The thing everyone is missing about Steve Bannon going to prison
Today the appeals court upheld Steve Bannon’s four month prison sentence for contempt of Congress. There are one or two more nuisance filings he can still make, but they won’t buy him more than a few weeks at most. Bannon is now going to prison – and there’s a lesson in here that we should all pay close attention to.
The only reason Bannon was able to delay his prison sentence was that it was so short to begin with. His argument was that since it would take more than four months for the appeal to play out, he was at risk of serving his entire sentence, only for the sentence to then be overturned. Now that his appeal has played out, he’s going to prison.
More to the point, Bannon will now spend most or all of the remainder of the 2024 election cycle behind bars. This puts a serious damper on his ability to carry out whatever election antics he was hoping to get involved in. It will also make it very difficult for Bannon to spend the election lining his own pockets. It’s hard to get your podcast audience to send you money when you’re locked up and can’t do your podcast, right?
So Bannon would have been smarter to just serve his four month sentence back when he was first convicted and get it over with. It’s the latest reminder that Bannon is very much the opposite of smart. He’s a guy who digs himself a hole, then labels himself savvy for crawling out of it, and somehow gets the media (on both sides) to portray him as a political genius.
But the larger point here is that this is just the beginning for Bannon. He’s also set to go on criminal trial in New York this September for his “build the wall” scam. So Bannon is now in a position where he’s set to be in federal prison while he’s on criminal trial at the state level. Maybe the dates will line up such that Bannon is already out of prison by the time his trial starts. But it’s entirely possible that he’ll have to do his trial prep while in prison. And this is all because he didn’t just serve his four month sentence last year and get it over with.
Bannon is likely to be convicted in his New York trial. It’s centered on the kinds of serious felonies that come with multi-year prison sentences. So this time around the judge isn’t going to let Bannon sit home while he’s appealing. In other words Bannon is now on track to go from federal prison, to criminal trial, to state prison.
It’s also worth pointing out that even if Trump were to somehow win in November, he still wouldn’t be able to pardon Bannon on these state charges in New York. So Steve Bannon’s life now consists of prison, trial, and prison. He’s seventy years old and seemingly in poor health, so he may never get out.
So much for the notion that people like Steve Bannon know what they’re doing, or know how to play the system, or are “never going to prison no matter what.” Steve Bannon will be in federal prison within weeks – and he might well spend the rest of his life in state prison. Bannon doesn’t have a magic wand, and neither does Trump.
