Bannon Defense Team Asks: Should He ‘Be Jailed for Relying on the Advice of His Lawyers?’
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Steve Bannon shied away from the bombastic rhetoric for which he is so well known on Monday in a sentencing memo pleading with the court to give him probation after he was convicted over the summer of two criminal contempt charges after he refused to comply with a subpoena from the House January 6 Committee.
The Department of Justice issued its recommendation of a $200,000 fine and six months prison sentence for Bannon, who was previously pardoned by former President Donald Trump of separate fraud-related charges.
Bannon had vowed to fight the contempt charges and raged that he would turn the case into “the misdemeanor from hell.” Federal prosecutors noted in their sentencing recommendation that Bannon had repeatedly made wild statements outside of the courtroom including threatening to “go medieval” on his opponents and likened the proceedings to a “Moscow show trial of the 1930s.”
Apparently cowed by the trial and facing actual jail time, Bannon’s defense took a new approach in the memo, asking if he should be jailed for simply following the advice of his lawyers:
Should a person who has spent a lifetime listening to experts – as a naval officer, investment banker, corporate executive, and Presidential advisor – be jailed for relying on the advice of his lawyers?
Bannon’s memo also argued that his proximity to Trump in the White House should shield him from serving jail time.
“Mr. Bannon was a top advisor to President Donald J. Trump. On July 22, 2022, a jury convicted him on two counts of Contempt of Congress under 2 U.S.C. § 192 for his non-compliance with a congressional subpoena for documents and testimony over which President Trump asserted executive privilege. Prosecutions under 2 U.S.C. § 192 are rare. Even rarer are convictions of former top Presidential advisors for Contempt of Congress – this may be the first,” the memo noted.
Bannon was dismissed from the White House in August 2017 after a short tenure as a senior advisor to Trump. Federal investigators appeared unfazed by Bannon’s prior links to the former president as the contempt charges related to matters involving the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
“For his sustained, bad-faith contempt of Congress, the Defendant should be sentenced to six months imprisonment — the top end of the Sentencing Guidelines’ range — and fined $200,000 — based on his insistence on paying the maximum fine rather than cooperate with the Probation Office’s routine pre-sentencing financial investigation,” the DOJ filing read.
“The rioters who overran the Capitol on January 6 did not just attack a building – they assaulted the rule of law upon which this country was built and through which it endures. By flouting the Select Committee’s subpoena and its authority, the Defendant exacerbated that assault,” the prosecution concluded.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to better reflect the contents of Bannon’s memo.
