Bannon To Serve Jail Time

A federal court rejected the appeal of former Trump administration adviser Steve Bannon, which will require the political strategist to spend time in jail. The move came as one of the criminal trials facing his boss, former President Donald Trump, was likely delayed until after the 2024 election.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit rejected Bannon’s appeal stemming from a Contempt of Congress conviction. The House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 protests at the Capitol issued a subpoena to Bannon to testify, which he ignored.

The court decided unanimously to reject Bannon’s argument that he acted on his attorney’s advice and did not intend to break the law.

“As both this court and the Supreme Court have repeatedly explained, a contrary rule would contravene the text of the contempt statute and hamstring Congress’s investigatory authority,” wrote Judge Bradley Garcia. “Because we have no basis to depart from that binding precedent, and because none of Bannon’s other challenges to his convictions have merit, we affirm.”

Bannon advised the former president both in the 2016 election cycle and during Trump’s first term. The strategist has again emerged as a key ally of Trump’s and is one of the former president’s strongest backers.

Bannon said in 2022 that he respected the judge in the original 2022 ruling. He also said that he had been “totally respectful to his entire process on the legal side.” Bannon was sentenced to four months in prison and a $6,500 fine in the original 2022 decision.

Bannon’s attorney said that he would appeal the most recent decision.

“There are many fundamentally important constitutional issues at stake in this case,” said Attorney David Schoen. He also called the decision “wrong as a matter of law, and it reflects a very dangerous view of the threshold for criminal liability for any defendant in our country and for future political abuses of the congressional hearing process.”

There's no justice in a Leftist court. None.

The standard in Leftist doctrines of law is if it supports Leftism, it's "justice," and if it opposes Leftism, it's "injustice."https://t.co/4trZhVDOLe

— James Lindsay, full varsity (@ConceptualJames) May 10, 2024

He further said that the country should not prosecute individuals who “not only don’t believe their conduct to be wrongful or in violation of the law, but, as in this case, people who follow the advice of their lawyers who tell them that the law does not permit them to comply with a congressional subpoena when executive privilege has been invoked.”