The opposition media is desperate to take down Steve Bannon by any means necessary:
The issue of Bannon’s legal residency has been simmering since last summer, shortly after he became chief executive of Trump’s campaign. The Guardian reported in an Aug. 26 story that he was registered to vote at a then-vacant house and speculated that Bannon may have signed an oath that he was a Florida resident to take advantage of the state’s lack of state income taxes.
In California, where Bannon had lived and owned property for more than two decades, income tax can exceed 12 percent.
Bannon has not responded to repeated requests by The Washington Post to discuss the matter. Two Post reporters sought to independently verify his residency claims, using a wide array of publicly available information.
They obtained utility bills, court records, real estate transactions, state driver reports and the checks he wrote to pay municipal taxes in California. They interviewed neighbors, spoke with landlords and tracked his Breitbart-related activity.
In the digital age, when most Americans leave a clear footprint of their whereabouts, Bannon left a meandering trail filled with ambiguity, contradictions and questions. The Post found that Bannon left a negligible footprint in Florida. He did not get a Florida driver’s license or register a car in the state. He never voted in Florida, and neighbors near two homes he leased in Miami said they never saw him. His rent and utility bills were sent to his business manager in California.
Bannon’s former wife occupied the premises, according to a landlord and neighbors.
At the same time Bannon said he was living with his ex-wife, she was under investigation for involvement in a plot to smuggle drugs and a cellphone into a Miami jail, a law enforcement document obtained by The Post shows.
The Post learned that state prosecutors in Miami have an active investigation into Bannon’s assertions that he was a Florida resident and qualified to vote in the state from 2014 to 2016. In late August, investigators subpoenaed Bannon’s lease of a Coconut Grove home and other documents. They also contacted the landlords of that home and another that Bannon leased nearby, and sought information from a gardener and handyman who worked at one of the homes, according to documents and interviews.
Because state laws do not clearly define residency, making a false registration case can be difficult.
The danger, as I can personally testify, is that some state agents are willing to lie, ignore conclusive evidence, and make blatantly false residence claims. The Minnesota Department of Revenue eventually gave up and settled its absurd case against my father, two years after illegally seizing his house there for “unpaid taxes”, because it relied upon an agent pretending that two flights, one back to Florida and another one up to Minnesota, had not taken place even though my father provided the electronic and paper evidence that he had been on them. Erasing those flights added several nonexistent weeks to his time in Minnesota, just enough to permit them to make a false claim of his residence there and claim that he owed taxes that he manifestly did not.
Agencies love the nebulous “footprint” standard, which they prefer to the hard and fast residency laws that clearly enumerate the number of days one has to be physically present in a state in order to be a resident there. Some dirt, you see, is so magic that it sticks to you wherever you go.
In my father’s case, the entire family knew the MDR claim to be false, because we had all been with him at his house in Naples at one point or another during the time he was supposedly in Minnesota. But the agent ignored literally all the evidence, documentary and testimonial, in order to lay the foundation for a false residence claim. He’s dead now. Karma can be a bitch.
Anyhow, this would be an excellent time for the God-Emperor to return the favor and order investigations into the personal lives of the Post reporters who are so determined to dig up dirt on Bannon.
