Legal And Financial Fights Within Steve Bannon-Linked Anti-China Disinformation Network

US media report­ed last month that legal and finan­cial fights have erupt­ed with­in the strange anti-Chi­na net­work found­ed by for­mer Trump advi­sor Steve Ban­non and exiled Chi­nese busi­ness­man Guo Wen­gui. Accord­ing to a Dai­ly Beast report:

Sep­tem­ber 25, 2021 A wild fight has erupt­ed with­in the sprawl­ing finance and pro­pa­gan­da appa­ra­tus for­mer White House chief strate­gist Steve Ban­non co-found­ed with a fugi­tive Chi­nese bil­lion­aire.  The bat­tle involves an orga­ni­za­tion Ban­non inau­gu­rat­ed at the Stat­ue of Lib­er­ty last year with Guo Wen­gui, a Chi­nese dis­in­for­ma­tion king­pin, and hos­til­i­ties broke out even before the SEC this month charged com­pa­nies linked to Guo with unreg­is­tered stock and cryp­tocur­ren­cy sales. But a fed­er­al probe into the deal­ings had been under­way for months, and a key con­tention in a new law­suit is that mon­ey intend­ed to bankroll the duo’s vision of a vast anti-Bei­jing net­work instead went toward pay­ing back irate investors in illic­it trans­ac­tions.  Guo has long been a key financier of Trump­world ven­tures, includ­ing the con­ser­v­a­tive social media app Get­tr. When fed­er­al author­i­ties charged Ban­non last August with defraud­ing a non­prof­it, they col­lared him on the deck of Guo’s mas­sive $28 mil­lion yacht. For­mer Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump even­tu­al­ly par­doned Ban­non for any wrongdoing.

Nei­ther Ban­non nor Guo is a par­ty in the law­suit (just as nei­ther was charged in the SEC order). Instead, the plain­tiff is a mys­te­ri­ous enti­ty called Moun­tains of Spices LLC, while the top defen­dant is Sara Lihong Wei Lafrenz, co-direc­tor of a non­prof­it Ban­non and Guo start­ed in 2018. The amend­ed com­plaint filed in Ari­zona fed­er­al court on Sept. 16 reveals the inner work­ings of the web of pro­fessed anti-Com­mu­nist exiles Ban­non and Guo aspired to orga­nize against the Chi­nese regime, and in sup­port of a shad­ow gov­ern­ment under their con­trol.  And it sug­gests the sprawl­ing net­work is tear­ing itself apart.

Read the rest here.

We report­ed ear­li­er this month that Ban­non was part of an exclu­sive June 2021 New York City event host­ed by two NGOs linked to Wen­gui that served as a plat­form for sev­er­al for­mer Trump allies to “spew anti-gov­ern­ment rhetoric and con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries” about the 2020 election.