Steve Bannon, the openly racist supporter of Donald Trump, has been ordered to report to jail to serve a four-month prison sentence.
Bannon was found guilty of two counts of contempt of Congress in July 2022 after failing to respond to a subpoena related to the investigation into the deadly Jan. 6 Capitol riot, which Trump is accused of orchestrating in one of four criminal indictments the former president faces. Bannon was sentenced to four months behind bars in October 2022.
“The defendant chose allegiance to Donald Trump over compliance with the law,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Molly Gaston said during closing arguments of the trial. The right-wing podcaster’s sentence was delayed while he appealed the ruling.
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But on Thursday, Judge Carl Nichols made the order for Bannon to appear in prison next month after a higher court rejected his appeal. Bannon’s legal team argued in court on Thursday that Judge Nichols didn’t have the right to sentence him, claiming it would cause “irreparable and unjust” harm to him, particularly if their ongoing appeal to overturn the decision.
Bannon, Trump’s former strategist, is set to start his prison term on July 1, staying behind bars until November. He sparked controversy back in 2018 under Trump’s administration when he encouraged members of France’s far-right National Rally party to embrace being called “racist,” during a meeting with the group then led by Marine Le Pen, as reported by ABC News.
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Bannon now joins the ranks of Trump’s former allies in prison, following his failure to comply with a subpoena from the House Special Committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot. Trump’s ex-trade adviser Peter Navarro is already serving a four-month sentence for contempt of Congress.
Like Bannon, Navarro has appealed his conviction. However, the judge in his case proceeded with sentencing before the appeal was resolved, a move that was later upheld by higher courts.
Reacting to the next, Trump took to Truth Social to call Bannon’s sentence a “Total and Complete American Tragedy” as he suggested the Jan. 6 committee members should be indicted instead.
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Following Thursday’s hearing, Bannon vowed to fight his conviction “all the way to the Supreme Court if we have to.” He told reporters: “There’s nothing that can shut me up and nothing that will shut me up. There’s not a prison built or a jail built that will ever shut me up.”
He also claimed, without any evidence, that his conviction is part of a plan for “shutting down the Maga movement”. Bannon claims he was following legal advice when he refused to testify before the Jan. 6 committee. His lawyer, David Schoen has argued his client would have been violating Trump’s invocation of executive privilege if he’d testified. But the DC Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously rejected that argument when they upheld Bannon’s conviction in May.
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