Steve Bannon of Breitbart News speaks on behalf of Judge Roy Moore at Oak Hollow Farm in Fairhope , Alabama, with one week to go in U.S Senate race, Dec. 5, 2017: Photo by Glynn Wilson
By Glynn Wilson –
WASHINGTON, D.C. — A federal judge ordered Donald Trump brain trust and mouthpiece Steve Bannon to surrender by July 1 to start serving a four-month prison sentence imposed for contempt of Congress for disobeying a subpoena to provide documents and testimony to the House select committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
The New York Times broke the story.
After Bannon was sentenced in October 2022 on contempt of Congress charges, Judge Carl J. Nichols, who has overseen the case, allowed him to remain free on appeal. But last month, Bannon lost the first round when a three-judge panel of a federal appeals court judges in Washington decided that his guilty verdict was proper.
Bannon’s lawyers have promised to ask the full appeals court to reconsider the panel’s ruling, even though they had to sue Bannon to get paid. But Judge Nichols said that Bannon would have to start serving his sentence in less than four weeks, unless the full appeals court takes the case and issues its own ruling to pause the sentence from being enforced.
If he in fact goes to jail in July, that would take him out of the online sensational clickbait game on Trump’s side in the final four months of the presidential campaign. He could be out in time for the election on Nov. 5, but his popular right-wing podcast “the War Room” would presumably be silenced during the height of the campaign, and his cell phone would be confiscated so he would not be able to advise Trump or others in his campaign during the final, crucial months.
Bannon’s legal travails are likely to continue even during his stint in prison. A few months after he was found guilty of contempt of Congress in Washington, state prosecutors in Manhattan accused him of misusing money he helped raise for a group backing Trump’s border wall. In his final hours in office in 2021, Trump pardoned Bannon in a separate federal case that focused on similar accusations.
Bannon’s fraud trial is scheduled to take place later this year in the same Manhattan courthouse where Trump was recently convicted himself on charges of falsifying business records to cover up a sex scandal that threatened his 2016 run for the presidency.
Bannon is a despicable character who promotes tearing down the American establishment, including the Republican establishment, and came to Trump’s aid as campaign manager in the final months of the presidential campaign in 2016. His involvement could have been decisive, along with his partnership with Robert and Rebecca Mercer of Breitbart News and Cambridge Analytica, which used data from 20 million Facebook users to develop and promote fake news and conspiracy theories about Hillary Clinton on social media and promoted the false myth that Trump was a rich, successful business man in addition to being a famous reality television star.
In August, 2022, Facebook settled a lawsuit on that misuse of user data for an undisclosed sum.
Facebook-Cambridge Analytica Scandal Lawsuit Settled for Undisclosed Sum
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