Steve Bannon’s 'sugar daddy' arrested by FBI

The U.S. Dept. of Justice has announced a twelve-count indictment charging Ho Wan Kwok with crimes including wire fraud, securities fraud, bank fraud, and money laundering in what it alleges is a more than “$1 Billion Dollar Fraud Conspiracy.” Kwok, who uses numerous alias including Guo Wengui, was arrested Wednesday morning.

Last year The Daily Beast referred to Kwok as Steve Bannon’s “Sugar Daddy,” reporting the Chinese businessman would “have to pay massive contempt fines for moving the yacht where federal agents busted Steve Bannon in 2020.”

“The financier famed for bankrolling some of Steve Bannon’s best-known ventures, as well as the far-right strategist’s jet-setting lifestyle, is in deep trouble for steering a $28 million yacht—the same boat where federal agents arrested Bannon in 2020—out of American waters.”

Bannon is Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign chairman, who later became his White House Chief Strategist, and was named Senior Counselor to the President. After his exit from the Trump White House Bannon returned to the far-right wing website Breitbart, which he infamously once bragged was “the platform for the alt-right.” Today, Bannon runs the far-right extremist podcast, Bannon’s War Room.

The New Yorker last year published an article on Kwok titled, “How a Tycoon Linked to Chinese Intelligence Became a Darling of Trump Republicans.” It mentions Bannon 38 times.

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According to The Daily Beast, that best-known venture is the “supposed consulate for the ‘New Federal State of China,’ declared by ex-White House strategist Stephen Bannon and his flamboyant Chinese patron, fugitive businessman Guo Wengui,” also known as Ho Wan Kwok.

“Since 2017,” The Daily Beast adds, Kwok “has lived in luxury, setting up residence in a $68 million Central Park penthouse and underwriting numerous right-wing projects, from nonprofits with Bannon to dodgy media operations to bogus COVID-19 studies to would-be Twitter competitor GETTR.”

ABC News adds that “Bannon is currently being prosecuted by the Manhattan district attorney for defrauding donors to the We Build the Wall online fundraising campaign.”

Last year NewsNation profiled Kwok in a segment about “Billionaires pulling the strings in US elections.”