Steve Bannon Genius Strategy has Democrats freaking out…
Posted by Kane on December 2, 2021 1:52 pm
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Blowing Up The System
SOURCE — DAILY BEAST
Steve Bannon, who became the first person in nearly 40 years to be indicted on a charge of criminal contempt of Congress, now appears to be using his criminal case to go after the committee that went after him.
Bannon is attempting to force investigators to expose who they’ve talked to and what they’ve said, peek into secret communications on the committee, and create a playbook for other resistant witnesses, according to several legal experts.
“There’s no cost to opposing Congress if you can give Congress a black eye for even daring to ask you questions,” said Kel McClanahan, an attorney who specializes in national security matters.
As Bannon faces criminal charges, he’s entitled to the evidence against him.
And in a typical galaxy-brain, Bannon countergambit, Trump’s former senior adviser is trying to make some of that evidence public.
According to a Sunday night court filing by federal prosecutors, that includes secret witness interviews by law enforcement and internal communications between House committee staff members. The Justice Department claims that, if this material were exposed to the public, it would cause “specific harms” like “witness tampering,” with the added effect of making it difficult to find impartial jurors at a future trial.
In a
court filing on Tuesday, Bannon’s lawyers said the government’s argument was “festooned with hyperbole… perhaps designed to score points with the media.” That same day, a “press coalition” of 15 news organizations—including Buzzfeed, CNN, and
The Washington Post—sided with Bannon and
asked the judge overseeing the case to make documents available and reject what it called “this broad gag order.”
Bannon is severely raising the cost of coming after him—making good on his promise to turn this into the “misdemeanor from hell for Merrick Garland, Nancy Pelosi, and Joe Biden.”
Bannon’s attorneys on this case did not respond to repeated inquiries. However, in court documents, they strongly pushed back against the idea that Bannon’s strategy is to improperly use the evidence.
“This is a misdemeanor case,” they wrote in Tuesday’s filing. “It is not a case where witnesses have been intimidated. In the absence of any specific, particularized showing of actual harm, the Government conjures up a bogeyman.” Instead, Bannon’s lawyers said, “being able to use discovery materials to identify and question witnesses is not an improper purpose.”
Bannon is being represented by two attorneys in his criminal contempt case. One is M. Evan Corcoran, a former federal prosecutor who almost took a high-ranking job at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington during Trump’s final year in office, according to The National Law Journal. The other is David I. Schoen, one of the lawyers who represented Trump during his second impeachment trial in the U.S. Senate.
“Normally this doesn’t come up. His whole thing is about blowing up the whole system. He’s almost an anarchist,” said Jennifer Rodgers, a former Manhattan federal prosecutor who now teaches at Columbia University.
“It might not really be about the contents of any particular document. It might be about the process,” she said.
There’s a general sentiment by lawyers monitoring the case that exposing the committee’s work while its investigation is still underway could open it up to public criticism and potentially hamper its work. But the real damage might simply come from throwing a wrench in any future prosecutions of others who are refusing to answer the committee’s questions, like former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, who has been threatened with contempt charges by the committee for not cooperating. The same goes for Jeffrey Clark, the former Justice Department official who allegedly tried to have the DOJ help Trump overturn the 2020 election, who refused to answer questions and was voted “in contempt” by the committee on Wednesday evening.
Given that most congressional contempt cases would be nearly identical, exposing witnesses in Bannon’s case would give other resisters a long heads-up about what’s coming.
“That’s one of his goals: to try to make it more difficult for the committee to enforce its subpoenas in the future,” said Jonathan Shaub, a University of Kentucky law professor who previously worked at the Justice Department.
“It’s a chilling effect,” Shaub added. “If you know you’re going to have to disclose a ton of information, you probably won’t bring that first prosecution until you have the other ones.”
U.S. District Judge Carl J. Nichols, who was appointed to the bench by Trump in 2019, has yet to rule on whether the documents in question will be made public.
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