Former Trump advisor Stephen K. Bannon, host of the popular War Room show on Real America’s Voice, must report to jail by July 1, 2024 after losing his appeal in Washington, D.C., United States District Court Judge Carl Nichols ruled on Thursday, June, 6, 2024.
Steve Bannon requested to stay his sentence while he attempts to push his appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.
If this takes place Bannon will be out of commission during the most important campaign period before the U.S. 2024 elections.
Transcript
David Schoen: How you doing?
Steve Bannnon: Hey. Hey, guys. Thanks for sticking around.
David Schoen: Yeah a so, as you know, the judge today issued a surrender date of July 1st in order to let us appeal to a higher court, meaning the full Court of Appeals in DC and or the United States Supreme Court. As I said in the courtroom, this is an issue that legal scholars have said, from day one, is a case that has to go before the United States Supreme Court.
The Lecavalier case from 1961, as this judge found earlier in this case, cannot be reconciled with either the traditional notion of willfulness in the criminal law or the modern definition. There have been a number of cases just in the last few years that have flesh. This out and made clear that in this country we don’t send anyone to prison if they believed that they were doing something that complied with the law. In other words, with Justice Alito and Justice Thomas said in 2019, “where Congress wants to require proof that a criminal defendant knew his conduct was illegal, it specifies that the violation must be willful”. In the context of this statute, a misdemeanor Contempt of Congress, different from every single other statute in our jurisprudence, the court found that willful, In 1961, the court found that willful, willfully make default just means did you get a subpoena and did you comply with it? That’s not what willful means as a matter of law in the criminal context. And here the case is complicated because former President Trump invoked Executive Privilege and reaffirmed that, before the trial started, he had invoked Executive Privilege.
This case raises a dynamic separation of powers issue. We know from years and decades of case law that the president and a former president has the authority to invoke executive privilege. It’s his prerogative, his or her prerogative. One day may be her prerogative, but it’s his prerogative to invoke, and is presumptively valid when invoked. It’s not for Congress to determine whether it was an appropriate invocation or otherwise. And Congress cannot be the arbiter of how to respond to that. Only a court can be. That’s the McGahn case. Courts have spoken clearly about this.
The judge’s decision today cannot be reconciled with his earlier comments in the case that Lecavalier was wrongly decided, and what he said today was, he acknowledged, and the government had argued, that this panel in Mr. Bannon’s case didn’t have the authority to overrule Lecavalier.
So how on earth can you find that there’s no longer a substantial question when they never even considered the modern jurisprudence? The decision has it wrong, factually, in many, many ways. It’s a horrible decision that overlooks facts in the record. But beyond all that, the fundamental principle of law here that’s got to be vitiated in the United States Supreme Court is that willfully in the criminal conduct context means that you knew you did something wrong. The unequivocal evidence in this case, without any dispute, is that Mr. Bannon never got the subpoena, his lawyer got the subpoena, and his lawyer told him, an executive privilege has been invoked, President Trump confirmed that, and his lawyer told him that when executive privilege has been invoked, you may not, as a matter of law, comply with this subpoena. It’s not your privilege to waive, and he offered the committee an out. He said if the committee works out privilege with Mr. Trump, Bannon will comply fully. If the committee goes to a judge and a judge says either privilege doesn’t apply or it doesn’t extend this broadly, Mr. Bannon will comply fully.
The committee only went criminal for their publicity reasons and for their political agenda, and you can see that from every statement they made.
And I’m gonna say one more thing about this, because this is another issue. The committee, the January 6th committee was composed and engaged in conduct that violated the House rules without any question. There was never any ranking minority member, which was an essential part, as were other parts, of the resolution creating it.
My hope is that BLAG, the Bilateral Advisory Group in Congress, will be convened by the Speaker, and he will declare that, once and for all, that the January 6th Committee violated the House rules and that their conduct and their actions and subpoenas issued by them were not lawful subpoenas. That’s what they should do. They talked about it day in and day out, that the committee wasn’t properly composed and violated the rules. For the integrity of the House rules. I call on Speaker Johnson to simply convene BLAG and make that position clear as a matter of law. BLAG speaks for the House in legal matters. Thank you.
Bannon: Okay, thanks. I’ve got great lawyers, and we’re going to go all the way to the Supreme court if we have to, but I want to say something specifically about the Justice Department. Merrick Garland, Lisa Monaco, the entire Justice Department, they’re not going to shut up Trump. They’re not going to shut up Navarro. They’re not going to shut up Bannon. And they’re certainly not going to shut up MAGA. If you look right here, you reporters, in the two and a half or three years we’ve been here, look at the rise of MAGA. Look at the rise of Donald Trump. If the election was held today, according to Harry Enten over at CNN, President Trump would win in a landslide.
All of this, besides the major legal issues that have to be addressed, all of this is about one thing. This is about shutting down the MAGA movement, shutting down grassroots conservatives, shutting down President Trump. Not only are we winning, we are going to prevail and every number and every poll shows that. There’s nothing that can shut me up, and nothing that will shut me up. There’s not a prison, there’s not a prison, there’s not a prison built, there is not a prison built, or a jail built that will ever shut me up. All victory to MAGA. We’re going to win this. We’re going to win at the Supreme Court. And more importantly, we’re going to win on November 5th, and all, in an mmazing landslide with the Senate, the House and also Donald J. Trump back as President, United States.
Thank you very much.
