A federal judge in Washington ordered this Thursday the entry into prison before July 1 of Steve Bannon, advisor to former President Donald Trump and ideologist of the national-populist international. Bannon is sentenced to four months in prison for contempt of the US Congress, for defying the subpoena of a House of Representatives committee that investigated the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol. The judge handed down his sentence in October 2022, but left it suspended until appeals were exhausted. That moment came on May 10, when an appeals court confirmed the sentence.
The nine members (seven Democrats and two Republicans) of the January 6 committee called Bannon to testify in September 2021. He, who refused to do so, because, he said, he had the “executive privilege” of having worked as an advisor in the White House at the beginning of the Trump Administration, he also did not provide the documents requested. The four-month sentence included a $6,500 fine.
Carl Nichols, the magistrate who ordered the strategist’s imprisonment this Thursday, did not rule out that he could delay the beginning of his sentence if he gets an appeals court to grant him more time to appeal it.
When he finally enters prison, this sentence is the most tangible effect of the 18 months of the investigation by the commission of the assault 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 considered guilty of “a multi-part plan to overturn the 2020 presidential election,” not be allowed to run again, and asked that He will be prosecuted for four crimes, including insurrection.
Those conclusions were not binding, but then, in late 2022, they appeared to end Trump’s bid to return to the White House for a second term. A year and a half later, he is the Republican candidate for the next November elections, and some of the most relevant polls show him as the winner.
Full immunity
The investigative work carried out by the committee served, however, to build the case against Trump for his connection with January 6, which is pending in a Washington court. In the coming weeks, the Supreme Court will decide whether or not, in the last months of his presidency, he was granted total immunity for the performance of his position, which could put an end to that cause, or, at least, delay it.
Trump, who has two other criminal trials pending, was found guilty last week in a Manhattan court of 37 crimes for falsifying business records to cover up shortly before the elections the black payment to porn film actress Stormy Daniels to silence a relationship between the two that he denies. The sentence will be known on July 11.
It is highly unlikely that Trump and Bannon, who was key in the campaign that brought the magnate to the White House in 2016, will coincide in prison: experts do not expect that the judge of the Stormy Daniels case decree prison for the former president, and his lawyers’ strategy of delaying the processes as much as possible is currently bearing fruit. It is not at all clear that any of his pending cases will begin before the elections, at which time Bannon will have already served his sentence if he ends up going to prison as Judge Nichols wants.
Still pending in the same New York court that convicted his boss is a trial against Bannon, scheduled for before the end of the year, for misappropriation of funds raised to build the wall on the border between Mexico and the United States that Trump turned into a of his greatest electoral promises.
Peter Navarro, another ally of the former president, has been serving his own four-month sentence in a federal prison in Miami since March, also for contempt of Congress during the January 6 investigation.
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