WASHINGTON – Former Donald Trump counselor Steve Bannon is asking the Supreme Court to keep him out of prison, where he will report on July 1, two years after his conviction on contempt of Congress charges.
Bannon filed an emergency application for continued release with the Supreme Court on Friday morning after a federal appeals court denied his request for release pending an appeal of his convictions.
Bannon was convicted nearly two full years ago, in July 2022, and U.S. District Court Judge Carl Nichols, a Trump-appointed judge, sentenced him to four months in prison in October 2022. Earlier this month, Nichols ordered Bannon to report to prison on July 1. , which said there was no further basis to delay the sentence after a panel of appeals court judges upheld Bannon’s conviction in May.
On Thursday evening, a federal appeals court rejected Bannon’s bid to stay out of prison, leaving the Supreme Court as his last option.
Not long after he filed, the Supreme Court asked the Justice Department to file a response to Bannon’s request by June 26 at 4 p.m.
The case arose after Bannon rejected House committee subpoenas for testimony and documents. Bannon had previously worked in the White House in 2017, but had been out of that position for a long time, working as a podcaster during the period the committee investigated — when Trump lost the 2020 presidential election and was trying to cling to power. Trump’s federal criminal case related to his efforts to halt the transfer of power has been put on hold while the Supreme Court decides whether the former president is protected from prosecution by total immunity.
In their filing with the Supreme Court, Bannon’s attorneys argued that he “relied in good faith on the advice of his attorney” not to respond to the commission’s Jan. 6 subpoena. But prosecutors successfully argued in their 2022 sentencing memo that a claim of executive privilege “could not possibly have been wholly non-compliant by the defendant; the defendant was a private citizen who had not worked in the White House in years; the demands of the subpoena concerned only documents and information. that were not related to the defendant’s tenure there; several categories of the subpoena were completely unrelated to communications with the former president.
At the time, Bannon “announced and celebrated his opposition to the subpoena,” prosecutors wrote, adding that Bannon had “used his media platform to mock Committee members through offensive name-calling, and the investigation of to mock the committee with rhetoric that could lead to violence. , and ridiculing the criminal justice system through exaggerations.”
Former Trump adviser Peter Navarro, who was also convicted of identical contempt of Congress charges, petitioned the Supreme Court earlier this year to free him while he appealed his conviction. That appeal was dismissed by Chief Justice John Roberts before being dismissed by the full court.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
