The story of Banjo passed more or less unnoticed by the DC media, but perhaps it shouldn’t have. It’s an interesting saga with several unanswered questions that persist due to CEO Damien Patton’s continued silence about his past.
Patton was outed in April 2020 as having been involved in a drive-by shooting of a synagogue (thankfully empty at the time) in 1990, despite his Jewish parentage. You can read the original piece here. The following month he was replaced as CEO by Justin Lindsey, a former CTO at the FBI and Department of Justice.
Twenty years after being involved in shooting up a Nashville synagogue, Patton began working on what became Banjo. It received a $100 million investment from SoftBank in 2015. The company was, unlike many firms working in this space, based in Las Vegas, and received an investment from VegasTechFund.
At the time Patton was outed, Banjo had a contract with the state of Utah worth $20 million, and a pilot program was running in Goshen, Indiana. The rumor is Utah attorney general Sean Reyes had shopped Banjo around to other Republican AGs. A Vice reporter has said Patton and Reyes were friends:
The SoftBank, Vegas, and Sean Reyes connections together point to a possible Sheldon Adelson link as well. Adelson really hit it big when he sold Comdex to SoftBank, laying the groundwork for his bigger investments, and the relationship seems to have continued:
Moreover, Reyes signed on to Adelson’s anti-online gambling efforts, and Adelson had been a big supporter of the Republican Attorneys General Association.
After the revelations about Patton’s past, understandable concern arose that data collected under their various contracts had ended up in the hands of a white supremacist. A state auditor in Utah found that there was no danger of that, because Banjo’s AI was at least oversold, if not completely nonfunctional.
The main question that remains is: did anyone within the company or with whom they were doing business—perhaps the former FBI man—know about Patton’s past prior to it being revealed by journalists?
The knock-on question is, if others knew about Patton’s past, is their sense of it the same as ours, and is there more to the 1990 incident than has so far been reported? Namely, was he an informant in the circle of white nationalists and klansmen he got wrapped up with in Nashville. Matt Stroud, the author of the OneZero piece, told me he had heard rumors about Patton possibly having been one, but he was unable to confirm them.
The theory about Patton being an informant rests on a few things: First, he received a light sentence, pleading guilty to juvenile delinquency. Second, very few details about the gun transaction Patton allegedly made at the apartment complex are available:
And third, Patton was meeting with leading members of the Aryan Nations, which was the subject of numerous infiltration attempts and was considered a top domestic terror threat at the time of the investigation. Patton talks about going to Shoney’s with Richard Butler. This is especially relevant because the events in question precede the Nunn-Lugar Act of 1991, which opened up the federal government’s ability to infiltrate and spy on domestic extremist groups. FBI agent Tym Burkey, who worked with Aryan Nations infiltrator Dave Hall later in the 1990s, cites the Nunn-Lugar Act as the moment the FBI was green-lit to go after these organizations.
Finally, Damien Patton, then a minor, was driven across the country from California to Tennessee by a Jesse Albert Johnson, a klansman about whom little is known, but whom Patton says in trial testimony ran the Pace organization. The Pace organization was a project of William Daniel Johnson, the California-based far-rightist and head of the American Freedom Party, who later registered as a Trump delegate in 2016, causing a minor news cycle about Trump’s extremist connections. Johnson, according to Patton, was an FBI informant himself:
If Patton had chosen to, he probably would have been able to push back on the stories about his past by noting that he turned state’s evidence and helped put extremists in prison. He hasn’t chosen to do that, and in fact has kept radio silence so far, barring a statement or two after the initial story.
If the tech didn’t work and the founder had such a flawed past, the big mystery of what exactly Banjo was for remains. If the owners of the company knew about his past, it could have been a serious source of leverage over Patton. The story would have been hard to find, but not impossible, as it was covered in the Nashville press. There are, for instance, foreign interests that might have an interest in the kind of public data Banjo was working with.