Steve Bannon Pleads Guilty to Fraud in Border Wall Case but Will Serve No Time

A long legal saga for Stephen K. Bannon, a longtime adviser to President Trump, ended Tuesday when he pleaded guilty in Manhattan criminal court to a single felony count of defrauding donors who had sought to help build a wall at the southern border.

Mr. Bannon had been charged by the Manhattan district attorney’s office with five felony counts, including money laundering and conspiracy charges, and could have faced between five and 15 years in prison on the most serious charge. Instead, he received a three-year conditional discharge, meaning he will serve no prison time if he does not reoffend.

It was the second time that Mr. Bannon had avoided a trial on charges connected to a group called We Build the Wall, a seeming grass-roots effort to fulfill a key promise of Mr. Trump’s first term. In 2021, in the hours before he left office, Mr. Trump pardoned Mr. Bannon in a similar federal case.

To build the state case, the district attorney’s office would likely have needed to depend on those federal prosecutors, the documents they had gathered and the evidence they had presented to a federal grand jury in Manhattan.

But those officials now answer to an attorney general, Pam Bondi, who has pledged to scrutinizethe Manhattan district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, who won a felony conviction of Mr. Trump last year.

Last week, Ms. Bondi said that Mr. Bragg’s case would be reviewed by a Justice Department working group aimed at rooting out “abuses of the criminal justice process.” There is no indication that Mr. Bragg’s case against Mr. Trump violated the law.