How former Trump adviser Steve Bannon joined forces with a Chinese billionaire who has divided the president’s allies
By Rosalind S. Helderman, Josh Dawsey, Gerry Shih and
Matt Zapotosky
September 13, 2020 at 5:32 p.m. EDT
When federal agents arrested former chief White House strategist Stephen K. Bannon off the coast of Connecticut on Aug. 20, he was relaxing on a 150-foot yacht belonging to a flashy Chinese billionaire whose efforts to obtain asylum in the United States have divided top allies of President Trump.
Most of the attention after Bannon’s arrest has been on the federal charges he faces for allegedly fleecing donors to a nonprofit group that claimed it was privately building a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border.
But it has been Bannon’s partnership with Chinese businessman Guo Wengui, on whose yacht Bannon had told friends he had been living in recent months, that has come to dominate his post-White House career — a partnership that is now also under scrutiny. A company linked to both is a focus of a separate federal investigation, according to multiple people familiar with the probe.
Guo, who fled China after he was accused of bribery and other crimes there, forged a relationship with Bannon after he left the White House in 2017. About the same time, Guo began a vociferous campaign attacking corruption in Beijing and what he says is a politically motivated prosecution against him.
In the past several years, a company linked to the billionaire, who also goes by Miles Kwok and Miles Guo, has given Bannon a consulting contract. Guo has also publicly pledged to donate $100 million to a Bannon-led charity. Most recently, the month before Bannon’s arrest, Guo announced that Bannon would serve as chairman of a new social media company he was launching.
Bannon, in turn, has emerged as one of the biggest champions of Guo, who casts himself as an anti-communist dissident in dozens of fiery videos posted online. Even as other critics of the Chinese government have grown skeptical of Guo’s claims that he is a political victim of Beijing, Bannon has said Guo has valuable insider information that could help take down China’s Communist Party, or CCP, and says he has been prescient about China’s crackdown on Hong Kong and its handling of the novel coronavirus.
“Miles Guo has been the toughest Chinese opponent the CCP has ever encountered,” Bannon said in a statement to The Washington Post. “He has been the world’s leading fighter exposing the lies, the infiltration, and the malevolence of the CCP.”
Bannon added that he thinks the United States owes Guo “a debt of gratitude for his relentless mission against the Chinese Communist Party — the existential threat against the United States.”
But there are now signs that federal investigators are scrutinizing Guo’s financial activities in the United States and GTV Media Group, a social media company that Guo said raised $300 million from investors, according to people familiar with the investigation.
Some of those investors now say they think they were defrauded by the company and have been interviewed repeatedly by the FBI in recent months, according to three people familiar with knowledge of the case. The Wall Street Journal first reported the existence of the inquiry.
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/steve-bannon-guo-wengui/2020/09/13/8b43cd06-e964-11ea-bc79-834454439a44_story.html?tidr=a_breakingnews&hpid=hp_no-name_hp-breaking-news%3Apage%2Fbreaking-news-bar
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