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Tag: Steve Bannon
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Steve Bannon, Woody Allen, Bill Gates, and More: The New Set of Jeffrey Epstein Photos
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In the latest round of yearslong scrutiny related to Jeffrey Epstein’s trail of sexual abuse and the high-profile company he kept, MAGA architect Steve Bannon has played a prominent part, with a recently released cache of emails between him and Epstein showing the two men exchanging advice about a range of political and media issues. On Friday, Democrats on the House Oversight Committee released yet another batch of materials from Epstein’s estate, which added a visual component to the stew of intrigue. Among the 19 images on display was one of Bannon and Epstein, standing in front of a mirror and gazing at their half-smiling reflections as Epstein snapped a photo with his iPhone.
As with Bannon, the men depicted in these photos, which were gleaned from Epstein’s email account and released without additional context or details of their provenance, are already known to have associated with Epstein. They include Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, Richard Branson, Larry Summers, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, and, in four instances, Woody Allen. (Representatives for these men and Bannon did not immediately return requests for comment.) One image features a bowl of condoms, produced by a New York novelty shop, bearing a caricature of Trump’s face with the text “I’m HUUUUGE!” Another shows Trump standing among six women wearing Hawaiian leis whose faces have been concealed, his arm around one of their waists.
House Oversight Committee Democrats.
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House Oversight Committee Democrats.
“It is time to end this White House cover-up and bring justice to the survivors of Jeffrey Epstein and his powerful friends,” House Oversight Committee member Robert Garcia said in a statement. “These disturbing photos raise even more questions about Epstein and his relationships with some of the most powerful men in the world. We will not rest until the American people get the truth. The Department of Justice must release all the files, NOW.”
The photos come a week before a deadline established by the Epstein Files Transparency Act, signed into law last month, which requires the DOJ to release all unclassified materials related to its investigations of Epstein and his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell within 30 days. The scope of that release remains unclear: The bill includes a provision that the DOJ is permitted to withhold certain information that “would jeopardize an active federal investigation,” and just days before it was signed, Trump wrote on Truth Social, “I will be asking A.G. Pam Bondi, and the Department of Justice, together with our great patriots at the FBI, to investigate Jeffrey Epstein’s involvement and relationship with Bill Clinton, Larry Summers, Reid Hoffman, J.P. Morgan, Chase, and many other people and institutions, to determine what was going on with them, and him.”
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House Oversight Committee Democrats.
House Oversight Committee Democrats.
The new images offer some glimpses of Epstein’s MO when it came to collecting influential friends and associations. There is an element of haphazardness, for instance, in a new image of Bannon and Allen engaged in ostensibly affectionate conversation, and Epstein was long known for bringing together successful figures from seemingly far-flung worlds at his Manhattan gatherings. While the release of new Epstein materials invariably provides new fodder for observers of the broader spectacle—earlier on Friday, the New York Post reported that his antique Viennese desk went up for sale at a New Jersey auction house—it has also, in the lead-up to the release of the Epstein files, sometimes come with real consequences. Summers, who is pictured in the new images on a plane with Allen, took a leave of absence from Harvard and resigned from several advisory roles after cozy emails between him and Epstein surfaced last month.
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Dan Adler
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Trump Says “It’s Too Bad” He Can’t Run for a Third Term – LAmag
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President Donald Trump appeared to acknowledge on Wednesday that he cannot run for a third term, after toying with the idea of running in 2028 for months.
“I have my highest poll numbers that I’ve ever had, and, you know, based on what I read, I guess I’m not allowed to run. So, we’ll see what happens,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One en route to Gyeongju, South Korea.
“I would say that if you read it, it’s pretty clear. I’m not allowed to run. It’s too bad, but we have a lot of great people,” he added.
The U.S. Constitution, via the 22nd Amendment, explicitly bars anyone from being elected to more than two terms as president. A fact that House Speaker Mike Johnson spoke to on Tuesday, saying that he does not “see a path” for Trump to seek a third term.
Trump has hinted at the idea of seeking another term periodically, notably offering “Trump 2028” hats to allies and adversaries alike. He told NBC News earlier this year that he is “not joking” and believes that “there are methods” by which he could run for president in 2028. Ally of Trump, Steve Bannon, claimed in an interview released last week that “there’s a plan” for President Trump to serve a third term.
