A federal judge has rejected an attempt from the Department of Justice to toss out a case against Steve Bannon, who has already served a four-month prison sentence for defying a congressional investigation into January 6.
In February, Washington, D.C. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro signed a brief one-page motion asking the judge overseeing the case to dismiss it altogether. “The government has determined in its prosecutorial discretion that dismissal of this criminal case is in the interests of justice,” the filing says.
District Judge Carl Nichols, however, said Wednesday that Pirro’s bare-bones statement isn’t enough.
Her motion is “insufficient to justify” throwing out a case, and the Justice Department will need to try again with a new motion that articulates why, exactly, the government wants to abandon the case, Nichols wrote.
Bannon, Trump’s former adviser and a longtime far-right media figure, was held in contempt of Congress for defying subpoenas to testify to a congressional committee investigating the January 6 attack. He failed to convince several federal judges and the Supreme Court to let him stay out of jail while appealing.
A federal grand jury found Bannon guilty of contempt in two instances, including refusing to sit for an interview with the committee, and then refusing to provide documents about his efforts supporting Trump’s campaign to subvert the results of the 2020 presidential election.
He was initially sentenced in October 2022 and his conviction was upheld on a first round of appeals in 2024.
Before reporting to a low-security prison in Danbury, Connecticut, to begin his four-month prison sentence in 2024, Bannon called himself a “political prisoner.”
“I am proud to go to prison,” he said while still streaming to his War Room broadcast. “This is what it takes to stand up to tyranny.”
Trump had previously pardoned Bannon in a separate case after he was arrested on charges of conspiracy to commit mail fraud and money laundering in connection with a fundraising scheme for a U.S-Mexico border wall, sparing him a federal trial.
Last year, Bannon avoided jail time by pleading guilty to defrauding donors as part of a plea arrangement in New York on state-level money laundering and conspiracy charges in connection with the scheme.
But the Trump administration — which continues to try to rewrite the history of the Capitol attack and undermine the findings of the prosecutors and committees surrounding it — has argued that the January 6 committee’s work amounted to unlawful “weaponization” and should be disregarded.
U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer asked the Supreme Court in February to decide whether Bannon is “entitled to relief from his contempt of Congress convictions based on an argument that the committee that subpoenaed him was unlawfully composed, when he did not raise such an argument to the committee itself.”
In April, the Supreme Court tossed out an appellate court ruling upholding Bannon’s conviction, a move that was expected to prod Judge Nichols to dismiss the case.
Throwing out the case would largely be symbolic for Bannon, who already served prison time, but would mark yet another high-profile case tied to January 6 investigations to collapse under the Trump administration.
The president pardoned virtually every member of the mob, including dozens of people convicted of assaulting law enforcement officers, on his first day in office.
Earlier this month, a federal judge delivered a somber warning as he reluctantly agreed to dismiss treason-related charges against members of the Oath Keepers, the only remaining cases tied to the assault in the halls of Congress.
The move from District Judge Amit Mehta effectively closed the book on cases that have been wiped out with Trump’s sweeping clemencies.
Mehta wrote that his reluctant “epilogue diminishes the gravity of that day, denigrates the work of the prosecutors and law enforcement officers who secured these convictions, and excuses criminal acts that caused a centuries-long pillar of our democracy — the peaceful transfer of presidential power — to buckle.”
“The court cannot write a different ending," he wrote.
