The coverage came from an upstart network run by a little-known media mogul in Colorado, a felon with a record of unpaid taxes and a family history marked by tragedy and violence. The mogul, Robert J. Sigg, found news value in Bannon’s mission to the desert, which ultimately resulted in fraud charges.
“We were told fairly regularly we were Trump propaganda,” said a former Real America’s Voice producer, who, like about a dozen other current and former employees of Sigg’s business, spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid professional reprisal. “That is what our role was. That was the message from the top: ‘We’re a Trump propaganda network.’ That’s where the money was.”
Despite his ambitions, Sigg’s operation remains small and unpolished. An internal email reviewed by The Post said correspondents lacked “TV 101 skills.” A former manager said he became incensed in the fall of 2020 after learning that the network was taking feeds from Fox News and other outlets without crediting them, calling Sigg and his fellow executives “the gang that couldn’t shoot straight.”
Today, Sigg wears a designer Hermès belt and flies on private jets, according to images reviewed by The Post. He has a hands-on management style, said people who have worked for him, which extends to dictating individual shots and “huffing and puffing and yelling” about mistakes, as one former employee recalled. Then, he stalks around the office handing out $50 bills to people he had dressed down the day before, according to people who have witnessed his behavior.
A since-deleted online bio cites Sigg’s long record in advertising and television media, including at a firm conducting sales for Dish, whose revenue he helped expand by $250 million before leaving in 2004. A year later, Sigg pleaded guilty to bank fraud as part of what authorities described as a multimillion-dollar mortgage fraud scheme. Sigg falsely verified someone’s employment for a loan application and received a $1,000 check for his role, according to a plea agreement. He was ordered to pay restitution and sentenced to five years of supervised release.
By that time, Sigg had faced a host of legal problems stretching back decades, according to Colorado court records, including drug, assault and harassment charges, as well as civil claims involving disputes over money. Between 1997 and 2010, he amassed more than $235,000 in unpaid federal taxes, according to a lien filed against him in January 2012 and withdrawn within weeks.
In his bio, Sigg presented himself not as a scrapper but as a savant with “unprecedented standards.” For years, he specialized in weather news, not politics, marketing a Performance Once subsidiary, WeatherNation TV, as an alternative to the Weather Channel. To satisfy its audience, WeatherNation avoids discussion of climate change in its forecasting, said current and former employees, with one saying, “They’re conscious of catering to people who don’t want to hear about climate change.”
When DirecTV dropped WeatherNation in 2018, Sigg accelerated his move to digital platforms and search for other content, said a former employee. “You could call them highly entrepreneurial,” said a person who met with Sigg’s team at the time. “They were thinking, ‘We’re going to get every church in America on our network.’ Church didn’t work out but then they were like, ‘Hey, we could do this news thing if we can find the right niche.’”
The niche they chose was at odds with their previous political giving. Sigg had donated tens of thousands of dollars to Democrats including Sens. Charles E. Schumer of New York and Dianne Feinstein of California, federal records show. Performance One Media’s chief operating officer, Robert Schwartz, gave $2,700 to Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2015.
When “War Room” began in the fall of 2019, focusing on Trump’s impeachment, Sigg jumped at the chance to broadcast it, Bannon said. Other networks, from Newsmax to the Salem Radio Network, also picked up “War Room,” but Bannon said he chafed at their narrow time slots. Sigg, he said, was “much more flexible, and I need those big blocks.”
With Bannon locked in, Sigg set out to recruit more pro-Trump talent in 2020, current and former employees said, while also making personal investments in the president’s adopted state. Already the owner of a hilltop home overlooking Denver, Sigg purchased two waterfront estates in Lake Worth, Fla., each for more than $1.5 million, property records show. They lie about five miles from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club.
For “Actionable Intelligence,” which ran from October 2020 to February 2021, Greitens was paid $19,000 through Bentley Media Group, the company behind Solomon’s website, according to a financial disclosure filed last year by the former governor. Greitens continued contributing to Real America’s Voice, and was compensated directly by the network, he said in an interview with The Post. He did not identify those earnings on the disclosure required for his Senate bid.
“War Room” airs twice each weekday and once on Saturday, producing about 17 hours of content each week from the Capitol Hill townhouse once known as the Breitbart Embassy. The basement, where a producer and a sound engineer join Bannon beneath an ornate chandelier, is strewn with books, newspapers and knickknacks, including zinc supplements branded with the “War Room” logo.
In early 2020, the show’s focus shifted from Trump’s impeachment to the coronavirus. Bannon was attuned to the pathogen earlier than most, predicting a pandemic in a show on Jan. 25, 2020. More recently, he has provided a platform for disputed claims about vaccine injury and warned of a “war on the unvaccinated.” Anti-vaccine outrage is “beyond totemic” for Trump’s base, said Bannon, who told The Post he is unvaccinated. “It’s almost defining.”
A “War Room” appearance can move money to political causes. Caroline Wren, a Republican fundraiser, went on the show recently to argue that the GOP establishment had misused funds by neglecting legal challenges of the 2020 election. In the days after, she received more than 400 messages from viewers asking how to reorient their political contributions, she told The Post, including from several donors who had given more than $1 million supporting Trump’s reelection efforts.
Bannon said his audience depends on Sigg’s network and the show’s radio distribution. The audio on Apple Podcasts, even though it ranks in that platform’s top 100 shows, is “kind of an afterthought,” Bannon said. On a recent show, he said his removal from YouTube about a year earlier had expanded his reach. “When it was taken down on YouTube, the show got 10 times bigger,” he argued.
Whether or not the numbers bear out that claim, his ejection from mainstream platforms held value for Bannon, who is now “preaching to the choir” on platforms with even less scrutiny, said Jeremy Blackburn, a computer scientist at Binghamton University who has studied deplatforming. There is also value for platforms still giving him a megaphone and reaping the advertising rewards.
Dish offers a “broad range of content that will appeal to the many different interests of our customer base,” a spokesman said. A spokeswoman for Pluto TV, which says it has more than 54 million monthly active users, said, “We do not partake in any editorial decisions or moderation.” A Google spokesman did not respond to a question about why Google-owned YouTube removed “War Room” even as it remains on Google Play through Real America’s Voice.
This content was originally published here.
