(Headline USA) Longtime Trump ally Steve Bannon is scheduled to report to a federal prison in Connecticut on Monday to serve a four-month sentence on contempt charges for defying a subpoena in the congressional investigation into the U.S. Capitol uprising.
The lawfare attack has been widely condemned, particularly after Attorney General Merrick Garland gave himself a free pass for committing the exact same crime and citing the same reason for doing so—that executive privilege prevented him from complying with a congressional subpoena as part of the ongoing Biden impeachment investigation.
A jury found Bannon guilty of two counts of contempt of Congress: one for refusing to sit for a deposition with then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s hand-picked Jan. 6 committee and a second for refusing to provide documents.
However the Jan. 6 committee’s own work—as well as its partisan motives—have cast aspersions on its legitimacy and suggested that the attacks on Bannon and several other close Trump advisers were little more than a political witch hunt at best.
The committee was found to have hidden many of the exculpatory details from its final report while cherry-picking those that contributed to a bogus narrative in their effort to smear former President Donald Trump ahead of the 2022 midterm election.
While some Republican members of Congress have made cursory efforts to spare Bannon from serving his prison sentence through legislative means, others, such as House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, were reluctant to get involved.
A judge had allowed Bannon to stay free for nearly two years while he appealed, but ordered him to report to prison Monday after an appeals court panel upheld his contempt of Congress convictions.
The Supreme Court rejected his last-minute appeal to stave off his sentence.
Defense attorneys have argued the case raises issues that should be examined by the Supreme Court, including Bannon’s previous lawyer’s belief that the subpoena was invalid because Trump had asserted executive privilege. Prosecutors, though, say Bannon had left the White House years before and Trump had never invoked executive privilege in front of the committee.
Bannon’s appeal will continue to play out, and Republican House leaders last week put their support behind stepping in to assert the Jan. 6 committee was improperly created, effectively trying to deem the subpoena Bannon received as illegitimate.
Another Trump aide, trade adviser Peter Navarro, has also been convicted of contempt of Congress. He reported to prison in March to serve his four-month sentence after the Supreme Court refused his bid to delay the sentence.
Bannon is also facing criminal charges in New York state court alleging he duped donors who gave money to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. Bannon has pleaded not guilty to money laundering, conspiracy, fraud and other charges, and that trial has been postponed until at least the end of September.
Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press
