Steve Bannon, the rightwing podcaster and vociferous Donald Trump cheerleader, has been ordered to surrender to authorities by 1 July to begin a four-month prison sentence for contempt of Congress.
The order was issued by US district judge Carl Nichols – who was appointed to the bench by Trump – after he accepted prosecutors’ argument that Bannon should serve his sentence following the rejection of his appeal last month by a three-judge panel.
Bannon had fought the move to incarcerate him, contending that he was ready to go to the full US court of appeals and even to the supreme court to contest his conviction.
He was convicted in 2022 of two counts of contempt of Congress – one for failing to appear for a deposition of the House of Representatives’ select committee investigating the 6 January 2021 insurrection; and the other for refusing to turn over documents related to his role in Trump’s attempt to overturn his 2020 presidential election loss to Joe Biden.
Another close Trump ally, the former White House trade adviser Peter Navarro, is already serving a four-month term in a minimum-security facility in Florida after being convicted of a similar contempt offence relating to the January 6 inquiry. He has reportedly spent the time inside putting the finishing touches to a book on a future Trump administration’s agenda.
The confinement of Bannon – who served as White House chief strategist for the first seven months of Trump’s presidency – is likely to further fuel the rightwing Republican narrative of a justice department “weaponised” by Biden for the purposes of pursuing his predecessor and his allies.
There is no evidence of Biden’s involvement in the legal cases against Trump – who faces a further 54 criminal charges after being convicted of 34 felony counts by a New York court last week – or his supporters.
Bannon, in an interview this week, called for the prosecution and jailing in a future Trump presidency of figures such as Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney who led the prosecution of the former president that produced his conviction for falsifying documents in an effort to hide the payment of hush money to an adult film actor.
Being imprisoned from next month would mean Bannon missing the Republican national convention, which starts on 15 July and at which Trump is due to be officially nominated as the GOP presidential candidate. It may also result in the suspension of his War Room podcast, which regularly features interviews with figures on the right of the political spectrum.
Bannon, 70, has previously described himself as a “Leninist”, in reference to Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, leader of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, whose career in revolutionary politics included serving a year in prison after being arrested for sedition against the country’s Tsarist regime before being exiled for three years in Siberia.
