Stephen K. Bannon, who is set to be sentenced on Friday, deserved a penalty harsher than the minimum term of one month in jail because he had blatantly brushed off the Jan. 6 committee’s demands, prosecutors said.
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Stephen K. Bannon, a former top aide to President Donald J. Trump, is set to be sentenced on Friday.
The Justice Department said on Monday that Stephen K. Bannon, a former top aide to Donald J. Trump, should spend six months in jail and pay a fine of $200,000 after a jury found him guilty this summer of willfully disobeying a subpoena from the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack.
Mr. Bannon “pursued a bad-faith strategy of defiance and contempt” from the moment he received the subpoena last year seeking records and testimony about his knowledge of Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, culminating in the violent assault on the Capitol, prosecutors said in a sentencing memo to Judge Carl J. Nichols, who is overseeing the case.
The prosecutors noted that Mr. Bannon, who is set to be sentenced by Judge Nichols on Friday, deserved a penalty harsher than the minimum term of one month in jail because he had blatantly brushed off the committee’s demands and then attacked it in a series of brazen public statements.
Mr. Bannon, on the eve of his trial in Federal District Court in Washington, also tried an 11th-hour attempt to derail the criminal case by asking Congress to pressure the Justice Department to drop its charges in exchange for his belated testimony to the Jan. 6 committee.
Timothy J. Heaphy, the committee’s top investigator, told prosecutors in an interview this month that M. Evan Corcoran, one of Mr. Bannon’s lawyers, sent him a text message asking to speak with him shortly before Mr. Bannon’s trial began.
Steve Bannon’s Legal Troubles
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Stephen K. Bannon, a onetime political adviser and chief strategist to former President Donald J. Trump, has faced several charges since leaving the White House in 2017. Here are some notable cases against him:
Federal fraud charges. In August 2020, Mr. Bannon was charged with defrauding donors who supported building a border wall long sought by Mr. Trump. Prosecutors said Mr. Bannon used funds raised for the construction of the wall on private land to pay for personal expenses. In January 2021, Mr. Trump pardoned Mr. Bannon before he could be brought to trial.
Contempt of Congress. In November 2021, Mr. Bannon was indicted by a federal grand jury on two counts of contempt of Congress, after his refusal to comply with a subpoena from the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. In a trial the following summer, a jury found Mr. Bannon guilty of both counts. He is scheduled to be sentenced in October.
New York State charges. Mr. Bannon surrendered to the Manhattan district attorney’s office and is expected to be charged with money laundering, conspiracy and fraud in connection with the border wall project. The Manhattan district attorney’s office began its own investigation into Mr. Bannon’s role in the project after he was pardoned by Mr. Trump.
Mr. Heaphy said he was “friendly” with Mr. Corcoran because they had worked together as federal prosecutors in the same office, and he worried about responding without witnesses.
Mr. Heaphy assembled two other top lawyers from the committee to listen to what Mr. Corcoran wanted. Mr. Corcoran proposed that the committee join a motion to dismiss the case in exchange for a pledge that Mr. Bannon produce documents that the committee had demanded under subpoena and sit for an interview — exactly what Mr. Bannon had refused to do for months.
Mr. Heaphy told Mr. Corcoran that the committee could not take such a position, and that the matter was now in the hands of the Justice Department.
Even after Mr. Bannon was found guilty of contempt of Congress in July, prosecutors told Judge Nichols, he still failed to disclose a single document to the committee or answer any of its questions.
“From the time he was initially subpoenaed, the defendant has shown his true reasons for total noncompliance have nothing to do with his purported respect for the Constitution, the rule of law or executive privilege,” prosecutors wrote, “and everything to do with his personal disdain for the members of Congress sitting on the committee and their effort to investigate the attack on our country’s peaceful transfer of power.”
Mr. Bannon had at first sought to defend himself by arguing that he could not comply with the subpoena because Mr. Trump had asserted executive privilege over his testimony. He also tried to argue that in disobeying the committee’s demands, he had merely been following the advice of his lawyers.
But in pretrial rulings, Judge Nichols swept aside those arguments, leaving Mr. Bannon with little defense against the accusation that he had received a subpoena from the House committee and simply chose to ignore it.
“It wasn’t optional, it wasn’t a request, and it wasn’t an invitation — it was mandatory,” a federal prosecutor said during opening statements at the trial. “The defendant decided he was above the law and didn’t have to follow the government’s orders like his fellow citizens.”
Mr. Bannon also faces separate charges in New York of defrauding people who sought to contribute to an organization that took donations for the construction of a wall along the southwestern border, one of Mr. Trump’s signature policy platforms.
In that case, which largely mirrored one that Mr. Bannon escaped through a presidential pardon last year, the Manhattan district attorney’s office charged him with fraud, money laundering and conspiracy.
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Source: nytimes.com
