After nine months of refusing to answer Jan. 6 House Select Committee questions — and fighting related contempt of court charges — the right-wing provocateur is suddenly dangling an offer to finally testify. The game is supposed to make the Justice Department look bad. But if he does so on the eve of trial, he risks incriminating himself before Congress and then being sentenced next week. On Saturday, after a week-long effort to persuade former President Donald Trump’s inner circle, Bannon’s legal team succeeded in getting Trump to issue a letter waiving executive privilege. The letter allows the former White House chief strategist to testify before the committee on Jan. 6. (Never mind that a federal judge, an appeals panel, and even the Supreme Court have already said the former president has no executive privilege to assert or resign anyway.) The letter was a last-minute attempt to throw a curveball at the Justice Department just a week before Bannon’s criminal contempt of Congress trial for refusing to appear before that very committee. But on Monday afternoon, a D.C. federal judge struck down every potential defense the right-wing media personality could present in his criminal trial. When Bannon’s lawyers argued that politicians on the Jan. 6 committee should be forced to testify at trial, the judge questioned why Bannon’s lawyers couldn’t just ask committee staff. When his lawyers asked permission to tell a future jury that Bannon was merely following his lawyer’s advice when he failed to appear before Congress, the judge said no. And when they argued the trial should be delayed, the judge told them to come back prepared for the final showdown next week. Now Bannon is headed for a trial pending possible congressional committee testimony — a prime opportunity to perjure himself or explain why he broke the law — and lawyers say there’s almost nothing he can do that won’t puts him at even greater legal risk. “It will make it very difficult for him to understand what he could say that will not incriminate him. I think he’s going to be in trouble. It just seems inevitable,” said Michael J. Gerhardt, a professor of constitutional law at the University of North Carolina. It’s unclear whether the nine-member House Select Committee, led by Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS) and Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) has any appetite to put Bannon on the stand — much less on live television, as apparently requests . Commission staff did not respond to The Daily Beast’s questions about the offer on Monday. But between now and the trial scheduled to begin next week, Bannon is in limbo. If the committee accepts his weak bid, Bannon finds himself in the difficult position of putting himself in one hot seat days before he finds himself in another. For example, committee members could ask him why he never showed up last fall — and anything Bannon says under penalty of perjury could come up at trial days later. If at any point he contradicts anything, prosecutors can argue that he lied to Congress—another crime—or stand trial. There is an obvious expectation that Bannon will try to use his congressional testimony to essentially stage an episode of the MAGA-raging daily podcast War Room: Pandemic – to stand up, attack the committee’s work and spout theories conspiracy. But that’s an act of self-immolation, because angering federal prosecutors is the last thing Bannon should be doing, the lawyers said. “If he figures he can get a better plea deal, it would undermine those strategies … it could make his situation worse if he perjures himself or is seen as an extremely uncooperative witness,” said the George University Law School professor. Washington, Katherine J. Ross. . His options right now: Show up and play nice or face the wrath of the Justice Department. In a text message to The Daily Beast, David Schoen, one of Bannon’s defense attorneys, described the group’s Jan. 6 offer to the Commission as “no game.” He reiterated his argument that Bannon actually operated on the belief that Trump retained some sort of executive power after leaving the White House—and the committee had to sue Bannon in civil court and ask a judge to formally declare invalidate Trump’s claims of executive privilege and compel Bannon to testify rather than ask the Justice Department to pursue criminal charges. “Bannon is true to his word and true to his principles,” Schoen wrote. “It was not his prerogative to resign and his hands were tied. However, he also said he would absolutely comply if the privilege was resolved with former President Trump or if a judge ruled that the privilege was invalid. That was the only reason he didn’t comply.” “On the committee’s part of course they should have respected that and should have told the government to drop the criminal charges. but as we suspected from the beginning, they never really wanted his testimony. They wanted to despise him,” he added. In recent days, Bannon’s legal team has thrown one Hail Mary after another at U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols, perhaps expecting a receptive audience from the Trump appointee who once clerked for conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Schoen and Bannon’s other defense attorney, Evan Corcoran, sought to use the criminal case to seek documents that could show how political forces in the Biden administration or the Justice Department chose to target Bannon and make him example because he defied Congress. panel hated by Trump loyalist Republicans. They tried to claim that DOJ memos protecting a president’s staff gave Bannon permission to ignore the committee’s Jan. 6 congressional subpoena. They tried to play off the idea that Bannon was simply following the advice of his other lawyer, Bob Costello. And they tried to drag House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and other members of Congress into court to testify. But Nichols summarily shot down each of those defense maneuvers, leaving an exasperated Schoen to blurt out in court Monday: “What’s the point of going to trial if there’s no defense?” The three federal prosecutors trying the case, who have repeatedly insisted in court filings and in person that this case is a one-day slam dunk, have come out on top. “He received a summons. He did not honor it. This is illegal. This is contempt. He is being prosecuted for it. He has no defense. This is an open-and-shut case, so it has legal risk,” Ross told The Daily Beast. Bannon’s eleventh-hour offer to testify before the committee on Jan. 6 does not technically absolve him of the crime for which he is on trial, lawyers said. Justice Department prosecutors working on his case have already said in court filings that they plan to go after him no matter what. “The defendant’s last-minute efforts to testify, nearly nine months after his default — he has still made no effort to produce records — are irrelevant,” prosecutors wrote in a filing early Monday morning, saying jurors did not they even have to hear about his “eleventh hour efforts”. “The Criminal Contempt Act is not intended to ensure compliance. is intended to punish past non-compliance,” they wrote. “It’s futile because the judge in his criminal trial ruled that he doesn’t get him off the hook. He still refused to comply with the subpoena at the time he was required to comply and does not erase his wrongful act of failure to appear,” Ross said.
