Steve Bannon, a former advisor to former President Donald Trump, has had his appeal denied by a U.S. federal appeals court in relation to his refusal to comply with a congressional committee subpoena regarding the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, according to a report by Reuters.
Bannon was found guilty in 2022 of two misdemeanor counts of contempt of Congress for his refusal to provide documents or testify before the House of Representatives committee that was investigating the Capitol riot. As a result, he was sentenced to four months in prison. However, pending his appeal, he has remained free.
During his appeal, Bannon argued that his lawyer had advised him that he was not obligated to comply with the subpoena. Based on this advice, he claimed that he had no intention of committing a crime.
“Bannon’s argument would ‘hamstring Congress’s investigatory authority,’ by making it more difficult to prosecute witnesses who spurn congressional investigations, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit found,” per Reuters.
Bannon has the option to appeal to both the full D.C. Circuit court and the U.S. Supreme Court. The House panel, which is predominantly composed of Democrats, conducted an investigation into Trump’s actions to overturn the 2020 election results and his involvement in the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021, in an attempt to prevent the formal certification of the vote.
Bannon, who characterized the investigation as politically motivated, had foreseen the chaos that would unfold the day before the riot, stating that “all hell is going to break loose tomorrow.” In a similar vein, Peter Navarro, another advisor to Trump, is currently serving a four-month prison sentence for defying a subpoena related to the same investigation.
