[SIZE=7]Democrats Are Ready to Send Steve Bannon to Jail[/SIZE]
If Democrats want answers, they’ll need to enforce their subpoenas in the face of Trump allies’ defiance. They say that’s just what they plan to do.
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Looks like this dude just rolled out of a dumpster… :D:D:D
James Carville is furious. “It’s the LAW!!! If you do not enforce it, Dems will look as weak as people think they are,” he texted me earlier this week.
“I would ask if we could use DC jail for Bannon.”
What has Carville itching to put former President Donald Trump’s ex-adviser behind bars? Defiance.
The special congressional committee charged with investigating the January 6 insurrection gave former Trump White House officials Steve Bannon, Mark Meadows, Kash Patel, and Dan Scavino until the end of this week to comply with its subpoenas for testimony and records. Bannon has so far refused to cooperate.
The panel is determined to use every method possible to find the truth about the lead-up to a pro-Trump mob storming the Capitol on January 6. But the committee’s efforts may also end up emphasizing a dark truth revealed by Trump’s time in power – and highlighting the increasing threat for the future, too – as Trump relentlessly attacks US democratic institutions ahead of a possible 2024 White House bid.
Perhaps Bannon thinks that the committee won’t follow through, or that jail time might martyr him. He’s dodged consequences for alleged misconduct before. Last year, he faced prison for his role in the “We Build the Wall” scheme, which prosecutors said was fraudulent, but Trump granted him an 11th-hour pardon. At least he’s had some time to think about what he might have to pack.
The committee had hoped to depose Bannon, Meadows, Patel, and Scavino this week, according to lawmakers, but some members of that group have been more cooperative than others. “While Mr. Meadows and Mr. Patel are, so far, engaging with the Select Committee, Mr. Bannon has indicated that he will try to hide behind vague references to privileges of the former President,” Representative Liz Cheney, a Wyoming Republican, wrote in a joint statement with Thompson.
Bannon seems likely to continue resisting his subpoena. “The executive privileges belong to President Trump,” and “we must accept his direction and honor his invocation of executive privilege … Mr. Bannon is legally unable to comply with your subpoena requests for documents and testimony,” Bannon’s attorney, Robert Costello, wrote in a letter to the committee earlier this month. Bannon hasn’t worked in the executive branch since August 18, 2017, more than 1,500 days ago. And Trump is no longer the chief executive—he’s just some guy playing golf at his country club. The Biden administration has already waived executive privilege for the Trump-era documents that the January 6 commission was seeking.
The problem with enforcing congressional subpoenas, though, is that it pits two of the Democrats’ priorities against each other. Democrats have been tasked with both upholding democracy and defending constitutional norms. The norm of the past 90 years has been that congressional subpoenas are honored because the people subpoenaed are honorable. That doesn’t seem likely to happen here. Still, Congress hasn’t jailed a witness since 1934, when it found William P. MacCracken Jr. in contempt for refusing to participate in a Senate investigation into how federal airmail contracts were awarded. MacCracken was “taken into custody by the Sergeant at Arms, although rumor has it that he was held at the Willard Hotel,” according to the [I]The Washington Post[/I]. A criminal referral to the Justice Department would likely move much slower than MacCracken’s arrest—and could prove easier to fight. If Bannon can delay long enough, he could simply run out the clock, and hope that Democrats lose control of Congress in 2022.
Attempts to hold the former President’s inner circle accountable often fall short and end up having the unintended effect of further politicizing the vital institutions of government. This committee’s effort will face exactly the same kind of obstruction and intransigence as previous investigations of the former commander in chief meant to subject him to the checks and balances of the US constitutional system. Bannon never hid his desire to tear down the rules set by Washington’s establishment, so he may relish the challenge and the chance to launch a political cause célèbre.
If so, he will prove again that once-powerful figures who resolve to defy normal guardrails of political behavior – and in Trump’s case, the rule of law itself – often find they can operate with a degree of impunity. For Trump, for instance, even the historic stain of two impeachments turned out to be no deterrent to aberrant behavior and abuses of power – a reality that raises questions about the Constitution’s resilience against presidents with autocratic tendencies.
At the very least, this latest clash between Trump and the norms that have long governed US political life underscores how desperate the ex-President is, for whatever reason, to conceal what really happened on January 6. And while he is trying to obscure the truth about what happened in the last election, his conduct is offering a foreboding preview of how he might act in a second term, if he were to win the 2024 election.
