Steve Brannon To Testify Under Oath In 1st Post-Trump Legal Case

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Donald Trump’s longtime adviser and short time 2016 campaign CEO Steve Bannon is a very unusual guy. He wears shirt upon shirt as if he was fearful of a room getting cold. After Trump, he went to Italy to form a school in a closed monastery regarding far-right practices verging on nihilism. When the Italian government found him out, they said: not in my backyard. His crimes regarding Cambridge Analytic, now a defunct business, have come into sharp relief.

Bannon must appear before the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) investigation and testify under oath a federal judge ordered. The line of questioning would be into the “data breach at Cambridge Analytica,” according to The National Law Journal.

U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper agreed with the FTC and ruled that Bannon had to agree to the FTC’s civil investigation demands. He said that this request did not prejudice the former executive of The Breitbart in his New York trial. Bannon was accused of “money laundering and conspiracy to commit wire fraud.”

Cooper ruled that delaying the man’s testimony meant that the FTC would not be able to complete its investigation, The Law and Crime reported:

‘[E]ven six months under the optimistic assumption that he will be tried in May.’

Cambridge Analytica was abandoned after it was accused of:

‘[Using] deceptive practices to harvest personal information from tens of millions of Facebook users which it then is said to have used to profile and target individual voters. Bannon previously served as the data firm’s vice president and was a member of its board of directors.’

According to the FTC, the complaint that alleged this company’s CEO Alexander Nix and App developer Aleksandr Kogan:

‘[They] deceived consumers, enabling the company to collect Facebook data from more than 50 million Facebook users and their friends, despite telling consumers that no identifiable information would be retained.’

Kogan and Nix settled with the FTC, as 90 percent of most cases have done. Then, Facebook was fined $5 billion failing to protect users’ data privacy, The Politico reported.

The FTC wanted to question Bannon regarding this investigation so that it could decide whether he was liable, as an individual, for being part of the “unlawful breach and whether any of that data still exists or was shared with other entities.”

Judge Cooper found:

‘there was no ‘substantive overlap [between the FTC’s investigation and Bannon’s criminal case], in which he is accused of using funds raised for a privately-funded initiative to build a wall on U.S. border with Mexico called We Build the Wall (WBTW) for personal expenditures.’

He noted that Bannon could still assert his “Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination:”

‘As Mr. [William] Burck surely knows, requiring a deponent to assert [the Fifth] on a question-by-question basis is a common practice in government investigations.’

Burck was Bannon’s attorney for the WBTW criminal procedures. However, he resigned after his client spoke about “beheading FBI Director Christopher Wray and Dr. Anthony Fauci,” head of the NIH virology department.

That attorney still represent’s Bannon in the FTC proceedings. In regard to the upcoming hearing on the investigation:

‘Hopefully, you folks won’t need my help in coming up with a date soon after the holidays to schedule this. I will leave it to you all to do this. If you need my help, you know where to find me.’

The Mueller Report Adventures: In Bite-Sizes on this Facebook page. These quick, two-minute reads interpret the report in normal English for busy people. Mueller Bite-Sizes uncovers what is essentially a compelling spy mystery. Interestingly enough, Mueller Bite-Sizes can be read in any order.