PART 1: THE EMPIRE

Miles Guo built a billion-dollar empire on the idea that the Chinese Communist Party was evil and had to be stopped. His followers were Chinese immigrants and their families, spread across America, Canada, Australia, and Europe — people who had left China but never stopped caring what happened there. They believed him.

Guo — who prosecutors identified in court as Ho Wan Kwok, and who was also known as Guo Wengui, Miles Kwok, and Brother Seven — built GTV, a Chinese-language video network co-founded with a prominent American political figure, Steven K. Bannon, and used it to livestream himself daily to an audience of devoted followers — then sold them stock in it.

He organized his followers into regional cells across American cities — farms, he called them — and had them pool money under the promise it would be converted into shares.

He launched G-Clubs, a luxury membership program with entry fees from $10,000 to $50,000. He built the Himalaya Exchange, his own cryptocurrency, and told investors the coin was backed by gold.

The media platform built the audience. The audience funded the investments.

Bannon Gave Guo a Billion-Dollar Audience

miles-guo-and bannon - Frank Report — Guo and Bannon

Standing onstage beside him, praising the coin, the farms, the media empire, and the movement, was Bannon, the former White House chief strategist and MAGA hero.

Bannon gave Guo legitimacy inside the American conservative movement and access to an audience that extended beyond the Chinese diaspora.

Guo’s investors also funded a lifestyle that included a $37 million yacht, a 50,000 square foot New Jersey mansion, a $3.5 million Ferrari, two extra comfortable mattresses at $36,000 apiece, a private plane, a $67 million Sherry-Netherland apartment — in New York City — artwork, a collection of Red Army currency from the 1940s — the physical relics of the Communist revolution he made his living denouncing — and a house in New Canaan, Connecticut, purchased by Guo for Steve Bannon to use, and where Bannon’s girlfriend was living.

He bought $15,000 custom suits at Brioni on Park Avenue to be dressed for success.

Guo also bought the full-floor 18th-floor unit at the Sherry-Netherland in 2015 for $67.5 million. He tried to flip it, listing it for $86 million the same year he bought it, but found no takers. He had been accepted by the notoriously selective co-op board thanks to a letter from former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who had also dined at the apartment.

This lifestyle was funded by people who paid $10,000 to $50,000 for G-Club memberships on the promise of stock that, for reasons later explained at trial as outright fraud, never arrived.

Bankruptcy Records Show Bannon and Guo

guo and bannon - Frank Report — Guo and Bannon

According to court records, Guo paid Bannon $1 million under a consulting contract designed to use “Bannon’s notoriety and fame to promote himself.”

Bankruptcy court filings in the Miles Guo AKA Ho Wan Kwok case show that another $57.6 million flowed from entities controlled by Guo’s alleged financial architect, William Je, to Bannon-affiliated operations.

$35.5 million to Gettr USA Inc., the social media platform associated with Bannon, and an additional $21 million in Hamilton entity transfers to Gettr.

Beyond Gettr, $270,000 was wired directly to Warroom Broadcasting; $250,000 went to Bannon Strategic Advisors Inc. for “advisory services”; and $500,000 moved to an entity the bankruptcy Trustee identifies as a central payment hub for Bannon-related media operations.

Bannon also maintained a dedicated office inside Guo’s operation.

Bannon has not been charged with any wrongdoing in connection with Guo.

A source with direct knowledge of the operation says Bannon received multiple individual checks of $500,000 from a company called Soraka, a media entity connected to Guo’s operation, beginning in 2018 — a year before the FBI raid.

The source says there were several such payments and that they were distinct from both the $1 million consulting fee documented in court records and the $57.6 million traced through bankruptcy filings.

“The CCP Is Great”

According to Guo, he fled China in 2014 during an anti-corruption crackdown led by Xi Jinping that ensnared people close to Guo, including a top intelligence official, so he arrived in America already wanted, positioning himself as a dissident.

Guo said he had a tenth-grade education and did not seem particularly knowledgeable about politics or finance in conversation, yet he built a billion-dollar industry around anti-communist ideology through sophisticated financial instruments.

Guo, though ostensibly a Chinese Communist Party fighter, was heard many times telling his ever-changing staff that he believed in the CCP.

“The CCP is great. They give you the tools to make your money.”

The man who built a billion-dollar following on anti-CCP sentiment was openly pro-CCP in private.

“Communism is better than capitalism” — Guo told his staffers openly, adding that “capitalism makes people lazy, working forty hours a week, while communism makes you work.”

Guo, though poised and charismatic on air, displayed at times a violent temper and directed much of it at female staff, screaming at them in front of others.

On at least one occasion, according to staff who witnessed it, Guo and his financier, William Je, turned on Bannon directly, screaming at him that he was a cheat, a hustler, and greedy — that all he wanted was money for himself — something that could be pointed back at Guo as not entirely removed from his own persona.

The FBI Raid

In 2019, the FBI raided Guo’s Manhattan offices, and his home, carting out computers and financial records. No charges immediately followed.

He kept the enterprise running for four more years. Every major aspect of the enterprise that followed — the $452 million GTV stock offering, the $150 million farm loans, the $250 million G-Clubs memberships, the $262 million cryptocurrency — was built and operated after the FBI took his computers and walked away.

Steve Bannon was there. He co-founded GTV with Guo in 2020. He stood onstage promoting the investments. He collected millions.

The feds arrested Bannon on his own separate fraud charge while aboard Guo’s yacht. Three of the four We Build the Wall defendants went to federal prison — including Brian Kolfage, a triple amputee veteran, who was released to home confinement with an ankle monitor fastened to his only remaining wrist. Bannon did not go to prison. Trump pardoned him.

Guo’s chief of staff Yvette Wang was sentenced to ten years and is serving her sentence at Aliceville Federal Correctional Institution in Alabama. Miles Guo sits in MDC Brooklyn awaiting sentencing.

Steve Bannon broadcasts four hours a day.