Looks like Steve Bannon is going to prison after all
Here’s the thing about Steve Bannon: he just keeps cooperating with Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Early in 2018, he reportedly gave Mueller dozens of hours of cooperative testimony. He even hired the same attorney as other notable cooperators like Don McGahn. So when we learned this week that Mueller brought Bannon back in for another round of testimony, it was almost looking like Bannon just might manage to cooperate his way into getting off the hook. As it turns out, not so much.
Newly published emails from the New York Times reveal that while Steve Bannon was running the Donald Trump campaign, he knew all about Roger Stone’s antics with WikiLeaks and Julian Assange, as did Bannon’s former publication Breitbart. So much for the notion that Stone was acting as some kind of windmill tilting lone ranger whose actions were insulated from the Trump campaign. The emails show that Bannon wasn’t all that enthused about what Stone was doing, but that he nonetheless knew about it.
That’s going to make it really difficult for Steve Bannon to sell the notion that he didn’t have his hands dirty when it came to Trump-Russia criminal collusion. He was the head of the Trump campaign, and he knew that Trump’s best friend Stone was illegally conspiring with Russian hackers and Russian puppets in Trump’s name. That makes him a participant in a criminal conspiracy.
In that sense, Steve Bannon is being smart by cooperating as thoroughly as he can. But based on what we now know that he knew, it’s difficult to imagine a scenario in which a plea deal or cooperation agreement keeps him out of prison entirely. There is every reason to expect that Roger Stone will go to prison; now it’s fair to ask if Bannon might end up being his cellmate. The question now is whether Bannon told Donald Trump about the collusion at the time, and whether he can prove he did.
