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A US federal judge has ordered Steve Bannon, the right-wing agitator who became one of Donald Trump’s closest advisers, to surrender for prison by July 1 after being convicted of contempt of Congress.
The former chair of Breitbart News and ideological champion of Trump’s Maga movement was sentenced to serve four months and ordered to pay a fine of $6,500 after he refused to comply with a subpoena from the Congressional committee probing the January 6 2021 attack on the US Capitol by supporters of the former president.
“This is about shutting down the Maga movement, shutting down grass roots conservatives, shutting down president Trump,” Bannon said on Thursday outside the court in Washington. “There is not a prison built or a jail built that will ever shut me up.”
A protester shot back: “Your coup failed!”
The ruling comes a week after Trump became the first former US president convicted of a felony after being found guilty on 34 counts in a New York court, a verdict that has sent shockwaves through this year’s White House race.
Trump came to Bannon’s defence on Thursday, writing in a social media post: “It is a Total and Complete American Tragedy that the Crooked Joe Biden Department of Injustice is so desperate to jail Steve Bannon, and every other Republican, for that matter, for not SUBMITTING to the Unselect Committee of Political Thugs.”
Bannon’s prison order is also the latest legal setback to hit the Republican presidential candidate’s circle of advisers. Peter Navarro, a former top trade adviser to the ex-president, reported to prison in March after being convicted of contempt of Congress, on similar charges to Bannon’s.
On Tuesday, three Trump allies including Kenneth Chesebro, formerly an attorney for the ex-president’s campaign, were charged by the state of Wisconsin with conspiracy relating to efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election won by Joe Biden. Chesebro could not immediately be reached for comment.
Trump and many confidants, including his former lawyer Rudy Giuliani, were also charged by authorities in Georgia last year in a racketeering case that accused the former president and 18 co-defendants of trying to overturn the 2020 election. Chesebro was among the defendants who has pleaded guilty.
Bannon is set to face a separate trial in September after being charged with defrauding hundreds of thousands of people who donated to a crowdfunding campaign to raise money for a wall along the US-Mexico border. He has pleaded not guilty.
Carl Nichols, the judge presiding over Bannon’s contempt case, had previously halted his sentence while the defendant appealed against it. But an appellate court last month unanimously rejected Bannon’s challenges against the case, including the claim that his conduct was “affirmatively authorised by government officials”.
Federal prosecutors then swiftly asked Nichols to resume Bannon’s sentence. But his lawyers argued there was “no basis for considering the removal of the stay of the sentence pending appeal until the appeals process has fully run its course,” according to court filings.
Bannon’s legal team has claimed he believed he was protected under Trump’s executive privilege, even though Bannon had left his White House position as the then-president’s chief strategist in 2017.
However, government lawyers noted Bannon had refused to co-operate with the committee even after Trump had waived his executive privilege claim and that much of the evidence requested from Bannon was not privileged.
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