January 6 committee vote to approve Steve Bannon criminal contempt report: live updates

Steve Bannon, who was President Trump’s former White House chief strategist, spoke to Trump in December, urging him to focus on January 6 – the date of the Electoral College’s official certification of the vote by Congress, according to authors Bob Woodward and Robert Costa in their book “Peril”.

“We’re going to bury Biden on January 6,” Bannon reportedly said.

Woodward and Costa also reported that Trump called Bannon following his controversial Jan.6 meeting with then-vice president Mike Pence, in which the vice president said he didn’t no power to block Joe Biden’s certification of victory.

In its letter to Bannon, the committee cites communications it had with Trump on December 30, 2020, “and potentially other occasions” in which Bannon allegedly urged the former president “to plan and focus his efforts on January 6 “. The committee also refers to Bannon’s inflammatory comments on his podcast on January 5, in which he said “hell is going to break loose tomorrow”.

The committee announced last week that it was moving forward to detain Bannon on criminal contempt for refusing to comply with a subpoena.

“Mr Bannon refused to cooperate with the select committee and instead hides behind the former president’s insufficient, general and vague statements about the privileges he purported to invoke,” said Democratic Representative Bennie Thompson, who chairs the committee, in a press release. statement Thursday.

Bannon was due to testify before the committee last Thursday, but his lawyer wrote in a letter to the panel the day before that his client would not provide testimony or documents until the committee reached an agreement with former President Trump on executive privilege or a court decides on the matter.

The next step for the committee to move forward with the criminal contempt of Bannon is to hold a business meeting, which Thompson said today. At this meeting, the committee will adopt a contempt report, which describes the efforts it made to get the witness to comply with the summons and the witness’s failure to do so.

Anyone found guilty of contempt of Congress is then guilty of a crime that can lead to a fine and between one and 12 months in prison.

Holding Bannon for criminal contempt through prosecution, however, could take years, and historic cases of criminal contempt have been derailed with appeals and acquittals.

Read more about Bannon’s actions on January 6 here.