Steve Bannon, center, speaks outside Danbury Federal Correctional Institution, Monday, July 1, 2024, in Danbury, Conn. (AP Photo/Julia Nikhinson)
Steve Bannon surrendered himself to prison on Monday to serve out his four-month sentence for his contempt of Congress conviction after he refused to cooperate with the now-defunct House Select Committee to Investigate the Jan. 6 Attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Bannon will serve out his sentence at the Federal Correctional Institution in Danbury, Connecticut.
The longtime far-right bloviator and very short-lived adviser to former President Donald Trump was greeted by a small coterie of supporters, according to The Associated Press, including Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, another Trump darling and vehement critic of the Jan. 6 committee. Greene held a press conference Monday for Bannon’s surrender.
“I’m proud of going to prison,” Bannon said Monday.
He added that he was “standing up” to the “Garland corrupt DOJ,” referencing U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland, and also said he was standing up to President Joe Biden and former speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat.
As Law&Crime previously reported, Bannon lost his last-ditch attempt to stay out of prison when he pleaded his case to the Supreme Court.
First convicted in July 2022, he was sentenced to serve four months in prison that October. When he appealed his conviction and sentence, he was allowed to remain free on appeal. That appeal was eventually rejected and U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols, a Trump appointee, found there was no sufficient reason to keep Bannon out any longer.
Nichols told Bannon when he was sentenced in 2022 that he was remorseless about his conduct with the committee and made no effort to hide that.
Bannon’s attorney at the time David Schoen, however, said Bannon’s conduct wasn’t so bad.
“A more egregious contempt of Congress would have been: ‘Screw you, Congress! Take your subpoena, and shove it!” Schoen said.
Bannon unsuccessfully argued in court that he ignored the subpoena because of legal advice received from his attorney, Robert Costello, and he also failed to convince judges at the district or appellate level that he never “willfully” ignored the committee’s subpoena.
It was only ever unintentional, Bannon recently told the Supreme Court when pleading for the justices’ intervention.
The high court never responded to his request in depth, only curtly denying it in a one-page order. But there was no need for the justices to go into detail — the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit was succinct in its denial: nothing in Bannon’s urgent request warranted a new or substantial question of law or would likely result in a change of his fate.
“Bannon’s proposal — that to prove willful default the government must establish that the witness knew his conduct was unlawful — cannot be reconciled with the Supreme Court’s approach to the statute,” the appellate court’s June 20 order states. “If an assertion of good-faith reliance on advice of counsel excused a witness’s wholesale noncompliance, even as it is plainly unavailable to a more cooperative witness who appears but refuses to answer certain questions, Congress’s power of inquiry would be ‘nulli[fied].””
Bannon is expected to be released in four months, just a matter of days before the 2024 presidential election.
Much like he did in the run-up to the 2020 election, Bannon has publicly decried the results of the pending presidential election before a single ballot has been cast. In an interview with NBC News on June 29 he also claimed Democrats were incapable of winning the race without stealing it and that it would be “death of the constitutional American republic we know” if Biden won in November.
Bannon’s time at the White House was short-lived — Trump fired him in 2017 — and the documents that the Jan. 6 committee sought from him were from a period where he no longer had the protections of executive privilege.
Congressional investigators were particularly keen to question Bannon about his knowledge of events planned around Jan. 6 before they occurred and, specifically, a remark he made on his podcast on Jan. 5, 2021.
“It’s not going to happen like you think it’s going to happen. OK, it’s going to be extraordinarily different. All I can say is strap in. All hell is going to break tomorrow. So many people said, ‘Man, if I was in a revolution, I would be in Washington.’ Well, this is your time in history,” Bannon said.
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