A federal judge will hear arguments Thursday morning on whether former Donald Trump political adviser and right-wing podcaster Stephen K. Bannon should report to prison immediately to begin serving a four-month sentence for contempt of Congress after that an appeals court upheld his conviction. In May.
Federal prosecutors made the request last month, arguing that no substantial legal questions remain about Bannon’s two-count conviction for refusing to provide documents or testimony to a House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack after that a panel of the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit rejected Bannon’s appeal on all grounds.
“Under these circumstances, the Court will ‘order’ that the defendant ‘be detained,’ and the suspension of sentence should be lifted,” Assistant U.S. Attorney John Crabb Jr. wrote to U.S. District Judge Carl J. Nichols, who convicted Bannon in October 2022 but agreed to postpone his prison stay pending appeal.
A lawyer for Bannon, 70, disagreed, arguing to Nichols that the same legal issues that led the judge to allow his client to remain free after the sentencing will remain unresolved until the entire D.C. Circuit or the Supreme Court resolves them.
“According to the Government itself, these issues can only be fully reviewed on their merits by the full Court of Appeals or the Supreme Court of the United States; therefore, there is no basis to consider removing the stay of sentence pending appeal until the appeal process has run its course,” Bannon’s attorney, David I. Schoen, argued in papers filed before the hearing. on Wednesday.
Trump advisor Peter Navarro published a book in which he reveals the plan to keep Trump in office. (Video: Monica Rodman, Sarah Hashemi/The Washington Post)
Bannon would suffer “irreparable harm” if he were sent to prison now because he would almost certainly serve out his four-month sentence before his appeals are decided, Schoen wrote.
Schoen has said he would seek a rehearing before the full D.C. Circuit after a three-judge panel of the appeals court on May 10 upheld Bannon’s conviction at trial before a D.C. jury in July 2022. panel said Bannon can still request a review. from the full appeals court or the Supreme Court, and that it would not return the case to Nichols until seven days after either of them handled such a request. Prosecutors argued that Nichols retains the authority to revoke Bannon’s bail now and force him to report to prison.
At the ruling, Nichols suspended Bannon’s reporting date, saying it raised a substantial question about whether he should be able to argue that he did not “intentionally” refuse to cooperate because he relied on legal advice to ignore a House subpoena for his documents. and testimony, among other defenses.
Nichols has said he did not have the authority to overturn a 1961 D.C. Circuit decision barring such defenses, but that the full appeals court could.
Bannon could also ask the Supreme Court to intervene, but the justices rejected a similar request from Trump’s trade adviser, Peter Navarro, 74, who in March became the first person jailed for contempt of Congress in more than half a century. , from the red harassment. Hearings from the Cold War era. Navarro, who said in his memoirs that he and Bannon had a plan for Jan. 6 that would prevent Joe Biden from taking office, was convicted of the same crimes in September and received an identical sentence in January by U.S. District Judge Amit P. Mehta. .
However, Navarro interacted with the House investigative committee without an attorney, while Bannon communicated with them through an attorney, Robert J. Costello, who represented Bannon in several matters before withdrawing from the case before trial. because he was a potential witness.
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