daughter (“dumb as a brick”), another major contributing factor to Mr. Bannon losing his Breitbart job, according to people familiar with the events, and prompting Mr. Trump to disavow him publicly as having “lost his mind.”

Mr. Bannon has maintained relationships with other wealthy people, including the billionaire Bernie Marcus, the founder of Home Depot. He also visited the townhouse of Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted pedophile who officials say killed himself in jail, according to reports.

Mr. Bannon served as the government’s star witness at the trial of Roger J. Stone Jr., Mr. Trump’s longest-serving political adviser, who was convicted last year on charges stemming from the special counsel’s investigation.

In an email on Thursday, Mr. Stone noted contradictions between Mr. Bannon’s testimony at trial and what he told House Intelligence Committee investigators examining ties between the Trump campaign and Russia, and said his lawyers should have been informed that Mr. Bannon was under investigation.

He cited “karma” as accounting for Mr. Bannon’s arrest before adding, “I will still be praying” for him.

This year had seemed to offer Mr. Bannon his best hope yet at public redemption. He began hosting a podcast focused on the health and economic hazards of the coronavirus from the basement of the Capitol Hill townhouse where he once ran Breitbart. “War Room: Pandemic” attracted sponsorships from top-tier advertisers like Oracle and was picked up by Newsmax TV, which airs a video feed of it at 11 p.m. five nights a week. Mr. Bannon hosted Mr. Guo for one episode.

Mr. Bannon has told friends recently that Mr. Trump has told others that he watches the program and that the president was familiar enough with it to cite specific interviews he had seen when the two men spoke this summer. Mr. Trump, who has periodically asked advisers for Mr. Bannon’s opinion about different issues, insisted on Thursday after the arrest that he had not dealt with Mr. Bannon in some time.

It was unclear whether Mr. Bannon had any information to offer prosecutors in any plea deal to avoid prison time. He has been caught up in the swirl of investigations into Mr. Trump and his administration, and questions have emerged about whether he was forthcoming about ties between Russia and Mr. Trump’s transition team.

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Though Mr. Bannon left the White House in 2017, he has more recently counseled Mr. Trump quietly from afar.Credit...Al Drago/The New York Times

Prosecutors for the special counsel grew skeptical about Mr. Bannon’s insistence to them that he knew little about the Trump campaign’s links to Russia and expressed concern about deleted text messages of his. Investigators eventually were satisfied that Mr. Bannon had not destroyed the messages after his lawyer hired forensic technicians to show that the messages were instead not backed up because of a technical problem.

Mr. Bannon has spent most of the summer on Mr. Guo’s yacht. He has said that he intended to ride out the pandemic there and that he was taking regular doses of hydroxychloroquine, which he credited for keeping him healthy. He joked that by Labor Day he would be “two shades darker and 20 pounds lighter.”

In an interview earlier this summer, Mr. Bannon suggested he had been vindicated about making apocalyptic warnings early on in the Trump administration that the country was ill-equipped to handle a global catastrophe. But he seemed somewhat wistful for the days when he was able to speak directly to the president in the Oval Office.

“The world’s not perfect,” he said. “That’s why Bannon’s in his basement doing a podcast.”

Michael Forsythe contributed reporting.

Maggie Haberman is a White House correspondent. She joined The Times in 2015 as a campaign correspondent and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for reporting on President Trump’s advisers and their connections to Russia. More about Maggie Haberman

Michael S. Schmidt is a Washington correspondent covering national security and federal investigations. He was part of two teams that won Pulitzer Prizes in 2018 — one for reporting on workplace sexual harassment and the other for coverage of President Trump and his campaign’s ties to Russia. More about Michael S. Schmidt

Jeremy W. Peters covers national politics. His other assignments in his decade at The Times have included covering the financial markets, the media, New York politics and two presidential campaigns. He is also an MSNBC contributor. More about Jeremy W. Peters

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 20 of the New York edition with the headline: After Leaving White House, Bannon Struggled to Find His Footing. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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