Steve Bannon, a prominent figure, spoke on the first day of the 2025 Conservative Political Action Conference at National Harbor, MD, USA on February 20, 2025. The event was captured by Joshua Sukoff of Medill News Service/Sipa USA via AP Images.
Former Trump White House chief strategist Steve Bannon once again lost a bid for judicial relief from his contempt of Congress convictions.
But the decision was a close call.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit recently made a decision regarding Bannon’s two convictions in July 2022. Bannon had defied subpoenas from the House Select Committee to Investigate the Jan. 6 Attack on the U.S. Capitol, resulting in his convictions. The appeals court ruled against granting en banc review of his case.
The loss is the latest in a long line of frustrated efforts.
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Following a jury’s guilty verdict, Bannon received a four-month prison sentence in October 2022. Initially, U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols, appointed by President Donald Trump, allowed Bannon to remain free pending his appeal of both the conviction and sentence, showing leniency.
Over the course of nearly two years, all relevant levers of the judicial system were pulled — from the D.C. Court of Appeals to the U.S. Supreme Court. But each time, Bannon’s appeals were rebuffed. Between the appellate and high court’s rejection, Nichols pointedly mused Bannon was simply not likely to succeed, and the judge obliged the government’s request to revoke his bail in June 2024.
Again, the process played out — as Bannon tried to stay out of prison, with no luck, and then to receive early release, to no avail.
Still, even now, Bannon takes issue with the way his prosecution — and subsequent conviction — occurred and aims to vindicate his rights.
The heart of Bannon’s efforts rests on the idea that bad precedent was used in his case to hamstring his defense. This precedent, the 1961 D.C. Circuit case of Licavoli v. United States, stands for the proposition that an advice of counsel defense is simply not available to a defendant facing a contempt of Congress charge.
Bannon claims his defiance of subpoenas was not simply to frustrate investigators but because the requests implicated executive privilege — and that his lawyer, in turn, instructed him to wait for a higher court’s ruling on those privilege issues before responding.
Delving deeper into the precedent, the Licavoli case interpreted the word “willfully” in the contempt of Congress statute to mean a “deliberate intention” not to appear — whereas beforehand the word arguably meant an intention to act with bad faith not to appear.
While the appeals court again rejected the argument this week, three members of the court voted in favor of overturning the Licavoli case.
U.S. Circuit Judge Neomi Rao, also appointed by Trump during his first term, penned the lengthy dissenting statement — which was joined in full by U.S. Circuit Judge Justin Walker, another Trump appointee. One section of the dissent specifically dealing with the precedent was joined by U.S. Circuit Judge Karen L Henderson, who was appointed by George H.W. Bush.
To hear Rao tell it, a “text and structure” analysis requires the minority’s understanding of “willfully” because of how the two separate offenses in the contempt of Congress statute are worded.
The statute reads, in relevant part:
Every person who having been summoned as a witness by the authority of either House of Congress to give testimony or to produce papers … willfully makes default, or who, having appeared, refuses to answer any question pertinent to the question under inquiry, shall be deemed guilty of a misdemeanor.
In the statute, the first crime requires willful conduct not to cooperate; the second crime only requires refusal to cooperate under certain circumstances. Rao, applying a canon of construction, says this “variation” — one crime requiring a mental state; one crime requiring only action — is “meaningful” because when Congress “uses a term in one place and omits it in another, the choice is intentional.”
Additionally, the dissent notes that Supreme Court precedent has explicitly defined the second crime in the contempt statute — saying there is no requirement of “bad purpose or evil intent.” The logical upshot here, Rao insists, is the first crime — the crime Bannon was convicted of — necessarily does require such intent.
The dissent goes on, at length:
Under the best interpretation of [the contempt of Congress statute], the government must prove an individual defaulted on a congressional subpoena willfully, that is, with knowledge that his conduct was unlawful. Licavoli cannot be reconciled with the text or structure of [the statute], and the decision runs counter to the overwhelming weight of Supreme Court precedent. Licavoli should be overruled.
One member of the court, U.S. Circuit Judge Gregory G. Katsas, another Trump appointee, voted to respect the denial but wrote separately to suggest his strong misgivings with Licavoli. Still, Katsas said, overturning the decades-old case should be left to the Supreme Court.
In the majority, four members of the court issued a concurring statement arguing in favor of keeping Licavoli as controlling precedent.
Penned by U.S. Circuit Judge Bradley N. Garcia, a Joe Biden appointee, the concurrence takes issue with Bannon’s argument by citing late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia in service of an argument that “willful” can sometimes simply mean a deliberate, as opposed to an accidental, act.
“There are any number of reasons a subpoenaed witness might unintentionally fail to appear and thus ‘default’—’illness, travel trouble, [or] misunderstanding,’ to name a few,” Garcia writes. “Without the ‘willfully’ qualifier, the statute could have been read to criminalize those defaults too.”
This understanding, the concurrence argues, comports more with the contempt statute’s purpose.
“Bannon has not tenably explained why Congress would pass a law that encourages less-cooperative conduct,” the majority writes. “His reading is especially perplexing given that the purpose of the contempt-of-Congress statute is to facilitate congressional inquiry.”