When asked about Bannon’s comments on Monday, Trump said he hadn’t given it much thought, but definitely did not rule out the idea of seeking a third term.
Some observers have mused that President Trump could find himself in the Oval Office again if he successfully runs for vice president and the sitting president were to step down, enabling him to retake the presidency.
Experts are divided on whether it would work, but Trump seems to have ruled out the idea. “I think that people wouldn’t like that,” he said. “It’s too cute.”
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Amaya Arnic
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Trump, allies still talk about a 3rd term. Can it be done?
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President Donald Trump once again expressed interest in serving beyond the constitutionally mandated cap of two terms.
Asked by reporters about running for a third term in 2028, Trump said “I would love to do it,” adding, “I have my best (polling) numbers ever.”
Trump’s Oct. 27 remark on an Air Force One flight to Japan followed publication of an interview with his ally Steve Bannon, who told The Economist that “he’s going to get a third term … People ought to just get accommodated with that.” Bannon, who was pardoned by Trump after facing charges that he defrauded donors of a project intended to support Trump’s border wall, has no official role in the administration but said a “plan” to accomplish a third Trump term was in the works and would be unveiled “at the appropriate time.”
Trump has been publicly toying with a third term for much of his second. It would run counter to the clear language of the Constitution’s 22nd Amendment, which says, “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice.”
In an interview with Trump that aired March 30, NBC’s Kristen Welker mentioned the possibility of Vice President JD Vance, or another ally, running for president in 2028 with Trump as his vice presidential nominee, and then, if they win, stepping down and letting Trump ascend to the presidency. “That’s one. But there are others, too,” Trump told Welker. He added, “I’m not joking.”
Asked again about the possibility of a vice presidential switch during his recent Air Force One remarks, Trump said, “Yeah, I’d be allowed to do that.” He added, though, “I would rule that out because it’s too cute. I think the people wouldn’t like that.”
It’s possible that he’s trolling his critics; Trump is selling red “Trump 2028” hats, which he displayed at a meeting with Democratic leaders to discuss the federal government shutdown. The White House did not respond to an inquiry for this article.
The 22nd Amendment directly bars Trump from running for a third term, and allowing a president a third term would violate the Constitution’s spirit, constitutional experts told PolitiFact in March
But it might not violate the letter of the 22nd Amendment, they said.
A scenario such as the one involving Vance could provide a loophole that a candidate could exploit — along with some big ifs.
Trump would need buy-in from the courts and Congress, and the voters, who would have to weigh whether his performance during his second term and his health at 82 years on Inauguration Day 2029 — older than any president has been on an Inauguration Day — merited another four years in office.
“I think the best interpretation” of the constitutional language “is that Trump is ineligible to become president for a third term,” said Ilya Somin, a George Mason University law professor. “However, the issue is not airtight.”
Could Trump legally run for a third term?
Beginning with George Washington, who made a point of stepping down in 1797 after two terms in office, every president until Franklin Roosevelt in the 1940s served no more than two full elected terms. But this was a norm, not a written rule, and after the Great Depression and the start of World War II, Roosevelt successfully ran for a third term, and then a fourth.
After Roosevelt’s tenure, officials of both parties agreed to codify the two-term presidential limit. The 22nd Amendment cleared Congress on March 21, 1947, and was ratified on Feb. 27, 1951, a little less than six years after Roosevelt died in office.
This much, legal experts say, seems ironclad: No two-time winner of a presidential election can run for president a third time.
But there’s a caveat that hinges on the 22nd Amendment’s specific phrasing: It uses the word “elected.”
“There are ways to become president other than being elected president, and therein lies the problem,” said Brian Kalt, a Michigan State University law professor who wrote about the question in the 2012 book, “Constitutional Cliffhangers.”
The logic underpinning a Vance-Trump switcheroo is that Trump would have been elected vice president, not president, and he would become president by succession, not by election.
“A twice-elected president can clearly serve as president again,” Scott E. Gant, a lawyer in private practice, told PolitiFact in March.
