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Justice Dept. Recommends Bannon Be Sentenced to 6 Months in Prison

cigaretteman

HR King
May 29, 2001
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The Justice Department said on Monday that Stephen K. Bannon, a former top aide to Donald J. Trump, should spend six months in jail and pay a fine of $200,000 after a jury found him guilty this summer of willfully disobeying a subpoena from the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack.
Mr. Bannon “pursued a bad-faith strategy of defiance and contempt” from the moment he received the subpoena last year seeking records and testimony about his knowledge of Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, culminating in the violent assault on the Capitol, prosecutors said in a sentencing memo to Judge Carl J. Nichols, who is overseeing the case.
The prosecutors noted that Mr. Bannon, who is set to be sentenced by Judge Nichols on Friday, deserved a penalty harsher than the minimum term of one month in jail because he had blatantly brushed off the committee’s demands and then attacked it in a series of brazen public statements.
Mr. Bannon, on the eve of his trial in Federal District Court in Washington, also tried an 11th-hour attempt to derail the criminal case by asking Congress to pressure the Justice Department to drop its charges in exchange for his belated testimony to the Jan. 6 committee.
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Timothy J. Heaphy, the committee’s top investigator, told prosecutors in an interview this month that M. Evan Corcoran, one of Mr. Bannon’s lawyers, sent him a text message asking to speak with him shortly before Mr. Bannon’s trial began.

Steve Bannon’s Legal Troubles​

Card 1 of 4
Stephen K. Bannon, a onetime political adviser and chief strategist to former President Donald J. Trump, has faced several charges since leaving the White House in 2017. Here are some notable cases against him:
Federal fraud charges. In August 2020, Mr. Bannon was charged with defrauding donors who supported building a border wall long sought by Mr. Trump. Prosecutors said Mr. Bannon used funds raised for the construction of the wall on private land to pay for personal expenses. In January 2021, Mr. Trump pardoned Mr. Bannon before he could be brought to trial.
Contempt of Congress. In November 2021, Mr. Bannon was indicted by a federal grand jury on two counts of contempt of Congress, after his refusal to comply with a subpoena from the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. In a trial the following summer, a jury found Mr. Bannon guilty of both counts. He is scheduled to be sentenced in October.
New York State charges. Mr. Bannon surrendered to the Manhattan district attorney’s office and is expected to be charged with money laundering, conspiracy and fraud in connection with the border wall project. The Manhattan district attorney’s office began its own investigation into Mr. Bannon’s role in the project after he was pardoned by Mr. Trump.



Mr. Heaphy said he was “friendly” with Mr. Corcoran because they had worked together as federal prosecutors in the same office, and he worried about responding without witnesses.
Mr. Heaphy assembled two other top lawyers from the committee to listen to what Mr. Corcoran wanted. The Bannon lawyer proposed that the committee join a motion to dismiss the case in exchange for a pledge that Mr. Bannon produce documents that the committee had demanded under subpoena and sit for an interview — exactly what Mr. Bannon had refused to do for months.
Mr. Heaphy told Mr. Corcoran that the committee could not take such a position, and that the matter was now in the hands of the Justice Department.
Even after Mr. Bannon was found guilty of contempt of Congress in July, prosecutors told Judge Nichols, he still failed to disclose a single document to the committee or answer any of its questions.



