Former top Trump White House adviser Steve Bannon was sentenced on Friday to four months in prison for ignoring a subpoena from the House Jan. 6 Committee. He is also being fined $6,500.
The chain of events is simple: Bannon refused to comply with the House select committee’s subpoena for documents and testimony because he argued it would violate President Donald Trump’s executive privilege. The Biden administration contested this argument, and the House of Representatives voted to hold Bannon in contempt of Congress last year.
The Bannon sentencing is unprecedented. Individuals are rarely prosecuted, let alone convicted and imprisoned, for being held in contempt of Congress. Ten years ago, then-Attorney General Eric Holder was held in contempt of Congress for ignoring a subpoena related to the Fast and Furious scandal in which, due to negligence, the United States government supplied a Mexican cartel with firearms that were used to terrorize and kill Mexican and American citizens. Even though the Fast and Furious scandal was far more deadly than the capital riot, Holder was never prosecuted for snubbing the Republican-led Congress. The last time someone was even charged with contempt of Congress was nearly 40 years ago, and the accused was cleared.
The Sham J6 Committee
The Jan. 6 Committee that targeted Bannon was a sham from its inception. For the first time in the history of the House, the speaker barred the minority party from appointing members, with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi blocking Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy’s picks, Reps. Jim Jordan and Jim Banks. Instead, Pelosi appointed her own favorites who serve Democrats’ interests: Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger. Because there was not one Republican-appointed member present on the committee, the GOP conference had no representation.
Bannon’s lawyers tried to dismiss the charges against him by asserting that the select committee was not a valid entity because it had no ranking minority member. Democrat House lawyers, however, waved this argument, writing in their amicus brief: “As a practical matter, the Select Committee is functioning differently than other House Committees. Here, there is no formalistic division between majority Members and minority Members, or majority staff and minority staff.”
Legal counsel for McCarthy rejected the Democrat lawyers’ statement, writing that the committee’s power “is limited to its authorizing resolution,” and adding that “had the House desired the Select Committee’s subpoena authority to ‘function[] differently than other House Committees’ it should have explicitly so said” in its resolution to create the committee. Even though, as McCarthy’s lawyers point out, the formation of the committee did not follow House protocol, the federal judge refused to dismiss Bannon’s charges.
But there’s more to the J6 Committee’s disdain for norms. In 1961, the Supreme Court affirmed that questions asked of individuals subpoenaed by Congress must be relevant to whatever subject the committee has been authorized to investigate. Yet according to a Federalist analysis from January of this year, only 10 percent of the J6 Committee subpoenas were even related to the Capitol riot.
The committee also targeted private citizens who exercised their First Amendment right to peacefully assemble, which, as The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway reported, calls into question the constitutionality of the committee’s actions “since Congress is not one of the branches of government tasked with investigating alleged crimes of private citizens.”
There was no justice or fact-finding, as the committee promised to do. Instead, with the blessing of Pelosi, the Jan. 6 Committee went scorched earth on Trump, his supporters, and his advisers, such as Bannon. It ignored House precedent, violated its own organizing resolution, refused to follow House deposition rules, lied in subpoenas, and doctored evidence. The J6 Committee’s very formation was predicated on the ridiculous notion that Trump incited an “insurrection” by questioning the integrity of the 2020 election — a legitimate and increasingly substantiated concern.
The Real Insurrectionists
Bannon’s conviction brings into focus the Democrats’ weaponization of government power to punish their political enemies, but it’s merely the latest — not the first — in a parade of abuses that gutted the rule of law in America.
While the bogus J6 Committee cries insurrection, for instance, Americans are just supposed to forget about when Democrats and the deep state conspired to annihilate the Trump campaign and subsequently overthrow his presidency using falsified evidence and illegal tactics. But unlike Bannon, not a single one of the Russia collusion hoax co-conspirators spent a second in jail.
And it’s emboldened them, especially the hyper-partisan FBI. Last month, a whistleblower alleged the FBI is going to move agents off of child sexual abuse cases to devote more manpower to punishing political enemies like the Jan. 6 protesters. The agency’s 2022 budget has its largest funding increase request under the category of combatting “domestic terrorism” — the same label leftists used to smear parents who peacefully protested at local school board meetings.
And consider the disparity in how different groups are treated under the law. When Black Lives Matter rioters caused death and billions of dollars in property damage during the summer of 2020, federal law enforcement and their corporate media enablers gave them a free pass.
The same pattern has occurred following the leak of the Dobbs opinion to overturn Roe v. Wade. Despite pro-abortion vandals and arsonists attacking at least 86 Catholic churches and at least 75 pro-life pregnancy centers across the country, the FBI has announced zero charges and zero arrests.
Case in point: After CompassCare Pregnancy Services in Buffalo, New York, was firebombed in early June, it gave local police and the FBI surveillance footage to help bring the arsonists to justice. Despite a pro-abortion group even taking responsibility for the attack, the FBI has yet to charge or arrest anyone.
When CompassCare asked for its footage back because law enforcement was apparently not investigating, the FBI and local police refused, claiming that if the care center had its own tapes back, it could incite right-wing violence. What?
Meanwhile, the FBI is very interested in pro-life protesters. It has now publicly indicted 22 of them, and in just the last two months, it has raided the homes of two.
Catholic father of seven Mark Houck was raided and arrested on Sept. 29 in front of his wife and screaming children by what his wife described as a swarm of 25 to 30 FBI agents for alleged “FACE Act” violations. Chet Gallagher’s Tennessee home was raided in earlier October for the same charges. Houck, Gallagher, and six of Gallagher’s fellow demonstrators face a maximum possible sentence of 11 years in prison, three years of supervised release, and fines of up to $350,000.
Only the Beginning
“Today was my judgment day by the judge,” said Bannon, but “on November 8th, [there’s going to be] judgment [for] the illegitimate Biden regime and … Nancy Pelosi and the entire [Jan. 6] committee.”
Bannon might be onto something. Day by day, deep-state corruption becomes more apparent. From the FBI interfering in the 2020 election to its raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home, anger builds. The left’s Jan. 6 show trial will not end with the committee’s last hearing either, with a subpoena outstanding for Trump and former White House trade adviser Peter Navarro heading to trial next month on the same charges as Bannon.
Conventional wisdom and norms used to dissuade elected leaders from prosecuting their political enemies to avoid the appearance of a Third World banana republic. Recall the criminal accusations against Hillary Clinton, who was never prosecuted. Today, that status quo hasn’t just been broken, it’s been obliterated. Anyone associated with Trump will have the book thrown at them, from Bannon and Navarro to Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn, and any number of innocent J6 protesters whose lives have been destroyed by the corrupt Department of Justice.
America’s rule of law is dead, and Democrats killed it. But in its wake — amid a mass loss of faith in our elections, justice system, media, health officials, tech oligarchs, universities, and other institutions — Bannon’s political imprisonment is a call to action.
“The Biden administration ends on the 8th [of] November,” Bannon said. “Merrick Garland will end up being the first attorney general that’s brought up on charges of impeachment and he will be removed from office.”