Gant, who co-wrote a 1999 law review article on this topic, cautioned against assuming how Supreme Court justices would rule in a hypothetical case. Still, he said, “I would expect they would agree with our conclusion.”
In his book, Kalt wrote that presidential succession, distinct from presidential election, was a familiar concept to lawmakers as they were drafting the amendment.
“At the very moment that the 22nd Amendment was written in 1947, the incumbent president was Harry Truman, who had succeeded to the office and had not (yet) been elected in his own right,” Kalt wrote. “At that time, every generation in living memory had featured unelected presidents.”
The main legal argument against the Vance-Trump 2028 scenario comes from the 12th Amendment. That amendment, ratified in 1804, says, “No person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States.”
However, the 12th Amendment makes no distinction between being elected president and serving as president. If one uses the logic that the 22nd Amendment prohibits a two-term president from being elected to a third term — but does not prohibit a president from serving a third term — then a two-term president is “eligible” to serve as president a third time, which would make Trump eligible to run as Vance’s vice presidential running mate.
Another approach involves the House speakership. The Constitution doesn’t bar a former two-term president from becoming House speaker. Becoming president this way would require the resignation of both the elected president and an elected vice president; if that happened, the House speaker would be next in line for the presidency. (By the Constitution, an aspiring third-term president wouldn’t need to win a seat in the House to be elected speaker, although historically, the House has always elected one of its members as speaker.)
The least practical option is amending the Constitution, which hasn’t been done from start to finish since 1971. The bar is high requiring two-thirds approval in both chambers of Congress, then approval by three-fourths of the states. In today’s politically polarized age, securing that level of support for a third Trump term is essentially impossible.
How realistic are these scenarios?
Trump would need to claw back a substantial amount of support to be competitive in a free and fair 2028 election.
Despite Trump’s statement on Air Force One that “I have my best numbers ever,” polling averages show him from 7 to 13 percentage points under water, meaning his disapproval rating is higher than his approval rating. Trump’s approval rating is lower than for any post-World War II president at this point in his tenure other than his own first term. An April ABC News/Washington Post poll found 18% of those surveyed supporting a third Trump term; among Republicans, support was 38%.
In addition, Trump would have to lock in a commitment from the Republican presidential nominee to step down if elected. “What’s in it for Vance?” Frank O. Bowman III, a University of Missouri law professor, said. “If they won the election, he’d be the president. Why give that up?”
Trump would also need to get on the ballot in enough states to secure an Electoral College majority, something that many Democratic-leaning states would likely try to block if he defied the 22nd Amendment and ran.
Although the issues were somewhat different, the Supreme Court’s unanimous 2024 ruling in Trump v. Anderson could bolster Trump’s quest in that regard. In that case, Colorado sought to bar Trump from the 2024 ballot, arguing that his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol riots disqualified him under the 14th Amendment. The justices said he could not be barred on those grounds.
Trump would have another option, albeit one that would be unconstitutional by any measure: Refuse to give up the presidency.
Deciding to stay in office past Jan. 20, 2029, “would effectively be an overthrow of our government,” said Michael Gerhardt, a University of North Carolina law professor.
Kalt agreed: “That would be the end of the United States of America’s constitutional experiment.”
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Steve Bannon urges investigation of Spencer Cox after Charlie Kirk shooting
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Steve Bannon has called for an investigation into Utah Governor Spencer Cox following the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.
Newsweek reached out to Cox’s office for comment via email.
Why It Matters
Kirk, 31, was assassinated during a speech at Utah Valley University on September 10 during his “American Comeback Tour.” A suspect, 22-year-old Tyler Robinson, is in custody. Kirk was a vocal supporter of President Donald Trump and played a key role in organizing young Republican voters.
What To Know
Cox has earned bipartisan praise for his response to the assassination, but some more MAGA-aligned conservatives, such as Bannon, have been more critical. During an episode of his War Room podcast, the former White House chief strategist called on Cox to be investigated over the state’s mental health initiatives.
No law enforcement has suggested Cox has done any wrongdoing to warrant an investigation.
During an interview with Sheila Matthews, a co-founder of a conservative parental rights group, Bannon raised concerns about Intermountain Support Coordination Services, a company that is contracted by the state to provide services for individuals who have disabilities. Robinson’s mother, Amber Robinson, is a social worker who has reportedly worked for the company.
