There's no reason why Steve Bannon shouldn't already paying society's debt behind bars, the government says.
“This Court recently denied a similar application for release by another defendant who engaged in complete defiance of a subpoena issued by the same committee that subpoenaed applicant,” Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar wrote in a court filing first reported by NBC News Wednesday. “For reasons set forth in more detail below, the same result is warranted here.”
The "applicant" is former President Donald Trump's trade adviser Peter Navarro, who was also convicted of contempt of Congress and has been imprisoned since March.
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Nearly two years ago, Bannon, 70, who served as former President Donald Trump's White House strategist before being forced out to eventually launch his "War Room" podcast, — had been convicted on two counts of contempt of Congress for defying subpoenas from the House Jan. 6 committee.
Like Navarro, Bannon was sentenced to four months in prison.
But Bannon has managed to delay incarceration by appealing his conviction and is currently lobbing an eleventh hour reprieve from the Supreme Court to intervene and prevent his July 1 surrender to a low-security federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut, that was the inspiration by an ex-inmate's memoir that inspired the Netflix hit show “Orange is the New Black.”
In his Supreme Court filing, Bannon wrote that he "relied in good faith on his attorney's advice" to blow off the House Jan. 6 committee's subpoena for fear of breaching executive privilege.
However, Bannon was a civilian and had been long gone from the White House when he was ordered to appear before lawmakers investigating the deadly siege on the U.S. Capitol back on Jan. 6, 2021.
Bannon’s lawyers already tried to win over the D.C. U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals by arguing against putting the advisor behind bars “for the four-month period leading up to the November election, when millions of Americans look to him for information on important campaign issues."
