WASHINGTON – Former Trump counselor Steve Bannon must report to jail on Monday after the Supreme Court rejected his last-minute bid to avoid his four-month prison sentence for defying subpoenas from a House committee on Jan. 6.
Bannon was convicted in Washington nearly two years ago, in July 2022, on two counts of contempt of Congress and sentenced to four months in prison in October 2022. U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols had suspended his sentence while he appealed his conviction, which was dismissed in May. Nichols subsequently ordered Bannon to report to prison by July 1, saying there was no reason to continue to delay the sentence. An appeals court subsequently rejected Bannon’s appeal of the decision, leaving only the Supreme Court to help him avoid prison time.
Bannon was charged with contempt of Congress after he rejected the commission’s Jan. 6 request for documents and testimony as part of its investigation into former President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election and cling to power in the run-up to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. Bannon’s attorney told the Supreme Court that he was relying on the advice of counsel and said he was waiting for issues regarding executive privilege to be resolved. But as federal prosecutors noted in their 2022 sentencing memo, there was no operational claim to executive privilege, since Bannon was part of the Trump administration years earlier, and not during the time frame under investigation by the Jan. 6 commission.
Former Trump adviser Peter Navarro, who was sentenced to four months in prison on the same charges, is completing his sentence after reporting to prison in March.
Bannon, who is 70, has already been assigned an inmate number by the federal Bureau of Prisons: 05635-509.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