“Cox should be investigated. Why the White House—and they’re saying we had nothing to do with this guy, but even the first time, when [FBI Director Kash Patel] flew out there, why was he allowed to have a speaking role? Who made that decision? He needs to be investigated. [Robinson’s] mother needs to be investigated,” Bannon said.
Steve Bannon speaks during the Semafor World Economy Summit 2025 in Washington, D.C. on April 23, 2025.
Kayla Bartkowski/Getty Images
Bannon also raised concerns about Cox’s stance on LGBTQ+ rights, as the governor has been viewed as more moderate on the matter. He has previously declined to sign some anti-LGBTQ+ legislation, leaving him at odds with more conservative Republicans.
Robinson lived with a transgender roommate and romantic partner who is helping police in the investigation. Cox said the roommate “had no idea that this was happening.”
Kirk was previously critical of Cox, calling on him to be “expelled from the Republican Party” after he declined to sign into law a bill to ban transgender girls from participating in girls’ sports.
What People Are Saying
Utah Governor Spencer Cox, during a press conference last week: “Social media is a cancer on our society right now, and I would encourage people to log off, turn off, touch grass, hug a family member. Go out and do good in the community.”
Journalist Chris Cillizza, on X: “The country (and the world) now know the Utah governor’s name — due to the assassination of Charlie Kirk in the Beehive State on Wednesday. And what they’ve seen is a politician less interested in blame than in soothing. An elected official focused on empathy rather than political point-scoring.
“At the moment, we have a politics perfectly suited to our modern the attention economy. People who yell or bully or say vile things or ignore norms are rewarded — more fundraising dollars, more TV time, more ‘fame.’ It has created a downward spiral where our politicians seem to value trolling the other side more than actually engaging with them.
“But, Spencer Cox deserves credit — whether or not he is going to be a major player for Republicans in 2028 (or ever). Because he is doing the hardest thing in politics: Refusing to take the easy road.”
Governor Josh Shapiro, a Pennsylvania Democrat, on CBS News: “We are at a pivotal moment in this country, and we need leaders to step up and speak and act with moral clarity, not to use the rhetoric of vengeance, but to use words of healing. That’s exactly what Spencer has been doing over the past few years. Actually, he’s been doing it over the last number of years.”
What Happens Next
Charges against Robinson are expected to be filed this week.
Turning Point USA is set to hold a memorial for Kirk at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona, on September 21.
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A Day In The Life Of Steve Bannon In Federal Prison
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On July 1, Steve Bannon reported to federal prison to serve a four-month sentence for acting in contempt of Congress. The Onion followed the former Trump advisor and far-right figurehead for 24 hours behind bars.
- 6 a.m. Finally completes overnight digestion of cellmate
- 11 a.m.: Gets sent to Trump’s voicemail yet again
- 12 p.m.: Picks maggots out of chow; eats maggots
- 1:30 p.m.: Shanks self and blames it on Black prisoner
- 2 p.m.: Applies for podcast work release
- 3 p.m.: Gets neo-Nazi tattoo on only patch of living skin
- 5 p.m.: 15 minutes of maniacal growling
- 8 p.m.: Evening revenge vowing
- 10 p.m.: Wonders if Trump is looking up at the same moon
- 12 a.m.: Treats self to midnight snack by eating discarded asexual bud
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Steve Bannon’s bid to delay 4-month prison sentence rejected by appeals court
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A federal appeals court panel on Thursday rejected longtime Donald Trump ally Steve Bannon’s bid to stay out of prison while he fights his conviction for defying a subpoena from the House committee that investigated the U.S. Capitol attack.
Bannon is supposed to report to prison by July 1 to begin serving his four-month sentence for contempt of Congress.
U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols, who was nominated to the bench by Trump, earlier this month granted prosecutors’ request to send Bannon to prison after a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit upheld his conviction last month.
Bannon’s lawyers asked the appeals court to allow him to remain free while he continues to fight the conviction all the way up to the Supreme Court, if necessary. But in a 2-1 vote Thursday, the D.C. Circuit panel said Bannon’s case “does not warrant a departure from the general rule” that defendants begin serving their sentence after conviction.
