The trial featured two days of testimony. Prosecutors questioned only two witnesses. The defence called none.
The conviction may strengthen the committee’s position as it seeks to secure testimony and documents from others in Trump’s orbit. Trump last year asked his associates not to cooperate with the committee, accusing it of trying to hurt him politically, and several of them rebuffed the panel.
Rioters stand outside the US Capitol in Washington on January 6, 2021.Credit:AP
Another former Trump adviser, Peter Navarro, was separately charged with contempt of Congress in June for refusing to appear for a committee deposition. Navarro’s trial is scheduled for November.
The Justice Department opted not to charge two other Trump associates, Mark Meadows and Daniel Scavino, for defying the committee despite a House vote recommending it. Unlike Bannon, Meadows turned over some communications to the committee.
The committee could make multiple referrals to the Justice Department seeking criminal charges against Trump himself, according to its vice chair Liz Cheney.
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The main prosecution witness was Kristin Amerling, a top committee staffer who testified that Bannon spurned deadlines to respond to the September 2021 subpoena, sought no extensions and offered an invalid rationale for his defiance – a claim by Trump involving a legal doctrine called executive privilege that can keep certain presidential communications confidential.
The Justice Department charged Bannon last November after the Democratic-led House voted the prior month to hold him in contempt. Bannon separately was charged in 2020 with defrauding donors to a private fundraising effort to boost Trump’s project to build a wall along the US-Mexican border. Trump pardoned Bannon before that case went to trial.
A pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol and attacked police with batons, sledgehammers, flag poles, Taser devices, chemical irritants, metal pipes, rocks, metal guard rails and other weapons in a failed effort to block congressional certification of his 2020 election loss to Democrat Joe Biden.
The committee has said Bannon spoke with Trump at least twice on the day before the attack and attended a planning meeting at a Washington hotel. It played a clip of Bannon saying on his right-wing podcast the day before the attack that “all hell is going to break loose tomorrow.”
The judge limited the scope of the case Bannon’s team could present to jurors, moves one of his lawyers said “badly stymied” the defence. Bannon was barred from arguing that he believed his communications with Trump were subject to executive privilege and was prohibited from arguing he relied on legal advice from an attorney in refusing to comply.
Bannon’s defence argued that he believed the subpoena deadlines were flexible and subject to negotiation between his attorney and the committee. In an 11th-hour reversal with the trial looming, Bannon this month announced a willingness to testify in a public hearing before the committee, an offer that prosecutors said did not change the fact he had already broken the law.
Reuters
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