Government

Steve Bannon Guilty On All Charges. Let The Appeals Begin!

Are you there Neomi? It's me, Steve.

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Steve Bannon guilty? The devil you say!

No, not the devil, a jury of twelve of his peers in DC, which is functionally the same thing if you watch Fox News. And it didn’t take them long to decide, either.

This afternoon, after less than three hours of deliberation, the jury of eight men and four women found the podcaster guilty on both counts of contempt of Congress after he defied subpoenas for documents and testimony from the January 6 Select Committee.

Bannon’s argument that he hadn’t finished contempt-ing, since he offered a couple of weeks ago to come in and testify, failed to impress the jury, even though the defendant wore several of his luckiest shirts to court each day. This and vague insinuations of bias because a congressional lawyer and one of the prosecutors used to be in a book club together were all that the defense had to offer after Judge Carl Nichols blocked Bannon’s plan to turn his case into “the misdemeanor from hell for Merrick Garland, Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden.”

Even after he’d rested his case yesterday, Bannon’s lawyer David Schoen was begging the court to reconsider its refusal to allow him to put members of Congress on the witness stand.

“We’re not greedy, Your Honor,” he wheedled, asking the court to at least grant him access to Committee Chair Bennie Thompson. But to no avail.

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Schoen, who argued the case along with Baltimore attorney Evan Corcoran, seemed genuinely shocked last week when Nichols, a Trump appointee, blocked him from presenting his various mistake of law defenses, just because there is binding Circuit precedent on-point. Did he not get the memo from SCOTUS that stare decisis is basically optional now?

“What’s the point of going to trial if there are no defenses?” Schoen wondered, dejectedly.

And so, in the main, he didn’t. The defense presented no witnesses, and its brief closing statement consisted mainly of the book club silliness plus some bizarre feint at signature matching.

“The subpoena to Stephen Bannon was not an invitation that could be rejected or ignored,” US Attorney for the District of Columbia Matthew M. Graves said today. “Mr. Bannon had an obligation to appear before the House Select Committee to give testimony and provide documents. His refusal to do so was deliberate and now a jury has found that he must pay the consequences.”

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Bannon, who will be sentenced on October 21, appears to be betting all his chips on an appeal. In an attempt to ensure that their client will not “pay the consequences,” his lawyers will doubtless be marching into the DC Circuit to argue that Judge Nichols erred by not postponing the trial, by not allowing him to confront his congressional “accusers,” by barring his mistake of law defenses, by not allowing him to subpoena the Justice Department for its internal charging deliberations, and God only knows what else.

Or barring that, he’d accept a pardon. Again.

And here’s Bannon on the courthouse steps, after refusing to testify to Congress and opting not to take the stand at his own trial, excoriating the “gutless members of that show trial committee” for declining to “come down here and testify in open court.”

Arrest this man for the murder of irony.

US v. Bannon [Docket via Court Listener]

Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.

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