Steve Bannon is about to be in a world of hurt
Often times a coincidence really is just a coincidence, and not evidence of conspiracy or coordination or causality. But even in such case, coincidences can be delightfully grand. Take, for instance, the long running federal criminal case against Steve Bannon. Or perhaps we should say long suffering federal criminal case, given that Donald Trump torpedoed it several months ago with a federal pardon.
Federal prosecutors spent months refusing to drop the federal charges against Bannon, even though the pardon was going to make it impossible to get the charges to stick. Then suddenly the judge in the case dismissed the charges yesterday. And a few hours later it was revealed that the Manhattan District Attorney had empaneled a grand jury to criminally indict Donald Trump and others.
This matters greatly when you consider that two months ago the Washington Post revealed that the Manhattan DA was targeting Steve Bannon for criminal indictment on state charges. Not only that, in what is now becoming a familiar refrain, the New York Attorney General’s office had begun assisting with the criminal case. And now the Manhattan DA has empaneled a special grand jury for indictment purposes, which makes clear that the DA really is going to bring a boatload of criminal charges against people in the Trump world.
Steve Bannon will be criminally indicted in New York. Not only that, perhaps the plan is to indict Bannon now in the hope of getting him to cut a deal and help with Donald Trump’s indictment. Either way, Bannon is going down.
It should be noted that while the existing federal criminal charges against Steve Bannon were blown up by the Trump pardon, that pardon was flimsy in its wording and too narrow in its scope. The Feds can still bring other, unrelated federal charges against Bannon if they choose to. We’ll see. But it’s clear that Bannon is in for a world of hurt in New York, along with Trump and others.
