Liam Conner
washington – A three-judge panel of the appeals court upheld the criminal conviction of former Trump White House chief strategist Steve Bannon in a unanimous decision on Friday, ruling they found “no basis” to depart from the binding legal precedent.
Bannon was found guilty in 2022 of two misdemeanor counts of contempt of Congress for failing to respond to a subpoena from the now-defunct House select committee investigating the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol. At the time, he stated that he could not testify because of executive privilege concerns raised by former President Donald Trump and said his former lawyer, Robert Costello, advised him not to comply with the subpoena because of potential privilege.
A federal judge in Washington, D.C., ordered before the trial that binding legal precedent bar Bannon from raising the issue of his lawyer’s advice as a defense. After his conviction, Judge Carl Nichols sentenced Bannon to four months in prison.
The political strategist and his legal team appealed the conviction, claiming that Bannon did not deliberately defy Congress by not responding because he was following his lawyer’s advice. Nichols delayed Bannon’s prison sentence while the appeal was pending following the conclusion that the legal precedent underpinning the decision to prohibit defense counsel’s advice was likely to be overturned.
But in the ruling issued Friday, Judge Bradley Garcia, appointed by President Biden, upheld Nichol’s ruling, writing, “this exact defense ‘advice of counsel’ is no defense at all.”
“Nothing in the authorities on which Bannon relies calls into question this court’s long-standing interpretation of ‘intentionally’ … as requiring a deliberate and willful failure to respond to a subpoena,” the judge wrote.
Congressional investigators were interested in Bannon’s work in more than a dozen key areas, including his communications with former President Donald Trump.
Garcia and the other two judges on the panel — Cornelia Pillard, an Obama appointee, and Justin Walker, a Trump appointee — ruled unanimously that Bannon’s decision to dismiss the subpoena sufficiently supported the criminal contempt charges. Legal precedent dictates that contempt charges “do not require bad faith, evil motives, or unlawful purpose,” they wrote.
“Bannon does not dispute that he deliberately refused to comply with the Select Committee’s subpoena because he knew what the subpoena required and intentionally did not respond; in other words, his non-response was not accidental,” the appeals court ruled, pointing to legitimacy. the legal precedent they wrote makes clear that the advice of an attorney is “not available under this statute.”
The justices also rejected other arguments from Bannon’s defense team, including that the Jan. 6 committee was invalid.
Bannon’s lawyer did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but there are other avenues of recourse the legal team can pursue, including asking the Supreme Court to review the matter.
Bannon is not the only Trump White House official convicted of defying a House committee subpoena on Jan. 6. Former trade counselor Peter Navarro is serving a four-month prison sentence after a jury in Washington, D.C. found him guilty of contempt.
Like Bannon, Navarro is appealing his conviction and has asked another federal judge to release him from prison for supervised release, citing allegations that he was “denied the opportunity to speak to both the press and a member of Congress.”
It is not yet clear what effect Friday’s ruling will have on Bannon’s prison sentence.
