With our federal legislature’s approval rating sometimes down in the teens, it’s clear that many Americans hold Congress in contempt. Yet actual legal “contempt of Congress” can bring real consequences — if you’re the wrong person with the wrong associations and wrong ideology.
Enter Trump ally Steve Bannon, who was just sentenced to prison for this trespass because his name isn’t Eric Holder, the ex-Obama attorney general who was cited for contempt of Congress but never prosecuted.
Fox News reports on Bannon’s woes:
Former Trump White House official Steve Bannon has been sentenced to four months in prison and a $6,500 fine for contempt of Congress.
Bannon was found guilty of contempt of Congress in July after he ignored a subpoena from the House Jan. 6 Committee.
“I want to say one thing — I respect the judge, the sentence he came down with today is his decision. I’ve been totally respectful to this entire process on the legal side,” Bannon said after the sentence.
Bannon was released pending appeal. If an appeal is not made, Bannon must surrender voluntarily by Nov. 15, U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols ruled.
Yet this legal saga is far from over, as “Mr. Bannon’s lawyers asked the judge to allow their client to exhaust his appeals before any punishment takes effect” (and the stay was granted), added The Wall Street Journal — “raising the prospect of years of litigation and a Supreme Court petition before the case is finished.”
It may not take that long, however, if Bannon attorney David Schoen is to be believed. After informing reporters Friday of his team’s impending appeal, he stated, “I’ve said it before and I would confirm it, I believe that the appeal in this case is bulletproof,” reports CNN.
“The Constitutional issues involved in this case are very important,” Schoen continued, “but Mr. Bannon never got to tell the reason for his actions with respect to the subpoena, never got to tell his story because the government insisted from day one on prohibiting any mention and any evidence or discussion to go before the jury as to why Mr. Bannon reacted as he did to the subpoena on the advice of counsel.”
“‘His silence was at my direction,’ Schoen added on why Bannon did not testify during his trial,” CNN also tells us.
The rationale for Bannon’s refusal to testify was further explained by lawyer Robert J. Costello in a July 9 letter to the select committee. Because “President Trump invoked executive privilege with respect to Mr. Bannon’s testimony and the production of requested documents, Mr. Bannon was obligated to honor the President’s invocation,” he wrote, “unless and until, either your Committee reached a constitutionally required accommodation with President Trump as to the invocation of executive privilege or your Committee obtained a ruling from the Federal District Court that the invocation of executive privilege was improper or did not apply to the particular question or document sought.”
Costello added later, however, that since President Trump had on that day (July 9) offered to waive executive privilege if Bannon’s team and the committee “reach an agreement on a time and place for” giving testimony, Bannon “is willing to, and indeed prefers, to testify at your public hearing.”
For whatever reason, this wasn’t good enough for the J6 committee. Attorney Schoen has a theory as to why, too. “They had an ulterior motive,” he said of the select committee’s members in a summer interview on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Sunday. “They never wanted Steve Bannon’s testimony,” Breitbart reports him as saying.
In reality, while federal prosecutors had sought a six-month prison sentence and $200,000 fine for what they called Mr. Bannon’s “bad-faith strategy,” the J6 committee wrote the book on bad faith. For example, consider how the customary practice of letting both Democrats and Republicans each choose members of such a committee was ignored in this case. As The New American reported in March:
When House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy nominated Representatives Jim Banks (R-Ind.), Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), Rodney Davis (R-Ill.), Kelly Armstrong (R-N.D.), and Troy Nehls (R-Texas) to serve on the committee, Pelosi nixed Banks and Jordan. Jordan had particularly inflamed Democrats with his articulate, effective responses to their attacks and his aggressive, rapid-fire grilling of Democratic witnesses. He was too big a threat to their Kabuki theater. To his credit, McCarthy refused to play in the Pelosi-rigged game and pulled all five of his nominees. Adamant to have her way with her “bipartisan” committee, Pelosi appointed her own “Republicans”: Representatives Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, two of the most notorious Hate-Trump RINOs (Republicans In Name Only) in Congress.
Of course, Cheney and Kinzinger are but shills here, Democrats in GOP clothing.
But the J6 committee kangaroo court merely reflects a justice-system double standard that has long existed — and worsened over time. As mentioned earlier, ex-attorney general Eric Holder was “held in contempt by the House in June 2012 ‘for failing to disclose internal Justice Department documents in response to a subpoena,’” Newsweek reminds us. Yet there was no pre-dawn FBI raid on Holder’s home as was done with Trump confidant Roger Stone; there was no four-month prison sentence and fine handed down. In fact, Holder wasn’t pursued at all.
There’s also Hillary Clinton, who illegally had classified documents on a private server. Nothing happened to her, either, and, unlike journalist James Gordon Meek, she didn’t mysteriously disappear after an FBI raid to allegedly uncover the classified material.
Then there’s former Clinton national security advisor Sandy Berger. He did have to plead guilty to taking copies of classified documents from the National Archives and then destroying them (and subsequently lying about it). He got no jail time, but he did have to say “Oops!”
It’s all part of what in 2020 was called the “Third Worlding of America,” where “a winner-take-all spirit prevails” after elections and the Democrats, if they triumph, persecute political opponents with the Deep State’s enthusiastic complicity.
It won’t stop, either — unless America resurrects that prerequisite for a flourishing constitutional republic: virtue in the people.
