Man sentenced to 5 years in ‘We Build the Wall’ fraud case

The last of three men convicted in a “We Build the Wall” fundraising fraud scheme was sentenced to more than five years in prison Tuesday, federal prosecutors said.

Timothy Shea "stole hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations to line his own pockets," U.S. Attorney Damian Williams of the Southern District of New York said in a statement.

Shea, 52, was sentenced to 63 months, or five years and three months, in prison, the U.S. attorney’s office said.

"We Build the Wall" was a crowdfunded effort to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. President Donald Trump made a wall a key part of his 2016 campaign and presidency.

It pulled in more than $25 million, federal prosecutors said. The government alleged that Shea and others defrauded donors and took money for their own use.

Steve Bannon, the chief White House strategist in the Trump administration, was also charged in the scheme.

Bannon, who had pleaded not guilty, was pardoned by Trump in the final hours of his presidency in 2021 and never stood trial.

Shea, of Castle Rock, Colorado, also pleaded not guilty but was convicted by a jury in October of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, conspiracy to commit money laundering and obstruction of justice.

The other two people charged — Brian Kolfage and Andrew Badolato — pleaded guilty and were sentenced to prison in April.

Kolfage was sentenced to a little over four years, and Badolato was sentenced to three years. They each pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Kolfage also pleaded guilty to tax and wire fraud counts out of Florida, officials said.

The fundraising scheme started on GoFundMe, but it was impossible to directly transfer money to the federal government, and GoFundMe threatened to return the cash to donors unless a nonprofit entity was identified, according to court documents.

That’s when Bannon and Badolato got involved, according to prosecutors, and all four men started a nonprofit entity called “We Build the Wall, Inc.,” prosecutors said in a sentencing memo.

Promises were made that "100%" of the funds would be used in the effort to build a wall, and Kolfage promised to take no compensation, prosecutors wrote.

“Those representations were lies,” the U.S. attorney’s office said.

Kolfage took more than $350,000 for his personal use, and Shea kept more than $180,000, prosecutors said.

"Shea’s communications make clear that he was motivated by greed," prosecutors wrote in a sentencing submission. "From the beginning, Shea viewed this fundraising project as a cash cow."

An attorney for Shea did not immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday night.

Shea’s attorneys argued that Shea was not aware of a “secret agreement” about payment that prosecutors alleged and that he learned about it only after his arrest.

"He is a good man who got swept up in a dizzying vision of becoming enriched by something that both got out of control and was not what he planned," his attorneys wrote in their own sentencing submission.

Shea wrote in a letter to the judge that he regrets becoming involved and that he failed to recognize the importance of Kolfage’s claim of no compensation, seeing it instead as “a relatively meaningless salesman’s boast.”

He also wrote that he wished he had taken a plea deal. “I do acknowledge that some of the things I did were wrong and probably illegal,” he wrote.

In addition to the prison term, Shea was ordered to pay $1,801,707 in restitution, the U.S. attorney's office said.