US Justice Dept. recommends Bannon be sentenced to 6 months in prison
By Alan Feuer and Luke Broadwater
WASHINGTON – The Justice Department said on Monday (17) that Steve Bannon, a former top aide to Donald Trump, should spend six months in jail and pay a fine of $200,000 after a jury found him guilty this summer of wilfully disobeying a subpoena from the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack.
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 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 Bannon, who is set to be sentenced by Nichols on Friday (21), 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.
Bannon, on the eve of his trial in US 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 Bannon’s lawyers, sent him a text message asking to speak with him shortly before Bannon’s trial began.
Heaphy said he was “friendly” with Corcoran because they had worked together as federal prosecutors in the same office, and he worried about responding without witnesses.
Heaphy assembled two other top lawyers from the committee to listen to what Corcoran wanted. The Bannon lawyer proposed that the committee join a motion to dismiss the case in exchange for a pledge that Bannon produce documents that the committee had demanded under subpoena and sit for an interview — exactly what Bannon had refused to do for months.
Heaphy told 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 Bannon was found guilty of contempt of Congress in July, prosecutors told 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.”
Bannon had at first sought to defend himself by arguing that he could not comply with the subpoena because 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, Nichols swept aside those arguments, leaving Bannon with little defence 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.”
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 Trump’s signature policy platforms.
In that case, which largely mirrored one that Bannon escaped through a presidential pardon last year, the Manhattan district attorney’s office charged him with fraud, money laundering and conspiracy.
-New York Times
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