Steve Bannon will receive a boost from the House of Representatives as he fights a prison sentence orchestrated by President Joe Biden’s Department of Justice (DOJ).
The Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group (BLAG), the House’s internal legal body, voted 3-2 Tuesday to file a legal brief supporting the former Trump adviser’s fight to remain a free man. The group took action after an uprising of Republican support on Capitol Hill to aid Bannon’s appeal.
Bannon is set to report to prison July 1 for a four-month sentence for defying a Congressional subpoena from Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) now-defunct January 6 Committee. Bannon insists executive privilege protects him from being forced to divulge information to the committee.
BLAG – comprised of the Speaker and the majority and minority leadership of the House – operates at a staff level as part of the House General Counsel’s Office and is responsible for articulating the House’s institutional position in legal filings with federal, state, and local courts.
“The Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group voted 3-2 to file a brief with the D.C. Circuit in the case against Steve Bannon,” Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA), and Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-MN) – the Republican BLAG members – said in a joint statement Wednesday.
The statement continued:
The amicus brief will be submitted after Bannon files a petition for rehearing en banc and will be in support of neither party. It will withdraw certain arguments made by the House earlier in the litigation about the organization of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the U.S. Capitol during the prior Congress.
House Republican Leadership continues to believe Speaker Pelosi abused her authority when organizing the Select Committee.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) speaks at her weekly press conference on Capitol Hill on Sept. 30, 2022. (Mariam Zuhaib/AP)
Bannon thanked the group, although it is unknown to what degree, if any, the brief will help his cause.
“Speaker Johnson and House leadership showed tremendous courage in repudiating the illegally constituted J6 Committee and its activities/investigations,” Bannon told Axios.
The House’s actions coincide with a House Republican fight with Attorney General Merrick Garland after his DOJ announced it would ignore the Republican-led House resolution holding him in contempt. The House passed the resolution June 12 after he refused to surrender evidence from special counsel Robert Hur’s investigation into Biden’s alleged withholding of classified documents.
On the day of that vote, the Department of Justice argued in a memo that Garland would be protected from prosecution for contempt of Congress because Biden had strategically asserted executive privilege over the recordings on May 16, 2024, before the House Judiciary and Oversight Committees marked up their contempt resolutions.
Republicans say that evidence would reveal Biden’s – Garland’s boss – lack of fitness for office.
Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) says she will force a vote Friday to hold Garland in inherent contempt of Congress in a rarely used maneuver to enable the House Sergeant-at-Arms to detain Garland, bypassing the executive branch and DOJ. The House is considering other options as well to force the DOJ to act.
Peter Navarro, another former Trump adviser, is currently serving a federal sentence for defying a subpoena from the J6 committee. In Navarro’s case, like Bannon’s, the Biden DOJ followed a Democrat-run House’s recommendations to pursue charges for subpoena defiance.
The case is Bannon v. United States, 23A1129, in the Supreme Court of the United States.
Bradley Jaye is a Capitol Hill Correspondent for Breitbart News. Follow him on X/Twitter at @BradleyAJaye.
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