Court upholds Steve Bannon’s January 6 contempt of Congress conviction

Steve Bannon, the controversial hard-right strategist who has been influential in the thinking of Donald Trump, has lost his appeal against his conviction for contempt of Congress relating to the investigation into the January 6 insurrection.

A unanimous ruling from a three-judge panel of the District of Columbia circuit court of appeals upheld Bannon’s conviction on Friday. The decision brings him closer to a four-month sentence behind bars meted out to Bannon for having resisted the terms of Congress’s subpoena against him.

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He has one last hope left to avoid a prison term – he could appeal to the full bench of the circuit court. He has seven days to make the move.

Bannon, a former editor of the far-right news outlet Breitbart, was convicted of contempt charges at trial in July 2022, having been charged with two federal counts. He was accused of refusing to appear for a deposition and of refusing to provide documents to the committee in response to a subpoena.

He was sentenced later that year to four months in prison. The punishment was put on hold after Bannon appealed.

Bannon’s lawyers claimed in the appeal that he had not ignored the committee’s subpoena, but was following the advice of his lawyer and acting out of concern that he might violate executive privilege objections raised by Trump.

The January 6 committee countered that virtually none of the documents it was seeking related to executive privilege as they were overwhelmingly related to Bannon’s actions as a private citizen.

The appeals court decision, written by Judge Brad Garcia, found that “Bannon failed to comply with the subpoena, and his failure to comply was willful”. The “advice of counsel” defense “is no defense at all” when faced with a subpoena.

Another former senior aide to Trump, Peter Navarro, is currently serving an identical four-month prison term having refused to testify and hand over records to the January 6 committee about matters relating to Bannon. Congress had wanted to question Navarro about a plot to subvert the 2020 election with which he had been involved and which he wrote about in a book, stating that the plan originated with Bannon.

Bannon worked as Trump’s chief strategist in the White House during the first seven months of his presidency. He left the White House in August 2017 following controversy over Trump’s response to the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and now runs a popular podcast called the War Room.

The January 6 committee was led by Democrats in the House of Representatives with the participation of some Republican Congress members. It concluded that Trump had engaged in a conspiracy to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and had not prevented a mob of his supporters attacking the US Capitol on 6 January 2021.

This is not Bannon’s first brush with a federal prosecution. As one of his last acts in the presidency, Trump pardoned Bannon in 2021, clearing him of fraud charges relating to his fundraising campaign, We Build the Wall.

Bannon had been accused by federal prosecutors of committing wire fraud and money laundering connected to the scheme, which claimed to be supporting Trump’s contentious plan to build a border wall with Mexico. Bannon denied the charges.

He is still facing trial over allegations that he defrauded thousands of people who donated to the We Build the Wall fundraiser in New York supreme criminal court. State prosecutions are not covered by a presidential pardon.

That trial has been postponed until September. The judge presiding over it, Juan Merchan, currently has his hands full sitting on Trump’s hush-money and election interference trial.