For months, right-wing agitator Steve Bannon has been squaring off with his former lawyers over unpaid legal bills. But Bannon is finally starting to explain why he didn’t pay at least one person on his legal team—to the tune of a half-million dollars—and the whole story sounds a lot more complex than his lawyers would like everyone to believe.
In recent court papers, Bannon claimed that the well-connected attorney who snagged him a highly coveted presidential pardon from then-President Donald Trump for one case actually crossed a line by speaking to the feds without his permission on a totally separate matter—and continued racking up legal bills long after he’d been told to stop.
If this story sounds familiar, that’s because it is.
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Bannon’s lawyer, Bob Costello, has already been in the news for allegedly doing the same thing—to one-time Trump lawyer Michael Cohen.
In March, The Daily Beast documented how Costello and his law firm swooped into Cohen’s life just as he came under federal scrutiny for his role in Trump’s porn star hush money payments—only to have Cohen rebuff him repeatedly while Costello kept billing for hours of legal work while having sensitive conversations about a pardon with government types.
Costello never sued Cohen for the unpaid legal bills. But in Bannon’s case, he is.
Costello’s law firm, Davidoff Hutcher & Citron, filed a lawsuit against Bannon in February seeking that he repay a whopping $480,487. The lawyers recently asked a judge to decide unilaterally in their favor.
But last Monday, Bannon’s new lawyer said the matter isn’t as black-and-white as it seems.
“DHC asserts that its claims are ‘simple,’” Bannon’s new lawyer, Harlan Protass, wrote in a legal memo filed in court. “But the question of whether DHC is entitled to summary judgment on its claims against Mr. Bannon is far from ‘simple.’”
Protass declined to comment on this story. Costello also did not respond to questions.
Bannon, a former Goldman Sachs banker who breathed life into the American nationalist movement and wound up being Trump’s chief strategist in the White House, has been drowning in legal problems for years. When he’s not spewing far-right talking points or spreading conspiracy theories on his War Room podcast, he’s been in court fending off allegations that he bilked a nativist nonprofit and defending his refusal to testify before Congress over his role in fomenting the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
That litigious backdrop is partly why Costello played such a key role in Bannon’s life—until he was unceremoniously cut off sometime last year.
In August 2020, during the final months of the Trump administration and long after Bannon left the White House, federal prosecutors at the Southern District of New York criminally charged Bannon for pocketing donor funds that were raised to privately build a preposterous U.S.-Mexico border wall. In December, Bannon turned to Costello—who was positioned to help him at the time.
Costello is a former federal prosecutor in New York who has remained close with the man who once led the storied U.S. Attorney’s Office for Manhattan: Rudy Giuliani. That relationship has proven to be beneficial for Costello’s clients in recent years. After all, Giuliani was Trump’s personal lawyer—and may have played a role in determining who got pardons.
Bannon leveraged that connection to obtain a presidential pardon from Trump, one that totally toppled the feds’ “We Build the Wall” case in New York.
One source familiar with that effort noted how difficult it was for Costello to achieve that, saying the defense lawyer’s efforts went unappreciated.
Costello continued to represent Bannon in 2021, running interference when the House Jan. 6 Committee sent him a subpoena demanding that he testify about his role in the insurrection. Costello stuck around when the feds arrested and charged Bannon with contempt of Congress for ignoring that subpoena—which ultimately resulted in his conviction. And Costello continued to represent Bannon when Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg Jr. revived the wall fraud case last year, arresting Bannon yet again.
But the effort was all for naught, Bannon argued in court last week. Technically, Bannon said, they didn’t put their legal agreement in writing.
“I signed a retainer agreement with DHC for representation in connection with the SDNY case. I never signed a retainer agreement with DHC for representation in connection with the House Committee matter, the DC case or the DA investigation,” Bannon swore in an affidavit he signed last week.
However, Bannon goes even further, alleging that Costello actually took liberties in his interactions with the feds.
“As I understand it, in or about December 2021 Mr. Costello spoke with the FBI regarding the subpoena that had been served on me by the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capital. I did not authorize Mr. Costello to speak with the FBI about that subpoena,” Bannon wrote in his affidavit.
The accusations mirror the way Trump’s consigliere-turned-nemesis, Michael Cohen, claims to have been caught blindsided by an overly aggressive Costello who wouldn’t stop advocating—in ways he was never told to.
Emails obtained by The Daily Beast show how Costello harangued Cohen for months in 2018 as the feds closed in—peppering him with questions about strategy, billing for legal work, and trying to setup a backchannel to the White House that would serve as a get-out-of-jail card, even though Cohen largely remained mum and noncommittal.
Costello’s actions on behalf of Bannon clearly angered Bannon, who now claims that he asked Costello to back off to no avail.
“In or about January 2022 I instructed Mr. Costello to ‘stop work’ on my behalf,” Bannon swore in his affidavit last week.
Bannon’s latest accusation that Costello should have never spoken to the feds on his behalf in the contempt of Congress case adds salt to a festering wound, because those interactions ended up causing a headache for the New York lawyer, who became something of a potential witness against his own client.
Federal prosecutors used their interactions with Costello to probe whether he really did advise Bannon to not show up in front of the Jan. 6 Committee, controversially driving a wedge between the lawyer and his own client. Costello was eventually forced to bow out as counsel in D.C. federal court before the trial, which Bannon lost while being represented by two other lawyers.
But there remains an open question that pokes something of a hole in Bannon’s claim that Costello wasn’t really his lawyer: The right-wing podcaster tried to use “advice of counsel” as a defense in federal court when criminally charged with contempt of Congress, trotting out the excuse that he didn’t show up and testify—or even remain silent and plead the Fifth—simply because Costello said he didn’t need to.
That defense failed when a federal judge prevented Bannon from making that argument at trial, a pivotal issue that’s now on appeal. And there’s an essential question that Bannon still hasn’t answered: If Costello wasn’t his lawyer, why was Bannon taking his advice in the first place?
