Steve Bannon, an adviser to former President Donald Trump and ideologue of the national-populist international, was jailed on Monday to serve a four-month sentence for contempt of Congress. Bannon defied a subpoena from a House committee investigating the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol.
A leading figure in Trumpism, he appeared at around noon at the federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut, where he spoke to the press and a group of his supporters, led by the far-right congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who spoke before him. A handful of demonstrators also came to protest. Before that, he recorded the last program of his podcast, War Room. Bannon has carefully planned out how the show will go on without him, with around twenty collaborators from the MAGA movement. Danbury is a minimum security prison, so he is allowed phone calls for a maximum of 15 minutes per call, and a total of 320 minutes per month.
“I am proud to go to prison,” he told reporters Monday. “If it means standing up to tyranny, if it means not giving in to the corrupt and criminal U.S. Department of Justice, [el fiscal general Merrick] Garland, if he is ready to face Nancy Pelosi [presidenta de la Cámara de Representantes cuando Bannon fue citado] “Now Joe Biden, then I am proud to go through this.”
McCarthyism
In that appearance, Bannon, 70, also said he considered himself a “political prisoner of Pelosi,” and said he had asked to enter the Danbury prison to draw a parallel with the case of Ring Lardner Jr., a two-time Oscar-winning screenwriter for Woman of the year (1942) and by MASH (1970) who in the 1950s was the victim of Senator McCarthy’s witch hunt in Hollywood to rid the film industry of communists. Lardner famously said when he was being questioned about confessing his membership in the party: “I could 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 in the shadows, he replied: “a victory.” [en las elecciones presidenciales] Donald Trump’s release date is set just days before the election on November 5.
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Bannon’s lawyers last week urgently requested that the Supreme Court intervene to prevent him from going to prison, but the nine judges denied them that request.
Bannon was subpoenaed to testify before the Congressional committee investigating the Capitol attack (made up of seven Democrats and two Republicans) in September 2021. He refused to do so because he believed he had “executive privilege” for having worked as an adviser in the White House at the beginning of the Trump administration. He also failed to provide the requested documents. The four-month sentence included a $6,500 fine.
Trump’s former adviser also has a case pending in the same New York court that recently convicted the former president for the Stormy Daniels case a case of embezzlement of funds raised to build the wall on the border between Mexico and the United States that Trump made one of his biggest campaign promises. Peter Navarro, another ally of the Republican magnate, has been serving his own four-month sentence in a federal prison in Miami since March, again for contempt of Congress during the investigation into the events of January 6. He will be released on July 17.
Both imprisonments are the most tangible effects of the 18-month investigation by the commission into the assault on the Capitol, whose members interviewed a thousand people and reviewed a million documents. When that work was concluded, its nine members recommended in a document of more than 800 pages that Trump not be allowed to run again, finding him guilty of “a multi-part plan to overturn the 2020 presidential election,” and called for him to be prosecuted for four crimes, including insurrection.
The start of Bannon’s sentence coincided with the day on which the Supreme Court’s ruling was announced, which determined on Monday that Trump has criminal immunity for official acts when he was president, but denies it for unofficial acts. The court thus overturned the rulings of lower courts that denied Trump immunity in relation to attempts to alter the 2020 election result and asks them to decide according to the criteria it sets out in its ruling.
In practice, this will mean further delays in the former president’s pending cases with the justice system. Next week he will learn his sentence for the Stormy Daniels casebut it is highly unlikely that any of the other three trials awaiting him will take place before the November elections: the one in Washington, related to January 6; the one in Atlanta, for his attempts to rig the election in the State of Georgia; and the one in Florida, for his handling of the secret documents that he took from the White House without permission.
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