Federal appeals court upholds Bannon’s contempt conviction
A federal appeals court Friday upheld the contempt conviction of Steve Bannon, a longtime adviser to former President Donald Trump, for having defied a subpoena from the Jan. 6 House select committee, a ruling that could lead to Bannon serving a four-month term in prison.
The decision by the court means that Bannon could soon become the second former Trump aide to be jailed for ignoring a subpoena from the committee. The House panel sought his testimony as part of its wide-ranging investigation into Trump’s efforts to remain in power after losing the 2020 election, and its explosive hearings two years ago previewed much of the evidence used against Trump in a federal indictment filed over the summer accusing him of plotting to overturn his defeat. In March, Peter Navarro, who once worked as a trade adviser to Trump, reported to federal prison in Miami to begin serving his own four-month prison stint after a jury found him guilty of contempt of Congress for ignoring one of the committee’s subpoenas.
The judge who oversaw Bannon’s trial had allowed him to remain at home during the appeal of his conviction and is now in a position to force him to surrender.
Bannon had fought his contempt conviction as forcefully as he fought the initial charges during his brief trial in U.S. District Court in Washington in July 2022. That proceeding was a spectacle, with the defendant delivering heated speeches outside the courthouse and promising in the days before it began to go “medieval” on the prosecutors who had brought the case against him.
One of the arguments that Bannon raised to the appeals court was that his lawyers had advised him to ignore the committee’s subpoena — a tactic known as an advice of counsel defense. Bannon also claimed that Trump himself had ordered him to defy demands from the committee.
But in a 20-page ruling, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit swept those arguments aside, upholding both the jury’s guilty verdict and the sentence imposed on Bannon by Judge Carl Nichols.
The panel wrote that even if Bannon’s lawyers had told him not to comply with the committee, the advice could not excuse him for having willfully and intentionally ignored the subpoena.
“This exact ‘advice of counsel’ defense is no defense at all,” the judges wrote. The panel also rejected, as a matter of fact, Bannon’s claim that Trump had authorized him to defy the committee. It cited a letter written by one of Trump’s lawyers to Bannon’s lawyers shortly after the subpoena was originally issued, noting that the correspondence “nowhere suggested that Bannon should categorically refuse to respond” to the committee.
David Schoen, a lawyer who handled Bannon’s appeal, said his client would now ask the full appeals court to reconsider the panel’s ruling.
“It is not appropriate to prosecute criminally,” Schoen said, “when a layperson” — like Bannon — “gets a congressional subpoena, executive privilege is invoked, and his lawyer tells him the law does not permit him to respond.”
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