WASHINGTON — Federal prosecutors told the Supreme Court that Steve Bannon should start his four-month prison term on January 6, 2022. This is almost two years after he was found guilty of two counts of contempt of Congress for ignoring subpoenas from a House committee on January 6.
“This Court recently denied a similar application for release by another defendant who completely disobeyed a subpoena issued by the same committee that subpoenaed applicant,” Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar wrote in a court filing. She was talking about Peter Navarro, a former Trump adviser. “The same result is right here for the reasons given in more detail below.”
Navarro was given the same charges as Bannon and was sent to federal jail for four months. He started his sentence in March and is now nearing the end of it.
This was in reaction to Bannon’s last-minute request to the Supreme Court that he be allowed to stay out of jail and file more appeals. After a very interesting hearing this month, U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols told Bannon that he had to go to jail by next Monday.
After Nichols’ decision, Bannon asked a federal appeals court to delay his prison term until he could file another appeal. The court turned him down, so only the Supreme Court could stop the sentence. The high court told the Justice Department that it had until 4 p.m. ET Wednesday to file a brief explaining its position on the case.
In a brief sent later Wednesday, Bannon replied to the Justice Department’s filing and tried to make a difference between himself and Navarro by saying that the two cases were “easily distinguishable.”
Wednesday, Bannon’s new lawyer, Trent McCotter, said that Bannon had talked to the House committee on January 6 about his subpoena and the problems of privilege that came up because of it through his old lawyer. “Mr. Navarro, on the other hand, did not do this,” McCotter wrote in the court document.
At any time, the Supreme Court could decide Bannon’s case.
Bannon was found guilty of two counts of contempt of Congress in July 2022 and given a four-month prison term in October 2022. The sentence was put on hold while appeals were being heard. Nichols made the decision after a group of federal appellate judges confirmed Bannon’s conviction in May. Federal prosecutors asked him to tell Bannon to go to prison, saying there was no legal reason for the stay to continue.
When Bannon first wrote to the Supreme Court, he said that he “relied in good faith on his attorney’s advice” to avoid the House committee’s subpoena on January 6 because he might use executive privilege. The House committee was interested in the time when Trump tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election and stay in power before the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. However, prosecutors said in their previous sentencing memo that Bannon had been out of the White House for a long time by that time.
As head of the House Administration Committee’s Subcommittee on Oversight, Rep. Barry Loudermilk, R-Ga., has worked to undermine the work of the Jan. 6 committee. He filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court in which he said Bannon’s conviction was the result of a “invalid” prosecution.
The Republican leadership in the House also said that the Bipartisan Legal Advisory group decided 3-2, with no tie votes, to file an amicus brief in Bannon’s case with the D.C. Circuit. In a statement released Wednesday, Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., said that the GOP leadership thought that former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., “abused her authority” when she set up the select committee.
Pete Aguilar, Chairman of the House Democratic Caucus and a member of the Jan. 6 committee, said that the House Republicans’ action was “shameful” and that their upcoming meeting “isn’t worth the paper that it’s printed on.”