Steve Bannon Could Have Gone to Jail for Many Things, but He’s Finally Going for One of Them

Longtime Donald Trump adviser and right-wing media figure Steve Bannon is going to jail, sources (i.e., the judge who sentenced him to jail) say:

In 1996 Bannon was charged with misdemeanor battery after police found evidence that he had violently grabbed his then wife by her arm and neck. As a Trump adviser, he facilitated White House access for a lobbyist named George Nader, who was later convicted of making illegal payments to political campaigns on behalf of the United Arab Emirates. In 2020 Senate investigators told the Department of Justice they suspected him of lying to them during the investigation of the 2016 Trump campaign’s connections to Russia. He was charged in 2022 with defrauding donors to a group that he purportedly had helped found to build a privately funded border wall between the U.S. and Mexico. And he has worked for several years as a consultant to a Chinese national named Guo Wengui, who was charged by federal prosecutors in 2023 with operating a large-scale fraud scheme.

Impressively, none of those activities is related to Bannon’s impending jail term. (The domestic violence prosecution was dropped when his now ex-wife chose not to testify. His border-wall fraud trial is currently scheduled to begin in the fall. He has not been charged with any criminal activity related to his work with Guo, Nader, or the Trump campaign.) Instead, Bannon is being sentenced for contempt-of-Congress charges related to his refusal to testify to the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attacks about his involvement in the plan to overturn election results via Vice President Mike Pence, a scheme that failed because Pence refused to participate. (The judge in Bannon’s case had postponed his imprisonment during the appeals process but ruled on Thursday that further appeals are unlikely to succeed after a circuit-court panel rejected Bannon’s arguments.)

If it’s not one potentially criminal thing with Steve Bannon, it’s another, and now he’s going to jail for one of those things.