The wheels of justice may not turn quickly, but every so often they do throw a sharp curve. Steve Bannon, the former White House strategist who once served as the philosophical North Star of Trump’s political brand (or at the very least its salty compass), has found himself once again on the business end of a federal court verdict. On Thursday, a judge ruled that Bannon must report to prison by July 1 to finally begin serving his four-month sentence for contempt of Congress. Evidently ignoring a subpoena from a congressional committee investigating a violent attack on the nation’s Capitol does not come with a get-out-of-jail-free card, even if you loudly believe it should.
U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols, himself appointed by former President Trump, concluded that Bannon had exhausted his appeals and essentially ran out of procedural rope. The ruling came after appeals courts rejected Bannon’s parade of objections which seemed to suggest that complying with congressional subpoenas was merely optional for the right kind of political operative. Bannon, who was convicted way back in 2022 for stiff-arming both a deposition and a request for documents, has spent the intervening time as both a cause célèbre and a podcast juggernaut, using every platform short of semaphore to rail against what he calls the “deep state.”
His lawyers, apparently still pinging off the faint hope that one final appeal will burst through court doors like a last-minute cinematic reprieve, have vowed to take his case to the Supreme Court. At the very least, this will keep Bannon in the news, which is likely his idea of a consolation prize second only to never setting foot inside a federal penitentiary.
The case at hand is a relic of a once-crowded field of investigations into Trumpworld’s greatest hits. The House committee investigating the January 6 attack quite specifically asked Bannon to testify about conversations he had in the days before the Capitol riot. Bannon responded with an enthusiastic no, then pointed to executive privilege like it was a magic shield rather than a legal doctrine with rules and boundaries. Unfortunately for him, the judiciary disagreed, and inched him closer to that fateful day when orange jumpsuits are no longer just a fashion statement in cable newsroom graphics.
Bannon is now poised to become the first figure from Trump’s inner circle to serve actual jail time for refusing to cooperate with the January 6 probe, a milestone that is either deeply symbolic or impressively futile, depending on your opinion of subpoenas and their enforceability amid political theatre.
Still, one must admire a man who faces prison with the defiance normally reserved for revolutionaries and reality television contestants. As for what comes next, Bannon’s team will likely try everything short of building a time machine to halt or delay the inevitable, but for now, the countdown to July 1 has begun in earnest.
After all, summer incarceration is still technically summer.