“From the time he was initially subpoenaed, the defendant has shown his true reasons for total noncompliance have nothing to do with his purported respect for the Constitution, the rule of law or executive privilege,” prosecutors wrote, “and everything to do with his personal disdain for the members of Congress sitting on the committee and their effort to investigate the attack on our country’s peaceful transfer of power.”
Mr. Bannon had at first sought to defend himself by arguing that he could not comply with the subpoena because Mr. Trump had asserted executive privilege over his testimony. He also tried to argue that in disobeying the committee’s demands, he had merely been following the advice of his lawyers.
But in pretrial rulings, Judge Nichols swept aside those arguments, leaving Mr. Bannon with little defense against the accusation that he had received a subpoena from the House committee and simply chose to ignore it.
“It wasn’t optional, it wasn’t a request, and it wasn’t an invitation — it was mandatory,” a federal prosecutor said during opening statements at the trial. “The defendant decided he was above the law and didn’t have to follow the government’s orders like his fellow citizens.”
Mr. Bannon also faces separate charges in New York of defrauding people who sought to contribute to an organization that took donations for the construction of a wall along the southwestern border, one of Mr. Trump’s signature policy platforms.
In that case, which largely mirrored one that Mr. Bannon escaped through a presidential pardon last year, the Manhattan district attorney’s office charged him with fraud, money laundering and conspiracy.

 
Prisoners be like...

shit-yuck.gif
 
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Reactions: ping72
Wait till he finds out the only booze they serve in prison was made on-site in a toilet bowl.
 
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I’m just happy we get to throw the other side in prison as we wish. It’s great to live in more of an authoritarian type country where you can really stick it to whoever you disagree with politically.
 
  • Haha
Reactions: Wendy79
The Justice Department said on Monday that Stephen K. Bannon, a former top aide to Donald J. Trump, should spend six months in jail and pay a fine of $200,000 after a jury found him guilty this summer of willfully disobeying a subpoena from the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack.
Mr. Bannon “pursued a bad-faith strategy of defiance and contempt” from the moment he received the subpoena last year seeking records and testimony about his knowledge of Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, culminating in the violent assault on the Capitol, prosecutors said in a sentencing memo to Judge Carl J. Nichols, who is overseeing the case.
The prosecutors noted that Mr. Bannon, who is set to be sentenced by Judge Nichols on Friday, deserved a penalty harsher than the minimum term of one month in jail because he had blatantly brushed off the committee’s demands and then attacked it in a series of brazen public statements.
Mr. Bannon, on the eve of his trial in Federal District Court in Washington, also tried an 11th-hour attempt to derail the criminal case by asking Congress to pressure the Justice Department to drop its charges in exchange for his belated testimony to the Jan. 6 committee.
Advertisement
Continue reading the main story


Timothy J. Heaphy, the committee’s top investigator, told prosecutors in an interview this month that M. Evan Corcoran, one of Mr. Bannon’s lawyers, sent him a text message asking to speak with him shortly before Mr. Bannon’s trial began.

Steve Bannon’s Legal Troubles​

Card 1 of 4
Stephen K. Bannon, a onetime political adviser and chief strategist to former President Donald J. Trump, has faced several charges since leaving the White House in 2017. Here are some notable cases against him:
Federal fraud charges. In August 2020, Mr. Bannon was charged with defrauding donors who supported building a border wall long sought by Mr. Trump. Prosecutors said Mr. Bannon used funds raised for the construction of the wall on private land to pay for personal expenses. In January 2021, Mr. Trump pardoned Mr. Bannon before he could be brought to trial.
Contempt of Congress. In November 2021, Mr. Bannon was indicted by a federal grand jury on two counts of contempt of Congress, after his refusal to comply with a subpoena from the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. In a trial the following summer, a jury found Mr. Bannon guilty of both counts. He is scheduled to be sentenced in October.
New York State charges. Mr. Bannon surrendered to the Manhattan district attorney’s office and is expected to be charged with money laundering, conspiracy and fraud in connection with the border wall project. The Manhattan district attorney’s office began its own investigation into Mr. Bannon’s role in the project after he was pardoned by Mr. Trump.