Judges Cornelia Pillard, who was nominated by former President Barack Obama, and Bradley Garcia, a nominee of President Biden, voted to send Bannon to prison. Judge Justin Walker, who was nominated by Trump, dissented, writing that he should not have to serve time before the Supreme Court decides whether to take up his case.
Bannon is expected to ask the Supreme Court to stave off his prison sentence. His attorneys didn’t immediately respond to an email seeking comment Thursday.
He was convicted nearly two years ago of two counts of contempt of Congress: one for refusing to sit for a deposition with the Jan. 6 House Committee, and the other for refusing to provide documents related to his involvement in efforts by Trump, a Republican, to overturn his 2020 presidential election loss to President Biden, a Democrat.
Bannon’s lawyer at trial argued that the former Trump adviser didn’t ignore the subpoena but was still engaged in good-faith negotiations with the congressional committee when he was charged. The defense has said Bannon had been relying on the advice on his attorney, who believed that Bannon couldn’t testify or produce documents because Trump had invoked executive privilege.
Lawyers for Bannon say the case raises serious legal questions that will likely need to be resolved by the Supreme Court but he will have already finished his prison sentence by the time the case gets there.
In court papers, Bannon’s lawyers also argued that there is a “strong public interest” in allowing him to remain free in the run-up to the 2024 election because Bannon is a top adviser to Trump’s campaign.
Bannon’s lawyers said the Justice Department, in trying to imprison him now, is “giving an appearance that the government is trying to prevent Mr. Bannon from fully assisting with the campaign and speaking out on important issues, and also ensuring the government exacts its pound of flesh before the possible end of the Biden Administration.”
Prosecutors said in court papers that Bannon’s “role in political discourse” is irrelevant.
“Bannon also cannot reconcile his claim for special treatment with the bedrock principle of equal justice under the law,” prosecutors wrote. “Even-handed application of the bail statute requires Bannon’s continued detention.”
A second Trump aide, trade adviser Peter Navarro, is already serving his four-month prison sentence for contempt of Congress. Navarro, too, has said he couldn’t cooperate with the committee because Trump had invoked executive privilege. The judge barred him from making that argument at trial, however, finding that he didn’t show Trump had actually invoked it.
The House Jan. 6 committee’s final report asserted that Trump criminally engaged in a “multi-part conspiracy” to overturn the lawful results of the 2020 election and failed to act to stop his supporters from attacking the Capitol, concluding an extraordinary 18-month investigation into the former president and the violent insurrection.
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Partisan border wars
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In this week’s The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman scrutinize President Joe Biden’s executive order updating asylum restrictions at the U.S.-Mexico border in response to illegal border crossings.
01:32—Biden’s new asylum restrictions
21:38—The prosecution of political opponents: former President Donald Trump, Hunter Biden, and Steve Bannon
33:25—Weekly Listener Question
39:56—No one is reading The Washington Post
48:09—This week’s cultural recommendations
Mentioned in this podcast:
“Biden Announces Sweeping Asylum Restrictions at U.S.-Mexico Border” by Fiona Harrigan
“Biden’s New Asylum Policy is Both Harmful and Illegal” by Ilya Somin
“Travel Ban, Redux” by Josh Blackman
“Immigration Fueled America’s Stunning Cricket Upset Over Pakistan” by Eric Boehm
“Libertarian Candidate Chase Oliver Wants To Bring Back ‘Ellis Island Style’ Immigration Processing” by Fiona Harrigan
“Donald Trump and Hunter Biden Face the Illogical Consequences of an Arbitrary Gun Law” by Jacob Sullum
“Hunter Biden’s Trial Highlights a Widely Flouted, Haphazardly Enforced, and Constitutionally Dubious Gun Law” by Jacob Sullum
“Hunter Biden’s Multiplying Charges Exemplify a Profound Threat to Trial by Jury” by Jacob Sullum
“The Conviction Effect” by Liz Wolfe
“Laurence Tribe Bizarrely Claims Trump Won the 2016 Election by Falsifying Business Records in 2017” by Jacob Sullum
“A Jumble of Legal Theories Failed To Give Trump ‘Fair Notice’ of the New York Charges Against Him” by Jacob Sullum
“Does Donald Trump’s Conviction in New York Make Us Banana Republicans?” by J.D. Tuccille
“The Myth of the Federal Private Nondelegation Doctrine, Part 1” by Sasha Volokh
“Federal Court Condemns Congress for Giving Unconstitutional Regulatory Powers to Amtrak” by Damon Root
“Make Amtrak Safer and Privatize It” by Ira Stoll
“Biden Threatens To Veto GOP Spending Bill That Would ‘Cut’ Amtrak Funding to Double Pre-Pandemic Levels” by Christian Britschgi
“This Company Is Running a High-Speed Train in Florida—Without Subsidies” by Natalie Dowzicky
“Do Not Under Any Circumstances Nationalize Greyhound” by Christian Britschgi
“With Ride or Die, the Bad Boys Movies Become Referendums on Masculinity” by Peter Suderman
“D.C. Water Spent Nearly $4,000 On Its Wendy the Water Drop Mascot” by Christian Britschgi
Upcoming Reason Events:
Reason Speakeasy: Corey DeAngelis on June 11 in New York City
Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.
