How Steve Bannon could quickly end up indicted on additional felony counts
Steve Bannon is being arrested tomorrow – or depending on your time zone, later today. If he gets out on bail or house arrest, that’s just fine and dandy. The Feds can then monitor his communications and hope to catch him committing witness tampering etc. Then they can hit him with additional charges, which places more pressure him to flip. It’s just how it works.
To that end, the Feds don’t always ask the judge for pretrial incarceration, because they want someone like Bannon free to get caught committing more serious crimes. If this happens, the doomsday pundits will label the DOJ “weak.” But that’s total ignorance about the process.
Put another way: do you want Bannon to just face the two current felony counts, or do you want him to pick up another three or four felony counts for tampering, obstruction, seeking dirty foreign money to pay his lawyers, and so on? The latter is so much better for us.
“But if Bannon knows his communications are being surveilled, he won’t commit any more crimes!” Career criminals are creatures of habit. They can’t help themselves. Time and again you see them quickly get tripped up in this way while awaiting trial. The kicker is that not only do they get hit with additional felony counts, the conditions of their pretrial release are violated, so they then have to rot in jail while awaiting trial.
