Former Trump administration adviser Steve Bannon was ordered to self-surrender for his four-month prison sentence no later than July 1, a district court judge ruled Thursday.
U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols, an appointee of former President Donald Trump, lifted his previous stay on Bannon’s four-month prison sentence while he appealed his conviction. However, Nichols did allow Bannon on Thursday to begin the process of appealing the judge’s decision to lift the pause on his sentence.
“My stay of Mr. Bannon’s obligation to self-surrender is revoked,” Nichols said from the bench of the federal district courthouse in Washington, D.C., after nearly 50 minutes of argument between defense attorneys and a lawyer for the government.
“I do not believe that the original basis for my stay of Mr. Bannon’s sentence exists anymore,” Nichols added.
Before court proceedings began on Thursday, Bannon was standing, facing the media and viewers in the courtroom and having a discussion with Evan Corcoran. Corcoran is a key witness in the criminal case against Trump in Florida, where Trump is accused of improperly stashing classified documents after he left the White House.
Nichols’s decision comes after the federal government asked the judge to impose Bannon’s sentence for being found in contempt of Congress for evading a subpoena from the now-defunct House Jan. 6 committee. That request came in response to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit upholding the criminal contempt conviction on May 10.
Bannon, who is the host of the popular War Room podcast that attracts tens of thousands of fans of Trump, was initially sentenced in 2022, though Nichols had agreed to postpone the jail term while Bannon appealed the decision.
The popular podcast host plans to keep appealing the case to the full bench of the D.C. Circuit and the Supreme Court. But unless one of those courts steps in to block Nichols’s decision, Bannon is unlikely to stave off prison come July 1.
The imminent threat of prison time for Bannon comes a week after Trump was found guilty by a New York jury of 34 felony counts of business falsification. Judge Juan Merchan has scheduled Trump to appear for sentencing on July 11 at 10 a.m., just four days before Trump is slated to be named the Republican nominee for president at the Republican National Convention.
Trump released a statement about Bannon on Thursday afternoon, calling it a “Complete American Tragedy” that the Justice Department is seeking to imprison Bannon “for not SUBMITTING to the Unselect Committee of Political Thugs.”
Bannon is the second former Trump White House adviser to have serious prison time looming over his head for defying the now-defunct House committee. Peter Navarro, a former Trump trade adviser, is serving a four-month sentence in Miami for ignoring a subpoena from the panel. The D.C. Circuit’s rejection of Navarro’s effort to stay out of jail was factored into Nichols’s decision to revoke Bannon’s bail.
The former advisers had leaned heavily on the notion that Trump invoked executive privilege that allowed them to defy the congressional committee’s subpoenas. But the D.C. Circuit ruled in both cases that they could not show that Trump indeed invoked executive privilege to protect them.
Bannon’s lawyer, David Schoen, said from outside the courthouse that Bannon’s previous lawyer informed him that “when executive privilege has been invoked, you no longer have to comply with a subpoena.”
Nichols said from the bench that a written decision would be forthcoming. Bannon will appeal the D.C. Circuit’s decision upholding the contempt conviction and also appeal Nichols’s decision to rescind his stay of Bannon’s sentence.
A major part of Schoen’s argument in the courtroom on Thursday was the fact that given the time frames of the four-month sentence, Bannon may not completely exhaust his appellate relief options before being sent to prison.
Schoen said “even one day spent in prison” for Bannon would result in “irreparable harm” to his client.
Prosecutor John Crabb argued that Bannon didn’t satisfy the legal threshold for staying out of prison while his appeal continued. Crabb suggested that the failed effort by Navarro to pause his sentence should inform how the judge proceeds with Bannon. Navarro’s efforts to stay out of jail were ultimately rebuffed by the D.C. Circuit and the Supreme Court.
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Conservative Article III Project founder Mike Davis, a frequent guest on Bannon’s show, repeated Trump and other GOP supporters’ claims that the effort to imprison Trump and his allies is part of a broader “partisan quest” by the Biden administration to use “lawfare” against political enemies.
“This is all part of a broader criminal conspiracy by Biden, his aides, and his allies to politicize and weaponize law enforcement and intel agencies to violate the constitutional rights of Trump, his aides, and his allies for the purposes of partisan lawfare and election interference. These are republic-ending tactics,” Davis said.
