Steve Bannon, a White House adviser to US President Donald Trump during his first term, pleaded guilty on Tuesday to defrauding donors in a fundraising campaign that claimed to support the construction of a wall along the southern US border. The plea deal allows Bannon to avoid prison time under a three-year conditional release, compared to the convictions and prison sentences awarded to several co-conspirators.

The plea deal imposes several restrictions on Bannon’s future activities, including a prohibition on fundraising or serving as a director for charitable organizations in New York State and a restriction on using donor data collected during the campaign. The charges stemmed from his involvement in the “We Build The Wall” campaign, a private fundraising campaign that raised over $15 million on the promise that their donor contributions would go exclusively towards constructing sections of a border wall. Prosecutors had alleged that Bannon and others involved in the scheme had misappropriated funds for personal enrichment and that Bannon had funneled money to the campaign’s president through third-party entities.

Speaking to reporters Bannon called Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and New York Attorney General Letitia James “existential threats” to the Trump administration and called on Attorney General Pam Bondi to begin a criminal investigation into them. Steve Bannon’s lawyer, Arthur Aidala told reporters:

He wants a fight. Everybody knows Steve Bannon’s a – you know, he always wants to put up a fight, but he realized that maybe this was a fight because of the forum he was in that he was never going to win – and he has much bigger and better things to do than sit here for three weeks during a trial which – we counselled him, that we did not see a real victory here.

Steve Bannon was pardoned by President Trump during the final hours of his presidency in January 2021. However, with presidential pardons only applying to federal offenses, this left him open to state-level prosecution. This also comes after other defendants repaid millions to defrauded donors through asset forfeitures. Further, this is Bannon’s second felony conviction; he was convicted on charges of contempt of Congress for defying a subpoena from the House committee investigating the January 6 Capitol attack in 2022, for which he served four months in federal prison. Bannon had surrendered to New York authorities on financial fraud charges in September 2022.