Former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach and two other members of the We Build The Wall advisory board have remained silent about the indictments last Thursday of former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon and triple-amputee Air Force veteran Brian Kolfage for allegedly defrauding hundreds of thousands of the group’s donors.
Kobach, the general counsel of the nonprofit’s advisory board, has not responded to numerous requests from the Daily Caller News Foundation asking if he was aware that Bannon and Kolfage had allegedly diverted more than $350,000 to the Air Force veteran through “sham invoices and accounts” while at the same time telling donors he wouldn’t take a penny from the organization.
Other advisory board members of the private border wall group that have remained silent on the allegations include Blackrock USA founder Erik Prince and former Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke.
Two other We Build The Wall advisory board members — Retired U.S. Air Force Brigadier General Robert S. Spalding III and Pennsylvania businessman John D. Moran Jr. — told the DCNF they had resigned from We Build The Wall upon learning of the allegations.
Both Spalding and Moran said they had no prior knowledge of the allegations.
Two other advisory board members — retired Major League Baseball pitcher Curt Schilling and former Colorado Republican Rep. Tom Tancredo — also told the DCNF they first learned of the allegations on Thursday but did not respond when asked if they intended to resign their position with We Build The Wall. (RELATED: Advisory Board Members Resign After Steve Bannon Indicted For Fraud Over ‘We Build The Wall’)
None of the members of the We Build The Wall advisory board were named in the Justice Department’s indictment last Thursday.
Advisory boards are typically created for honorific purposes and do not carry the legal and fiduciary responsibilities of an organization’s board of directors. However, Kobach appears to have had a more active role within the organization compared to his fellow advisory board members during its first project in May 2019 when it erected a half-mile private border wall in New Mexico.
Kobach appeared in multiple videos posted to the We Build The Wall YouTube channel during the construction of that barrier. In one video he interviewed the CEO of the construction company putting up the wall and in two others he explained in detail why the organization chose the building site.
Kobach also claimed in a May 2019 Facebook Live broadcast that he had spoken with President Donald Trump three times about the private border wall project.
“I’ve spoken to the President about this project on three occasions now,” Kobach said, CNN reported. “And he said — the first time I told him about it — he said, ‘well, you tell the guys at We Build The Wall, that they have my blessing.’ And he used those exact words.”
Trump remained silent publicly about the privately-funded border wall project until July, when news broke that the group’s second project on banks of the Rio Grande was eroding less than a year after it was erected.
“I disagreed with doing this very small (tiny) section of wall, in a tricky area, by a private group which raised money by ads,” Trump tweeted. “It was only done to make me look bad, and perhsps [sic] it now doesn’t even work.”
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