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They also sought to fine Bannon the maximum $200,000 allowed because he refused to cooperate with court officials’ routine presentencing investigation and divulge his financial records.
“The Defendant’s contempt of Congress was absolute and undertaken in bad faith. To date he remains in default,” wrote prosecutors J.P. Cooney and Amanda R. Vaughn. “For his sustained, bad-faith contempt of Congress, the Defendant should be sentenced to six months’ imprisonment … 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.”
Bannon was convicted at trial in July by a federal jury in Washington on two misdemeanor counts — for refusing to provide either testimony or documents — each punishable by at least 30 days and up to one year in jail.
The House committee investigating the Capitol attack featured Bannon in its final public hearing Thursday, citing evidence lawmakers said indicated he had advance knowledge of Trump’s intent to declare victory falsely on election night and his plans for Jan. 6.
“All hell is going to break loose tomorrow,” Bannon said on his radio show the day before the attack, in audio excerpts played by lawmakers. Three days before the Nov. 3, 2020, election, he told associates from China, “What Trump’s gonna do is just declare victory. Right? He’s gonna declare victory. But that doesn’t mean he’s a winner … He’s just gonna say he’s a winner.”
Bannon’s defense is expected to request a noncustodial sentence or probation. Attorney M. Evan Corcoran on Friday asked with the government’s assent to have until noon Monday to file its recommendation to the judge writing that a presentencing report laying out disputed sentencing factors was only filed with the court after noon Friday.
Bannon, 68, a right-wing podcaster and former chief Trump campaign and White House strategist, is the closest person to Trump to be convicted of a crime following the attack on Congress as it met to confirm the 2020 presidential election result. Bannon was not at the Capitol that day, but the contempt case came after lawmakers’ attempt to enforce their calls for witnesses with information to come forward, employing a rarely used criminal statute meant to ensure people comply with congressional subpoenas.
Rep. Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.), the chairman of the House panel, and Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), the vice chair, said Congress referred Bannon for prosecution to enforce accountability for those responsible for the events of Jan. 6 as well as for anyone who obstructed lawmakers’ investigation.
The trial judge, U.S. District Judge Carl J. Nichols, has set sentencing for Friday.
Bannon’s lawyers contend the case will be reversed on appeal and are expected to seek a stay of any sentence pending its resolution.
They have challenged Nichols’s rulings that a defendant charged with contempt of Congress cannot raise as a defense that they were relying on the advice of counsel or believed their cooperation was barred by a president’s claim of executive privilege.
During Bannon’s trial, Corcoran suggested that the committee’s subpoena was illegitimate and politically motivated, and that the deadlines for Bannon to comply were merely “placeholders” for further negotiation. Corcoran, who is also a lawyer for Trump, has become enmeshed as a key figure of the Justice Department and FBI investigation of alleged mishandling of classified documents at the former president’s Mar-a-Lago resort.
U.S. prosecutors highlighted Bannon’s failure to respond or to produce a single document before the subpoena deadline, after which Bannon’s attorneys asserted that Trump intended to invoke executive privilege.
In fact, an attorney for Trump made clear to Bannon’s attorney privately that the former president had given no such instruction, and prosecutors Monday ran through a litany of Bannon’s use “hyperbolic and sometimes violent rhetoric” disparaging the House investigation, lawmakers and criminal justice system.
Vowing memorably to make his case “the misdemeanor from hell,” Bannon resorted to “name calling, mimicry, and menacing rhetoric” at lawmakers, threatening to “go medieval” on enemies and likening his case to a “Moscow show trial of the 1930s,” prosecutors noted.
“The Defendant’s statements prove that his contempt was not aimed at protecting executive privilege or the Constitution, rather it was aimed at undermining the Committee’s efforts to investigate an historic attack on government,” prosecutors Vaughn and Cooney wrote.
No one has been jailed for contempt of Congress since the red-baiting House Un-American Activity Committee hearings of the Cold War era. President Ronald Reagan’s former assistant secretary of state, Elliott Abrams, and former senior CIA official Alan D. Fiers Jr. each served less than a year of probation and community service for taking part in a coverup of the Iran-contra scandal, court records show, before receiving pardons from President George H.W. Bush in 1992.
Scott J. Bloch, former head of the federal agency that protects government whistleblowers during the George W. Bush administration, pleaded guilty in 2010 and was sentenced but was later allowed to withdraw his plea and admit instead to destruction of property. He also served probation.
Bannon is one of two former Trump aides to face criminal charges in connection with rebuffing the committee. Former White House trade adviser Peter Navarro’s trial is set for November.
The Justice Department has said it would not charge former Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and communications chief Dan Scavino Jr., who also were referred by Congress for potential criminal prosecution.
Unlike Bannon and Navarro, Meadows and Scavino engaged in months of talks with the committee over the terms and limits of potential testimony and executive privilege claims. Meadows also turned over thousands of text messages and communications with members of Congress and other White House aides before ending negotiations and withdrawing his appearance for a deposition.
And unlike the other three men, Bannon left the Trump White House in 2017 and was a private citizen at the time of the 2020 election and subsequent presidential transition.
