House votes to hold Steve Bannon in contempt for snubbing Jan. 6 committee
The House voted to hold Steve Bannon, a longtime ally and aide to former President Trump, in criminal contempt of Congress on Thursday afternoon after he defied a subpoena from a committee investigating the deadly Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection.
The House of Representatives approved the contempt citation mostly along party lines, 229-202 with nine Republicans joining all Democrats in voting in favor of the measure.
“Mr. Bannon stands alone in his defiance, and we will not stand for it,” committee chairman Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) said. “We will not allow anyone to derail our work, because our work is too important.”
Trump critic Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) said Congress needs to know what happened on Jan. 6 so it can decide if new laws are needed to prevent a future president from seeking to use violence to stay in power.
“While the attack was underway, President Trump knew it was happening (but) he took no immediate action to stop it,” Cheney said. “This appears to be a supreme dereliction of duty.”
But there’s still considerable uncertainty about whether the Justice Department will prosecute Bannon. Attorney General Merrick Garland gave no hints during a separate House hearing on Thursday.
“The Department of Justice will do what it always does ... apply the facts and the law and make a decision consistent with the principles of prosecution,” Garland said in response to a question from Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) at a congressional hearing.
The Jan. 6 select committee panel earlier voted to recommend the contempt charges against Bannon. It cited reports that the former White House political supremo spoke with Trump before the insurrection, promoted the protests and boasted that “all hell” was going to break loose.
“(Bannon) must have been aware of, and may well have been involved in the planning of everything that played out on that day,” Cheney said. “The American people deserve to know what he knew and what he did.”
Bannon has made the flimsy legal claim that Trump’s executive privilege allows him to snub the committee, even though he had long since left government in a previous spat with Trump.
House Minority Leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) called the subpoena “invalid.”
“Issuing invalid subpoenas weakens our power, not if somebody votes against it,” McCarthy said at a press conference.
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) told reporters that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green (R-Ga.) started shouting at Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wy.) during the vote.
“I was just talking to Miss Cheney and then she [MTG] starts screaming at Liz. I can’t remember exactly what she said. But they got into a back and forth about Jewish space lasers.”
Trump himself has continued a drumbeat of verbal attacks on the committee and increasingly defending his supporters who stormed the Capitol in a failed bid to keep him in power despite his election loss to President Biden.
“The insurrection took place on November 3, Election Day. January 6 was the Protest!” Trump wrote in an email message.
Bannon is alone in completely defying his subpoena, while more than a dozen other Trump aides and other witnesses are at least negotiating with the panel.
Another option available to Congress might be to try to imprison defiant witnesses. Called “inherent contempt,” the process was used in the country’s early years but hasn’t been employed in almost a century.
With News Wire Services
