Steve Bannon returns to federal court today in bid to remain out of federal prison during appeal

washington – Trump ally Steve Bannon is scheduled to appear in a Washington, D.C. federal court on Thursday as a judge weighs whether to clear the way for Bannon to serve a four-month prison sentence.

Prosecutors pressed last month for the former White House chief strategist to be sent to prison after an appeals court denied a request to overturn his criminal conviction. Bannon is fighting the measure and argues that the judge who supervised his criminal trial he does not yet have the legal authority to impose the sentence, as his defense team seeks other avenues of appeal.

A jury found Bannon guilty of two counts of contempt of Congress in 2022, after refusing to comply with a subpoena from the House Select Committee investigating the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Congressional investigators were interested in Bannon’s conduct in more than a dozen key areas , including his communications with former President Donald Trump as he resisted the results of the 2020 presidential election.

At the time, Bannon claimed he did not comply due to executive privilege concerns raised by Trump and said his former lawyer advised him not to respond to the subpoena because of the potential privilege.

Judge Carl Nichols ordered before the trial that Bannon could not tell the jury about the defense attorney’s advice because of binding legal precedent. Following his conviction, Judge Carl Nichols sentenced Bannon to four months in prison, but refrained from enforcing the decision, ruling that it was “likely” that the conviction would be overturned.

Bannon’s defense later appealed the conviction.

Last month, an appeals court disagreed with his arguments and ruled that Bannon’s “‘advice of counsel’ defense is no defense at all.” The three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously upheld the jury’s conviction and wrote that the defense he sought was “unavailable under this statute.”

“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 justices wrote last month in their opinion.

Still, the panel ordered that its decision would only take effect seven days after Bannon filed a new appeal, leaving an opportunity for another court to postpone the prison sentence again.

But the Justice Department took the case back to Nichols’ court and asked the judge to lift the suspension of Bannon’s four-month prison sentence. Prosecutors argued there was no longer a “substantial question of law” because the conviction was upheld.

In a previous order, Judge Nichols indicated that his main focus at Thursday’s hearing will be whether he has the legal authority to move forward.

“The defendant’s argument that the Court does not have jurisdiction to suspend the suspension of the sentence pending the issuance of the warrant is unsuccessful. He all but admits that there is not a single case that supports his position,” prosecutors wrote.

Bannon’s defense team, however, pushed back, writing Nichols “has no authority” to send Bannon to prison since the appeals court panel chose to do so without the mandate of his ruling. And even if the judge decided he had the authority, Bannon’s team wrote, Nichols should still delay sending Bannon to prison because, “the harm done would be truly irreparable and unjust if the sentence, already fully carried out, were then reversed in further review.”

“There is no basis to consider removing the suspension of sentence pending appeal until the appeal process has completely concluded,” attorney David Schoen wrote.

Schoen said in a statement to CBS News that, “This case raises vitally important constitutional questions that directly implicate the separation of powers” that should be considered by the entire D.C. Court of Appeals and “ultimately the Supreme Court.” He also claimed that the appeals court “ignored half a century of case law” in issuing a ruling that he will push to be reversed.

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 currently serving a four-month prison sentence after a jury in Washington, D.C. found him guilty of contempt.

Like Bannon, Navarro appealed his conviction, but the judge overseeing his case chose not to delay the imposition of the prison sentence, a decision that was upheld by higher courts.

Bannon was not in the White House during the final months of the Trump administration that were of interest to the January 6 committee, but he continued to exert influence within the former president’s political base. Following Trump’s conviction on the New York state charges last week, Bannon advocated retribution if Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, regained the White House.