IN Washington’s bars and restaurants, the talk is of little else than the fate of Steven Bannon, the former naval officer turned film producer and publisher of far right propaganda. Bannon was Donald Trump’s closest aide and is now facing serious contempt of Congress charges which saw him in court earlier this week and yesterday.
Bannon was indicted last week by a federal grand jury on two counts of contempt of Congress. He refused to cooperate with the committee that is investigating the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol which left five people dead.
Yesterday he pleaded not guilty to the charges of not complying with a Congressional subpoena and is
apparently sticking to his allegations that the prosecution is a politically motivated attack against him by President Joe Biden, Attorney General Merrick Garland and House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
The problem for Bannon is that it doesn’t matter if the prosecution is politically motivated, he is still looking at court appearances and possible jail time if found guilty – the penalty is not less than one month nor more than twelve months in jail, and a fine of not more than $100,000 or less than $100. And if the criminal court finds him guilty of further contempt, or perhaps prevarication, then he’ll be looking at a much longer time in jail.
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Which begs several questions. What is Bannon concealing? What exactly happened between him and Trump in the immediate run-up to January 6? It is known they were in frequent touch, but what did Bannon do and say and more importantly, what did Trump do and say – did he really incite a riot?
In case you’ve forgotten, Bannon was Trump’s campaign boss in 2016 and then he was White House chief strategist in the first year of Trump’s presidency, credited – if that’s the word – with Trump’s decision to pull the USA out of the Paris Agreement and the travel ban on immigration from Muslim majority countries.
Eventually his far right policies irritated other Trump allies just too much, and when he was blamed for Trump’s infamous stance on blaming “both sides” over the death of a counter-protester at a demonstration by white nationalists and supremacists, and neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, Virginia on August 12, 2017, Bannon’s coat went on the shoogly peg.
He was gone just six days later, and by the end of the year Michael Wolff’s book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House was quoting Bannon as reportedly characterising the controversial meeting of Donald Trump, Jr., with Russians during the 2016 Presidential campaign as “treasonous” and “unpatriotic.”
Trump hit back, calling Bannon “sloppy Steve” and it looked as though their relationship was sundered. Trump added that Bannon had been fired – the man himself maintained he had resigned – and that Bannon “not only lost his job, he lost his mind.”
Cast into the Trumpian wilderness, Bannon nevertheless stuck to his populist guns and tried to claw his way back into the President’s good books, mainly by becoming involved with We Build The Wall which attracted $25m in donations for the construction of Trump’s wall.
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In August 2020, Bannon was one of four We Build The Wall people to be charged with defrauding donors. His old adversaries at the Department of Justice alleged he had taken $1m out of the charity, and he became the sixth former senior aide to Donald Trump to face criminal charges after ex-Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen, ex-deputy campaign manager Rick Gates and former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.
He and Trump had been reconciled, however, and in one of his final acts in office, the outgoing President officially pardoned Bannon, meaning he could not be put on trial for any crimes committed to that point.
He cannot be saved for this latest alleged crime and he now faces a very tough decision: does he tell the truth about Trump or go to jail?
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