A US federal judge has mandated that Steve Bannon, former strategist to Donald Trump, must report to prison by July 1st to commence a four-month sentence.
This ruling, issued on Thursday, follows years of legal battles, culminating in an appeals court recently affirming Bannon’s 2022 criminal conviction for contempt of Congress.
The conservative podcaster was found guilty of unlawfully refusing to testify before the committee investigating the Capitol riot of January 6, 2021.
Bannon, aged 70, has consistently denied any criminal misconduct, and his attorney criticized the judgment as “a terrible decision.”
In response to Thursday’s ruling, Bannon stated that he and his legal team are prepared to pursue further legal action, including potentially appealing to the Supreme Court.
“There’s not a prison built or a jail built that will ever shut me up,” he defiantly told reporters outside the courthouse in Washington DC.
He characterized the legal battles against him as a strategy aimed at “silencing the Maga movement,” alluding to the “Make America Great Again” campaign slogan of former President Trump.
Bannon maintains that he was acting upon legal counsel when he declined to testify before the House committee investigating the events of January 6, when rioters stormed the US Capitol in an attempt to halt the certification of Joe Biden’s election victory.
His attorney, David Schoen, who has labeled the case against his client as politically motivated, pledged to pursue an appeal to a higher court.
Schoen asserted that Bannon would have breached Trump’s assertion of executive privilege—a legal principle permitting presidents to withhold certain communications from disclosure—had he complied with the congressional testimony request.
However, a three-judge panel from the DC Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously dismissed this argument when it upheld Bannon’s conviction in May, asserting that his assertion “clashes directly with established legal precedent.”
“This exact ‘advice of counsel’ defense is no defense at all,” Justice Bradley Garcia wrote in that decision.
A full appeals court could delay Thursday’s sentencing order if it took up the case and issued its own ruling stopping its enforcement.
Bannon was a key player in Trump’s 2016 rise to the Oval Office and later became chief strategist at the White House.
He left the administration after a violent far-right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017, but remains a top ally of the former president.
Another senior Trump aide, Peter Navarro, reported to prison in March after his own contempt of Congress conviction.