Donald Trump’s former adviser and far-right podcaster Steve Bannon must surrender to prison to begin a four-month sentence on July 1 after he defied a subpoena to testify to a congressional committee investigating the January 6 attack on the US Capitol.
Bannon raged against his sentence after his brief federal court appearance on Thursday while a protester shouted out that he is “going to jail” and labeled him a “coup plotter” outside the courthouse in Washington DC.
“This is about shutting down the MAGA movement, shutting down grassroots conservatives, shutting down President Trump,” Bannon told reporters. “Not only are we winning, we are going to prevail … There is nothing that can shut me up, and nothing that will shut me up.”
Last month, federal prosecutors asked the judge overseeing his case to reverse a stay of his sentence, arguing that “there is no legal basis” to block him from prison after an appeals court upheld his conviction.
On Thursday, Trump-appointed US District Judge Carl Nichols granted that request.
The former White House aide said he will try to take his case to the US Supreme Court.
“There’s not a prison built or jail built that will shut me up,” he said.
Bannon’s four-month prison sentence mirrors the one handed down to former Trump aide Peter Navarro, who also refused to comply with a subpoena from the House select committee investigating the Capitol attack.
Bannon was initially sentenced in October 2022, but the sentence was put on hold pending his appeal. That conviction was upheld last month.
Bannon was found in contempt of Congress in two instances – including refusing to sit for an interview with the January 6 committee, and then refusing to provide documents about his efforts supporting Trump’s campaign to overturn the former president’s election loss in 2020.
A final committee report found that the Trump campaign supported a “multi-part conspiracy” to reverse his election loss, while then-President Trump failed to stop a mob of his supporters from launching an assault inside the halls of Congress to do it by force.
Trump is criminally charged in Georgia and in federal court in Washington DC for his efforts to subvert the results of the 2020 election.
Bannon will be the second person from within Trump’s inner circle to see the inside of a jail in connection with the Capitol attack, and will be among half a dozen Trump allies who have served time for obstruction, campaign finance violations, fraud and other charges surrounding his 2016 campaign and his real estate empire.
He is also due in a Manhattan courtroom on September 23 for a trial on money laundering and conspiracy charges. That presiding judge is New York Justice Juan Merchan, who recently presided over Trump’s conviction on 34 felony charges of falsifying business records.
On his Truth Social, the former president called Bannon’s detention a “total and complete American tragedy” and demanded that members of the January 6 committee be prosecuted.
He falsely claimed that they had “deleted and destroyed evidence” that remains publicly available.
“The unAmerican Weaponization of our Law Enforcement has reached levels of Illegality never thought possible before,” he wrote. “INDICT THE UNSELECT J6 COMMITTEE FOR ILLEGALLY DELETING AND DESTROYING ALL OF THEIR ‘FINDINGS!’”
