This criminal trial is going rather badly for Steve Bannon
When prosecutors are trying to get a criminal target to crack, there’s a reason they love bringing charges on process crimes like obstruction or perjury or contempt. When the evidence is there, the cases are really straightforward, so juries rarely lose the plot and nearly always decide to convict.
Steve Bannon is handling his contempt charge rather differently than most criminal targets. Instead of taking it as a sign that he’s screwed and needs to cut a cooperating plea deal against Donald Trump, Bannon has decided to go to trial. His flurry of pretrial motions suggested that he thought he could BS his way out of ever going to trial. But the DOJ came prepared with responses to all of Bannon’s motions, and so the judge shot it all down.
Bannon then began using every flimsy excuse in the book to beg the judge for a multi-month delay in his trial, then a two week delay, then a delay of a few days, but the judge shot him down each time. Bannon seemed to think he could use his status as a controversial figure to prevent a jury from being seated against him, but the jury was seated in a day.
Now we’re a couple days into the trial, and the DOJ’s case is turning out to be every bit as straightforward as one would have expected. Bannon knew he’d been subpoenaed by Congress, he didn’t respond by the deadline, he didn’t ask for an extension, the end.
For any of this to have gone Bannon’s way, he’d have needed his pretrial antics to have worked. He and his attorney still have the opportunity to play games when they present their defense. But the judge already threw out nearly every possible phony defense that Bannon could have tried. And today the judge warned Bannon that no circus antics will be tolerated – meaning the judge is likely to shut Bannon’s side down the second they try anything during their defense presentation.
Steve Bannon is now on track to be convicted as soon as this week, depending on how long the jury takes to come back with a guilty verdict. If you’re having trouble figuring out Bannon’s overall strategy here, don’t worry, he has no idea what he’s doing either.
Bannon must have truly thought he could outsmart federal prosecutors and a federal judge, simply by throwing the kind of nonsense at the wall that he usually throws around on his podcast. Instead he’s about to be convicted and sent to prison.
Bannon’s prison sentence won’t be a long one; sentencing guidelines for contempt are rather short. But there are indications that the DOJ may end up bringing more severe charges against him. It wouldn’t be shocking if the DOJ brings those charges while Bannon is in prison, in order to pressure him to finally cut a deal against Trump. But Bannon may simply be too delusional to understand that he’s now well past the time where he could have gotten maximum leniency in exchange for cutting a deal.
