Steve Bannon’s Last-Ditch Bid to Avoid Jail Shot Down by Appeals Court
Steve Bannon’s contempt-of-Congress conviction was upheld Friday by a federal appeals court in the District of Columbia.
The three-judge panel shot down a number of challenges the former Trump strategist had made to the conviction. Those arguments included the claim that Bannon was not guilty because his lawyer had advised him not to comply with the subpoena, as well as the claim that the trial court excluded evidence Bannon should have been allowed to include for his defense. (Bannon’s lawyer, former Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz, has complained since the conviction that Bannon didn’t get a fair trial.)
Bannon, a former adviser to Trump during his presidency, was convicted in 2022 after failing to comply with a subpoena order for the House’s Jan. 6 committee, thereby obstructing the Capitol insurrection probe. He was sentenced to four months in prison in October 2022, but the judge allowed him to delay the sentence while he appealed.