“It’s monumental,” Bannon said in response to the coin’s release.
“I think if you look at it, the pieces are coming in place,” he added. Bannon then listed a series of projects that he and Guo were jointly involved in, including “G News, GTV, there’s Gettr, there’s now H Coin, there’s the Himalaya Exchange.”
“If you look at the institutionalization of the counteroffensive to the Chinese Communist Party, it’s pretty impressive,” Bannon continued.
In fact, as laid out in the indictment, the purported crypto scheme wasn’t cryptocurrency at all, but rather a series of “credits” that could only be used on the Himalaya Exchange or ultimately converted to dollars (which the exchange could deny). Guo and his named co-conspirator, Kin Ming Je aka William Je later extracted a $37 million “loan” from Himalaya Exchange to cover the costs of Guo’s luxury yacht.
Bannon was arrested by postal service agents on the yacht in August 2020, on allegations of his own fraudulent scheme. In that case, federal prosecutors accused Bannon and others of defrauding contributors to his so-called “charity” “We Build the Wall” out of more than $15 million for personal expenses.
Federal investigators are also allegedly interested in a Bannon-linked cryptocurrency called FJB.
Bannon and Guo have many links to one another and have long praised each other in public.
In October 2020, two of Guo’s media properties lavished praise on Bannon, to which he responded by returning the favor.
