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The Justice Department is asking a federal judge to sentence Steve Bannon, adviser to former President Donald Trump, to six months in prison and make him pay a $200,000 fine for his conviction on two counts of criminal contempt of Congress, according to a new court filing.
«From the moment that the Defendant, Stephen K. Bannon, accepted service of a subpoena from the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol, he has pursued a bad-faith strategy of defiance and contempt,» prosecutors said Monday. «The Committee sought documents and testimony from the Defendant relevant to a matter of national importance: the circumstances that led to a violent attack on the Capitol and disruption of the peaceful transfer of power. In response, the Defendant flouted the Committee’s authority and ignored the subpoena’s demands.»
The statement continued, «For his sustained, bad-faith contempt of Congress, the Defendant should be sentenced to six months’ imprisonment—the top end of the Sentencing Guidelines’ range—and fined $200,000—based on his insistence on paying the maximum fine rather than cooperate with the Probation Office’s routine pre-sentencing financial investigation.»
Bannon was found guilty in July of defying a subpoena from the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
He had been subpoenaed by the Jan. 6 panel for records and testimony in September 2021.
Bannon is set to be sentenced on Friday at the D.C. courthouse by federal judge Carl Nichols at 9 a.m. His lawyers are expected to submit their own sentencing memo Monday before noon.
In their sentencing recommendation, prosecutors outline in detail Bannon and his attorneys’ months-long campaign to resist cooperating with the Jan. 6 select committee’s investigation of the assault on the Capitol.
«From the time he was initially subpoenaed, the Defendant has shown that his true reasons for total noncompliance have nothing to do with his purported respect for the Constitution, the rule of law, or executive privilege, 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,» they say.
