Steve Bannon in Washington DC this Friday, during his trial JONATHAN ERNST (R)
Steve Bannon, a former adviser to Donald Trump, was found Friday guilty of obstructing the investigation by the commission pursuing responsibility for the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol. Bannon, a benchmark for America’s alt-right and the world’s foremost ideologue of national populism, from Jair Bolsonaro to Matteo Salvini, is being convicted of disobeying a subpoena from the commission of inquiry in what many saw as a victory for the nine-member panel (seven Democrats and two Republicans) consider it matters.
In any case, these are minor crimes for the gravity of the event, which was defined by the members of the commission as an attempted coup instigated by Trump and supported by his loved ones. Although Bannon left the White House after serving as the Republican’s strategist during the 2016 campaign and the early part of his tenure, he has sided with his former boss in refusing to provide any testimony or documents to the commission for its investigation to face Trump’s uprising.
Any violation of Congress is punishable by 30 days to a year in prison and a variable fine ranging from $100 to $100,000.
The jury’s verdict, made up of eight men and four women, came quickly after deliberating for just three hours, marking the first conviction for contempt of Congress since 1974. You have to go back to the Watergate scandal, during Richard Nixon’s presidency, for one similar case when a judge found G. Gordon Liddy guilty, who was involved in the wiretapping.
Bannon was the primary architect of Trump’s 2016 election victory, instilling alongside Democrats a radical, marginalized discourse about women or immigrants that nonetheless permeated broad layers of the population left behind by the great recession of 2008 and was overlooked by the Washington establishment. After Trump became president, Bannon, 68, served as his chief strategist in 2017 before a fight between the two separated him from the White House, though they later managed to rearrange their relationship. Bannon has also inspired the media battle of the so-called alternative right at the forefront of disinformation outlets like Breitbart News.
Bannon’s defense claims his client is a political target, while describing the prosecution’s key witness as a Democrat with clear political motivations and known ties to one of the prosecutors. The prosecution, for their part, asserts that Bannon has utterly disregarded authority and that he must be held accountable for his disregard for the law. In the two days of testimony, prosecutors questioned only two witnesses. The defense didn’t use their move.
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Another former Trump aide, Peter Navarro, was separately charged with contempt of Congress in June for refusing to appear before the commission and testify. Navarro’s trial is scheduled for November. The Justice Department chose not to indict two other Trump loyalists, Mark Meadows and Daniel Scavino, for the same reason, despite a vote in the House of Representatives recommending it. Unlike Bannon, Meadows made some communications to the committee.
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