Mr. Heaphy said he was “friendly” with Mr. Corcoran because they had worked together as federal prosecutors in the same office, and he worried about responding without witnesses.
Mr. Heaphy assembled two other top lawyers from the committee to listen to what Mr. Corcoran wanted. The Bannon lawyer proposed that the committee join a motion to dismiss the case in exchange for a pledge that Mr. Bannon produce documents that the committee had demanded under subpoena and sit for an interview — exactly what Mr. Bannon had refused to do for months.
Mr. Heaphy told Mr. Corcoran that the committee could not take such a position, and that the matter was now in the hands of the Justice Department.
Even after Mr. Bannon was found guilty of contempt of Congress in July, prosecutors told Judge Nichols, he still failed to disclose a single document to the committee or answer any of its questions.


“From the time he was initially subpoenaed, the defendant has shown his true reasons for total noncompliance have nothing to do with his purported respect for the Constitution, the rule of law or executive privilege,” prosecutors wrote, “and everything to do with his personal disdain for the members of Congress sitting on the committee and their effort to investigate the attack on our country’s peaceful transfer of power.”
Mr. Bannon had at first sought to defend himself by arguing that he could not comply with the subpoena because Mr. Trump had asserted executive privilege over his testimony. He also tried to argue that in disobeying the committee’s demands, he had merely been following the advice of his lawyers.
But in pretrial rulings, Judge Nichols swept aside those arguments, leaving Mr. Bannon with little defense against the accusation that he had received a subpoena from the House committee and simply chose to ignore it.
“It wasn’t optional, it wasn’t a request, and it wasn’t an invitation — it was mandatory,” a federal prosecutor said during opening statements at the trial. “The defendant decided he was above the law and didn’t have to follow the government’s orders like his fellow citizens.”
Mr. Bannon also faces separate charges in New York of defrauding people who sought to contribute to an organization that took donations for the construction of a wall along the southwestern border, one of Mr. Trump’s signature policy platforms.
In that case, which largely mirrored one that Mr. Bannon escaped through a presidential pardon last year, the Manhattan district attorney’s office charged him with fraud, money laundering and conspiracy.

What is up with that???? Why not ask for the max knowing the judge will go down. Now he will get time served and a week of probation.
 
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Reactions: cigaretteman
I’m just happy we get to throw the other side in prison as we wish. It’s great to live in more of an authoritarian type country where you can really stick it to whoever you disagree with politically.


Except thats not accurate at all (not a surprise considering the source tho). Criminals that were allowed to run rampant in for a 4 year window are finally being held accountable. It may SEEM like this is a one party affair, but you are merely seeing 4 years of Trump's swamp being chased down. It takes time. Im sure all the people who are breaking the law for the last 2 years will be prosecuted eventually. If there is an actual provable case to be had.
 
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Bannon’s lawyer, Evan Corcoran, seems to be the same ex federal prosecutor who is knee deep in trouble over the documents Donald Trump stole. I believe it was Corcoran who tried to get other lawyers to lie and say Trump had returned everything.
 
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A federal judge on Friday sentenced Stephen K. Bannon, a longtime adviser to former President Donald J. Trump who aided in the effort to overturn the 2020 election, to four months in prison for disobeying a subpoena from the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
Mr. Bannon, 68, was found guilty of two counts of contempt of Congress this summer after Judge Carl J. Nichols rejected an array of arguments offered by Mr. Bannon’s defense team, including that he was protected from being compelled to testify by executive privilege.
Mr. Bannon will remain free pending his appeal.
The sentence, coming a year after Mr. Bannon was held in contempt by the House, is two months short of what federal prosecutors had requested this week. They had accused Mr. Bannon, the onetime editor of the right-wing news outlet Breitbart, of having “pursued a bad-faith strategy of defiance and contempt” from the moment he received the subpoena seeking information about his knowledge of Mr. Trump’s efforts to reverse his electoral defeat.
“Others must be deterred from committing similar crimes,” said Judge Nichols, who also imposed a fine of $6,500 on Mr. Bannon.
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In a contentious exchange with the defense team before announcing a sentence, he said Mr. Bannon had shown “no remorse for his actions” and had yet to “demonstrate he has any intention of complying with the subpoena.”
In pronouncing sentence Judge Nichols dismissed Mr. Bannon’s claims that his refusal to testify was protected by executive privilege. But he also cited Mr. Bannon’s belated effort to reach an agreement with the committee, his service in the Navy, lack of a criminal history, and the unsettled judicial status of executive privilege as factors mitigating against a longer sentence.
Mr. Bannon, a rapid-talking provocateur who has used his daily internet radio show to skewer the government for prosecuting him, approached his sentencing with the same defiance that has characterized his attitude toward the congressional summons that prompted the case. He told reporters that he viewed President Biden as “illegitimate” as he entered Federal District Court in Washington, flanked by his lawyers.
After thanking reporters for showing up, he went on to claim that Democrats would face their “judgment day” in the coming midterm elections and urged all within earshot to oppose the Chinese Communist Party.
He sat impassively in a dark military-style jacket and an untucked blue shirt as the sentence was issued.