Today’s sponsor:
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Audio production by Justin Zuckerman and John Carter
Assistant production by Luke Allen and Hunt Beaty
Music: “Angeline” by The Brothers Steve
- Producer: Hunt Beaty
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Matt Welch
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Steve Bannon May Spend Most of Election Season in Prison
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Steve Bannon, former adviser to President Donald Trump, arrives at the federal courthouse on June 6, 2024, in Washington, D.C.
Photo: Andrew Harnik/Getty ImagesIt’s been a long road, but Steve Bannon might finally be behind bars soon.
On Thursday, a federal judge ordered that the longtime Trump adviser and conservative provocateur report to prison by July 1, after an appeals panel rejected his attempt to overturn his pending sentence. If Bannon reports as scheduled, he would be released just days before the 2024 general election.
In July 2022, Bannon was found guilty of contempt of Congress after he defied a subpoena from the House select committee investigating the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol. He was sentenced to four months in prison along with a $6,500 fine, a ruling he immediately appealed.
In his attempt to overturn the sentence, Bannon had argued that his legal counsel had advised him to ignore the subpoena, using a tactic known as “advice-of-counsel defense.” But a three-panel judge of the U.S. D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals did not buy Bannon’s argument. “This exact ‘advice of counsel’ defense is no defense at all,” the judges wrote in May, per CNN.
The panel’s ruling left room for Bannon to appeal to the full court, but prosecutors soon filed a motion requesting that U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols lift the pause on Bannon’s sentence. Nichols, a Trump appointee, agreed.
Outside the courthouse, Bannon vowed to continue fighting his sentence. “We’re gonna go all the way to the Supreme Court if we have to,” he said. That would hardly be unprecedented for ex-Trump advisers: Peter Navarro, a former trade adviser, appealed to the Supreme Court to get him out of serving his own four-month sentence for contempt of Congress. The Court declined, and Navarro reported to a Miami prison in March.
Still, Bannon remained defiant. “There’s nothing that can shut me up and nothing that will shut me up. There’s not a prison built or a jail built that will ever shut me up,” he said.
In a Truth Social post, Trump called Bannon’s pending prison sentence a “Total and Complete American Tragedy” and suggested that members of the January 6 committee, such as former representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, needed to face consequences of their own. “INDICT THE UNSELECT J6 COMMITTEE FOR ILLEGALLY DELETING AND DESTROYING ALL OF THEIR “FINDINGS!” MAGA2024,” he wrote.
Even after this sentence is over, Bannon will not be out of the legal woods. In 2022, Bannon was indicted by New York authorities for allegedly bilking donors in a fraudulent scheme to build a wall on the southern border. Bannon was under federal indictment for that same scheme in 2020 but was pardoned by Trump, who will likely mull using that power again if he wins reelection. The trial was slated to begin last month under Judge Juan Merchan, who recently presided over the Trump hush-money trial. But proceedings have since been postponed.
