Down goes Steve Bannon. Now what?
Now that Steve Bannon has been referred for criminal prosecution, what happens next? Garland is a policy guy, and DOJ policy in any federal criminal case is to bring indictments if and when they feel there’s an 85-90% chance of conviction.
So if the DOJ feels the case it’s been handed by the House is already enough to get a conviction, things will move fast (relatively speaking). If the DOJ feels it needs to dig deeper for more evidence to prove Bannon’s bad faith toward the subpoena, it’ll take a lot longer.
Ask anyone who’s ever worked for (or with or against) the DOJ, and they’ll tell you that the above scenarios are what will play out within the DOJ. Meanwhile, pundits who are just mugging for the TV cameras and Twitter retweets will paint a different, fictional narrative.
The worst of pundits will flood us with tripe about how Garland is hiding under his desk trying to decide whether he has a spine, or whatever superhero / supervillain drama they can invent to boost ratings.
Meanwhile the indictment decision against Steve Bannon will simply come down solely to odds of conviction at trial. There’s a reason the Feds sometimes take a long time to bring indictments, and why people who have been federally indicted usually end up cutting a deal. The Feds only indict you if and when they’ve got you nailed to the wall. That’s as true for Bannon as it is for anyone else. The rest is just pundit-driven noise.
