Monday, November 15, 2021

Bannon Arrested (DOJ Should Start Doing Its Job Because Sedition Is A Crime)


"We're taking action . . . we're taking over school boards, we're taking over
the Republican Party through the precinct committee strategy. We're taking over
all the elections. Suck on this. . . . [W]e're going to get to the bottom of 3 November
and we're going to decertify the electors. OK? And you're going to have a constitutional crisis."
Seth Abramson, Proof, November 12, 2021:
Americans Must Understand Just How Badly Steve Bannon Wants to Go to Jail
There are circumstances in which a political radical benefits from a jail stint—and all indications are that Trump agent and dangerous insurrectionist Steve Bannon thinks he's in such circumstances.

Steve Bannon isn't particularly concerned about testifying before the House January 6 Committee—he'll assert his Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination to keep any information he has from Congress or the American people. And he isn't so concerned, either, with any document demands that may fall under his outstanding subpoena (the one he ignored, now resulting in his indictment for criminal contempt by DOJ and a forthcoming self-surrender to federal law enforcement) as if his conduct during the Trump-Russia investigation is any guide, the most valuable documents in his possession have already been destroyed. . . .

Sure, Bannon could flee to some nation that has no extradition treaty with the United States—after all, when Bannon was last indicted for a federal felony, a mere 15 months ago, he was found on the superyacht of a mega-rich Chinese criminal in exile from his Communist homeland—but don't expect Bannon to do that, either, as it'd frustrate his conspicuous desire to be imprisoned as a Trumpist martyr. . . .

If it seems unlikely that a well-known coward like Bannon—always pulling the strings of major catastrophes behind the scenes, never in a position to risk anything himself—would be willing to go to jail for Donald Trump, think again. It’d be among the most lucrative decisions Bannon has ever made. And here are the three main reasons why:

(1) His place in a second Trump administration. While Bannon is a consummate liar, if there's one thing we know he does believe in, it's that Trump will be re-installed as President of the United States one way or another in the next 36 months—whether it takes the theft of the 2024 presidential election by lawless Trumpist elections officials or a vote by a GOP-led state legislature beholden to Trump and willing to throw out the votes of its constituents by the millions if they don't go Trump's way. So right now what Bannon wants more than anything is to be a power-broker in the second coming of Trump's autocratic enterprise, just as he was at the beginning (and end) of the first.

What better way to show Trump your loyalty than to do what Roger Stone and Paul Manafort did—be willing to go to federal prison to hide all your conversations with Trump about criminal activity he was involved in of the most dastardly, seditious sort?

(2) His own place in the #MAGAverse. Bannon routinely boasts that his "War Room" podcast—so named to mark Bannon's view that American is in a cold civil war that will soon become a hot one—is the most-listened-to podcast in America, and in a Rumble interview recently Garrett Ziegler, the top acolyte to Trump right-hand man Peter Navarro, said that Trump listens to Bannon's podcast  "regularly." The podcast is making Bannon rich, famous, and powerful—which is all the white supremacist has ever wanted, his pretensions to being some sort of philosopher-king notwithstanding.

So just as Trump's MAGA movement is now valorizing, lionizing, and all but deifying insurrectionists who attack our state or federal governments and their agents, it will do the same for any person who is incarcerated in the name of Trumpism. Bannon is desperate to gain this form of credential—currency, even—among those plotting the overthrow of U.S. democracy, as it can only augment the empire he has already built via a popular, deliriously overheated podcast.

(3) He is reasonably certain his time in jail would be brief. Right now Bannon faces two federal criminal counts of contempt, each carrying a minimum sentence of thirty days in jail at a maximum sentence of a year in prison. Because concurrent convictions often run concurrently—meaning, for instance, that if you get a month in jail on each of two convictions, the two sentences run at the same time and you "only" do a month in total—Bannon believes that, as someone with a prior federal indictment (and a very recent one, at that) but no prior convictions, he'll get closer to the minimum jail bid if he's convicted on both the charges he currently faces. What is thirty days in jail when it can make you even more rich and famous and beloved among insurrectionist mobs than you already are—and if it buys you the gratitude of the man you think will be the next President of the United States?

Keep in mind, too, that Bannon does not anticipate he will be held in custody pre-trial as a flight risk, even though he's been charged with not appearing at a hearing he was legally obligated to appear at, and the chief determination a judge makes in setting bail is whether a defendant is likely to return for their next scheduled hearing. Bannon likely thinks that, if he had to, he could negotiate speaking to Congress somewhere down the line to evade any jail sentence he does ultimately face . . . So Bannon is surely being told by his criminal defense attorney that he is unlikely to serve more than thirty days even if found guilty of the charges against him. And as Proof previously reported, the identity of Bannon's attorney tells us everything we need to know about what sort of advice he is getting from him and how closely apprised Donald Trump is being kept of Bannon's decisions.

For the foregoing three reasons, one shouldn't expect that Bannon is particularly upset about his recent indictment. . . .

Unless.

Unless, that is, DOJ and the federal courts get serious about investigating an armed attack on the United States Capitol and the people who planned it. . . .

Proof worries that Bannon's indictment could lead to a new silly season: progressives claiming that Bannon should rot in jail until he agrees to reveal all he knows (that's not how it works) . . . Or perhaps we will now hear of conservatives calling Bannon some kind of political prisoner, simply because he chooses to ignore the law when his political party isn't in power . . .

More than anything, America now needs the Federal Bureau of Investigation to start doing its job. Even a full "victory" in Steve Bannon's case would lead to nothing more than Bannon testifying before a body of politicians who cannot themselves hold him accountable in any way. By comparison, and especially given that it knows Bannon's history of obstruction of justice, witness tampering, and destruction of evidence, the FBI should be raiding Bannon's home and office, seizing all his electronic equipment, monitoring his communications, and doing all these same things as to anyone else it has probable cause to believe in engaged in plotting domestic terrorism post-election.

As the justice correspondent for The Nation, Elie Mystal, recently fumed on MSNBC—echoing what I've been writing here at Proof and on the Twitter feed associated with Proof for months—namely that the FBI and DOJ should be more, not less, aggressive with the coup's plotters as they're being with the coup's foot soldiers. Mystal was right to pen an op-ed entitled "The Department of Justice Is Letting the Coup Plotters Get Away", because so far that's exactly what's been happening. And the scary thing is that Bannon's indictment and arrest actually does nothing at all to mediate this state of affairs. While it's great that DOJ is finally doing something to aid the hard work our Congress is now doing to investigate the January 6 insurrection, far more important is that it execute on any and all ongoing criminal investigations being run by the FBI—and finally start sending the signal to Trump and his motley crew that this nation does not tolerate sedition.

[last two paragraphs, my emphasis in bold] 

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