Steve Bannon’s endgame just got really weird
Steve Bannon is now just days away from the start of his criminal trial for contempt of Congress. If convicted, he’ll be sent to prison for perhaps a year or two. This may be the least of Bannon’s problems, because the DOJ seems to be building a broader criminal case against Bannon. He’s tried to use the proceedings in his contempt case to force the DOJ to give him advance information about what else it has against him, but he’s failed in these efforts.
Now that Bannon is facing the prospect of imminent conviction and the start of a prison sentence, he’s making some rather weird endgame moves. According to the Washington Post, Bannon appears to have convinced Donald Trump to waive executive privilege so that Bannon can testify to the January 6th Committee, which Bannon believes would then make his contempt of Congress charge moot – thus saving him from conviction and prison.
If that sounds convoluted, that’s because it is. For one thing, there was never any executive privilege to begin with, because Bannon stopped working at the White House years before January 6th. But because Bannon has no viable defense at trial, he’s stuck relying on an imaginary privilege claim that the jury will likely just laugh at. Still, if Bannon begins negotiating with the committee and it falls through, he could be further weakening his own defense.
It’s not clear why Bannon thinks the letter would help him in all this. But given that he’s cornered and on the verge of prison, it’s not surprising that his strategy is becoming incoherent. Still, if Bannon does testify to the committee, and invokes the Fifth Amendment in response to any questions that could incriminate him, he could get himself off the hook for contempt. But that’s when his legal troubles might get a lot worse.
There’s a reason Bannon didn’t want to testify to begin with, and it’s that he didn’t want to further incriminate himself in relation to January 6th, and make it easier for the DOJ to nail him on underlying criminal charges. If Bannon does decide to testify to the committee in order to keep himself out of prison for now, he risks unwittingly incriminating himself with answers to questions that he thinks are harmless, but end up helping give the DOJ context for how to nail him.
Of course that’s a risk that Bannon now has to run. If he gets convicted now for contempt and goes to prison for a year, he won’t be able to keep using his podcast to raise money for his criminal defense fund for once the bigger criminal charges come in. Bannon is running the risk of helping to send himself to prison for a much longer sentence down the road, in a last ditch effort to temporarily avoid prison for now. But then people who are this thoroughly cornered tend to be left with nothing but bad options to choose from.
