Steve Bannon goes to jail to serve four months for contempt of Congress | International

Steve Bannon, an adviser to former President Donald Trump and ideologue of the national-populist International, entered prison on Monday to serve a four-month sentence for contempt of the US Congress. Bannon defied a subpoena from the House committee investigating the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

A reference to Trumpism, Bannon appeared around noon at the federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut, at whose door he spoke to the press and in front of a group of his supporters, including ultra-congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who had intervened before him. A handful of protesters also came to protest. Earlier, Bannon recorded the last program of his podcast near the penitentiary, war Room. He has carefully planned how the show will continue without him, for which he will have about twenty allies from the orbit of the MAGA movement. Danbury is a minimum-security prison, so phone calls are allowed for a maximum of 15 minutes per call and a total of 320 minutes per month.

“I’m proud to have entered prison,” he told reporters on Monday. “If that means facing tyranny, if that means not bowing to (Attorney General Merrick) Garland’s corrupt and criminal Justice Department, if that means facing Nancy Pelosi (the speaker of the House of Representatives when Bannon was subpoenaed) and Joe Biden, then I’m proud to have gone through that.”

McCarthyism

In that appearance, Bannon, 70, also said he considered himself a “Pelosi political prisoner,” and said he had asked to enter Danbury jail to draw parallels with the case of Ring Lardner Jr., the two Oscar-winning screenwriters who were accused of lynching. Woman of the Year (1942) and by Mash (1970) who was a victim of the witch hunt conducted by Senator McCarthy in the 1950s to cleanse Hollywood of Communists. When Lardner was encouraged to confess his membership in the party during questioning, he famously uttered the phrase: “I can give you the answer you expect,” he replied, “but if I did, you’d hate me every morning.”

When Bannon was asked what he expected from his months of darkness, he replied: “A victory for Donald Trump (in the presidential election).” His release date from prison is set for November 5, just days before the vote.

Last week, Bannon’s lawyers requested immediate intervention from the Supreme Court to prevent his imprisonment, but its nine justices denied them that possibility.

Bannon received a subpoena to testify before the congressional committee investigating the attack on the Capitol (made up of seven Democrats and two Republicans) in September 2021. He refused to do so because he believed he had “executive privilege” to work as an adviser in the White House at the beginning of the Trump administration. He also did not provide the requested documents. The four-month sentence also included a $6,500 fine.

The case of Trump’s former advisor is also pending in the same New York court which recently convicted the former President Stormy Daniels case The case of embezzlement of funds raised to build a wall on the border between Mexico and the United States that Trump turned into one of his biggest election promises. Another ally of the Republican magnate, Peter Navarro, has been serving his four-month sentence in federal prison in Miami since March for contempt of Congress during the investigation into the events of January 6. It will be released on July 17.

The two admissions to prison are the most concrete impact of an 18-month investigation by the commission into the attack on the Capitol, whose members interviewed a thousand people and reviewed a million documents. When that work concluded, its nine members recommended in a document of more than 800 pages that Trump, whom they consider guilty of a “multi-part scheme to overturn the 2020 presidential election,” should not be allowed to run for re-election, and asked that he be prosecuted for four crimes, including insurrection.

Bannon’s sentencing begins on the same day as the Supreme Court’s decision, which determined this Monday that Trump enjoyed criminal immunity for official actions while he was president, but was denied it for unofficial actions. The Court thus overturned lower court rulings that had denied Trump immunity in connection with efforts to change the 2020 election result.

In practice, this will mean more delays in the former president’s pending cases in the justice system. Next week he will learn his sentence for this Stormy Daniels casebut it is highly unlikely that any of the other three trials awaiting him will be held before the November election: the one in Washington, related to January 6; the one in Atlanta, for the coup attempt in the state of Georgia; and the one in Florida, for handling secret documents he had taken without permission from the White House.

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