Don't Cry for Steve, Magadonia
Prison is where crooks belong, which Bannon most certainly is.
A pro-life father who pushed an abusive pro-abort away from his family, a doctor who exposed horrific child abuse at a Texas hospital, a journalist who simply videotaped a major story at the US Capitol, various politicos whose only crime was to work for the wrong presidential campaign, even a former president who, while guilty of plenty, isn’t usually guilty of the specific crimes his enemies scream about...the past several years have seen Democrats hijack the criminal justice system to intimidate, silence, or otherwise punish a great many Americans broadly categorized as right-of-center for crimes ranging from exaggerated to nonexistent.
Steve Bannon isn’t one of them.
The slime-caked former presidential advisor who now fancies himself a sort of majordomo for Magadonia is currently begging the Supreme Court to intervene and save him from spending four months in prison for contempt of Congress, no doubt hoping that he can run out the clock and put the case on his presidential pardon tab for Donald Trump to pay when he’s inaugurated.
Speaking as someone fully capable of separating his personal feelings about others from how they should be treated, I hope the Supremes leave Bannon out to dry.
Yes, contempt of Congress is the most clear-cut double-standard in all of Washington. Democrats snub Republican subpoenas with impunity, safe in the knowledge nothing will happen to them (see Holder, Eric and Garland, Merrick). It’s a farce.
But it’s a farce Bannon was fully aware of when he chose to flout his subpoena to appear before the January 6 committee. What did he think was going to happen? Did he secretly believe Democrats weren’t really as malicious and vindictive as he tells his audience they are? Was he expecting The Plan ™ to bail him out? Did he figure a stint in the joint might net him some persecution points? Or was he genuinely afraid of testifying under oath about January 6—maybe because, like other Trump alums, he’d have been forced to speak very differently about “Stop the Steal” than his public posturing?
Whatever the reason, this particular punishment was fully within Bannon’s power to avoid. Yet he chose to gamble, and he lost. That’s not political persecution; it’s an entry for the Darwin Awards’ honorable-mention category. The injustice here is that Democrats don’t get busted for contempt of Congress, not that Bannon did.
More fundamentally, Bannon is a genuine crook who legitimately belongs in prison. Not because he whips up hate toward real conservative leaders, not because he feeds people grotesque lies about literal dictators being “anti-woke” heroes or juvenile red-meat fantasies about the good kind of weaponized government. But because he scams people out of large sums of money—like, for instance, the most naively idealistic members of his own target audience, who thought they were contributing to help build the southern border wall.
From Jonathan Turley, September 2020:
Mr. Bannon never does anything small and, when he decided to delve into the funds of this charity, he did it with signature gusto.
The charity raised $25 million and Mr. Bannon is accused of taking $1 million of that money as personal compensation. His co-defendants Brian Kolfage, Andrew Badolato and Timothy Shea are accused of taking their own shares despite assurances to donors that all of the money would go to building the wall along the southern border.
[...] indictment describes a series of shell companies and nonprofits used to distribute payments. That array of companies is all the more troubling when they served to hide that fact that officers were indeed taking considerable amounts of money from the charity. The indictment describes how money was sent to a nonprofit controlled by Mr. Bannon who then used that nonprofit to give money to Mr. Kolfage through “fake invoices and sham ‘vendor’ arrangements.”
What is striking about this indictment is the boldness and clarity of the claims made to donors including that “100% of your donations would be given to the government for the construction of a wall” and that, if the campaign did not attain its goal, the campaign would “refund every penny.” Few lawyers would sign off on such absolute promises even with the most righteous of charities.
Trump pardoned Bannon on his way out of the White House for the federal charges, but he still faces state-level charges that the pardon power can’t save him from. Perhaps a relatively short jail stay now will impress upon Bannon a need to change his ways, cut a deal, and make amends with those he’s wronged before the far bigger chickens he’s fed come home to roost.
Yeah, I doubt it too. But it wouldn’t be the strangest thing that’s happened in the last decade of American politics.