Steve Bannon Is Now A Political Prisoner, And The Rule Of Law Is Dead

Former top Trump White House adviser Steve Bannon was sentenced on Friday to four months in prison for ignoring a subpoena from the House Jan. 6 Committee. He is also being fined $6,500.

The chain of events is simple: Bannon refused to comply with the House select committee’s subpoena for documents and testimony because he argued it would violate President Donald Trump’s executive privilege. The Biden administration contested this argument, and the House of Representatives voted to hold Bannon in contempt of Congress last year.

The Bannon sentencing is unprecedented. Individuals are rarely prosecuted, let alone convicted and imprisoned, for being held in contempt of Congress. Ten years ago, then-Attorney General Eric Holder was held in contempt of Congress for ignoring a subpoena related to the Fast and Furious scandal in which, due to negligence, the United States government supplied a Mexican cartel with firearms that were used to terrorize and kill Mexican and American citizens. Even though the Fast and Furious scandal was far more deadly than the capital riot, Holder was never prosecuted for snubbing the Republican-led Congress. The last time someone was even charged with contempt of Congress was nearly 40 years ago, and the accused was cleared.

The Sham J6 Committee 

The Jan. 6 Committee that targeted Bannon was a sham from its inception. For the first time in the history of the House, the speaker barred the minority party from appointing members, with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi blocking Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy’s picks, Reps. Jim Jordan and Jim Banks. Instead, Pelosi appointed her own favorites who serve Democrats’ interests: Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger. Because there was not one Republican-appointed member present on the committee, the GOP conference had no representation. 

Bannon’s lawyers tried to dismiss the charges against him by asserting that the select committee was not a valid entity because it had no ranking minority member. Democrat House lawyers, however, waved this argument, writing in their amicus brief: “As a practical matter, the Select Committee is functioning differently than other House Committees. Here, there is no formalistic division between majority Members and minority Members, or majority staff and minority staff.” 

Legal counsel for McCarthy rejected the Democrat lawyers’ statement, writing that the committee’s power “is limited to its authorizing resolution,” and adding that “had the House desired the Select Committee’s subpoena authority to ‘function[] differently than other House Committees’ it should have explicitly so said” in its resolution to create the committee. Even though, as McCarthy’s lawyers point out, the formation of the committee did not follow House protocol, the federal judge refused to dismiss Bannon’s charges.   

But there’s more to the J6 Committee’s disdain for norms. In 1961, the Supreme Court affirmed that questions asked of individuals subpoenaed by Congress must be relevant to whatever subject the committee has been authorized to investigate. Yet according to a Federalist analysis from January of this year, only 10 percent of the J6 Committee subpoenas were even related to the Capitol riot. 

The committee also targeted private citizens who exercised their First Amendment right to peacefully assemble, which, as The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway reported, calls

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