The government argued for the maximum penalty of six months. P.J. Cooney, the lead prosecutor, said Mr. Bannon had “thumbed his nose” at American democracy — and flouted the basic responsibilities incurred by witnesses who appeared at the courthouse every day.

“He showed his contempt for the criminal justice system, his contempt for the law and his contempt for Congress,” Mr. Cooney said, accusing Mr. Bannon of never “lifting a finger” to comply with his legal obligations to produce evidence — or simply show up when summoned to assert his right not to testify.
Mr. Bannon’s lead lawyer, David I. Schoen, who represented Mr. Trump during his second impeachment trial, reiterated many of the same themes he raised then. He cast Mr. Bannon as a courageous defender of executive authority rather than someone who simply did not want to obey a lawful legislative summons.
“Never at any time did Mr. Bannon believe in any way, shape or form that he was acting in any way that was unlawful or against the law,” Mr. Schoen said in a rambling hourlong speech in which he invoked the writings of James Madison, then veered off to slam a former Trump lawyer as “a thug” who had ripped him off.
Mr. Bannon and his lawyers quietly reached out to congressional staffers on the eve of the trial, with a belated offer of testimony if the government dropped the charges. It was rejected.
Mr. Schoen, whom Mr. Bannon once mocked on his radio show, recommended that he not spend any time in jail and instead receive probation. He argued that the Justice Department had declined to file indictments against two other former aides to Mr. Trump who had also disregarded subpoenas from the committee: Mark Meadows, his final chief of staff, and Dan Scavino Jr., a deputy chief of staff who oversaw Mr. Trump’s social media operations.
Mr. Schoen also claimed that all of Mr. Bannon’s actions were guided by the advice of his lawyers, including M. Evan Corcoran, who is also representing Mr. Trump in the Mar-a-Lago documents case.
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Mr. Bannon is not the only former Trump aide to be charged with disobeying a subpoena from the committee: Peter Navarro, the former White House trade adviser, was indicted in June on contempt of Congress charges.
He is scheduled to go on trial in Washington next month.
Members of the House Jan. 6 committee, who viewed Mr. Bannon as a central figure in several schemes aimed at unlawfully keeping Mr. Trump in power, said the sentence would discourage others from flouting legislative subpoenas.
Mr. Bannon has said he plans to appeal.
This is not the first time Mr. Bannon, who clashed with Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and other aides during a brief and tumultuous tenure as a senior White House adviser, has faced a reckoning in a federal court.
In August 2020, Mr. Bannon and three associates were charged with defrauding donors of more than a million dollars as part of online fund-raising scheme purportedly linked to Mr. Trump’s attempt to build a border wall with Mexico.
After Mr. Trump lost the election, Mr. Bannon began lobbying for a pardon, even as he participated in meetings to discuss ways to overturn the election. Mr. Trump pardoned him just hours before leaving office.
Still, Mr. Bannon faces separate charges in New York over his role in the fund-raising project. The Manhattan district attorney’s office has charged him with fraud, money laundering and conspiracy, a case that largely mirrors the one erased by the pardon.

 
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