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Nia Prater
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Appeals Court Upholds Steve Bannon’s Contempt Of Congress Conviction – KXL
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Steve Bannon accompanied by his attorney M. Evan Corcoran, speaks to the media as he departs the federal court in Washington, Thursday, July 21, 2022. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal appeals court has upheld the criminal conviction of Donald Trump’s longtime ally Steve Bannon for defying a subpoena from the House committee investigating the attack on the U.S. Capitol.
A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit on Friday rejected Bannon’s challenges to his contempt of Congress conviction.
Bannon had been sentenced to four months in prison, but the judge overseeing the case had allowed him to stay free pending appeal.
Bannon’s attorneys didn’t immediately respond to an email seeking comment.
More about:
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Grant McHill
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Appeals court upholds Steve Bannon’s contempt of Congress conviction
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Washington — A three-judge appeals court panel upheld the criminal conviction of former Trump White House chief strategist Steve Bannon in a unanimous decision on Friday, ruling they found “no basis” to depart from binding legal precedent.
Bannon was found guilty in 2022 of two misdemeanor counts of contempt of Congress for not responding to a subpoena from the now-defunct House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. At the time, he maintained that he could not testify because of executive privilege concerns raised by former President Donald Trump and said that his one-time attorney, Robert Costello, had advised him not to comply with the subpoena because of the potential privilege.
A federal judge in Washington, D.C., ordered ahead of the trial that binding legal precedent prevented Bannon from raising the issue of his attorney’s advice as a defense. After his conviction, the judge, Carl Nichols, sentenced Bannon to four months in prison.
The political strategist and his legal team launched an appeal of the conviction, contending Bannon did not willfully defy Congress by not responding because he was following the counsel of his attorney. Nichols delayed Bannon’s prison sentence while the appeal was pending after finding it was likely that the legal precedent underpinning the decision to forbid the advice of counsel defense would be overturned.
But in the ruling issued Friday, Judge Bradley Garcia, who was appointed by President Biden, upheld Nichol’s ruling, writing, “this exact ‘advice of counsel’ defense is no defense at all.”
“Nothing in the authorities Bannon relies upon calls into question this court’s longstanding interpretation of ‘willfully’ … as requiring a deliberate, intentional failure to respond to a subpoena,” the judge wrote.
The congressional investigators were interested in Bannon’s work in over a dozen key areas, including his communications with former President Donald Trump.
Garcia and the two other judges on the panel — Cornelia Pillard, an Obama appointee, and Justin Walker, a Trump appointee — ruled unanimously that Bannon’s decision to disregard the subpoena sufficiently upheld the criminal contempt charges. Legal precedent dictates that the contempt charges do “not require bad faith, evil motive, or unlawful purpose,” they wrote.
“Bannon does not dispute that he deliberately refused to comply with the Select Committee’s subpoena in that he knew what the subpoena required and intentionally did not respond; his nonresponse, in other words, was no accident,” the appeals court ruled, pointing to standing legal precedent that they wrote makes clear advice of counsel is “unavailable under this statute.”
The judges also rejected other arguments from Bannon’s defense team, including that the Jan. 6 committee was invalid.
Bannon’s attorney did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but there are other avenues of appeal that the legal team can pursue, including asking the Supreme Court to look at the matter.
Bannon is not the only Trump White House official convicted for defying a subpoena from the House Jan. 6 committee. Former trade advisor Peter Navarro is currently serving a four-month prison sentence after a jury in Washington, D.C. found him guilty of contempt.
Like Bannon, Navarro is appealing his conviction and has asked another federal judge to release him from prison into supervised release, citing allegations that he was “denied the opportunity to speak both with the press as well as a with Member of Congress.”
It remains unclear what effect Friday’s ruling will have on Bannon’s prison sentence.
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The Governor Who Wants to Be Trump’s Next Apprentice
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As every politician knows, openly campaigning for the job of vice president is bad form. But Kristi Noem doesn’t seem to care.
Last week alone, the South Dakota governor sent out a dozen tweets praising Donald Trump. She went on Fox News’s Hannity to condemn attempts in Maine and Colorado to remove the former president from the ballot. And she hosted a get-out-the-caucus rally for him across the border in Iowa. “Show up for a couple hours and fight for the man that’s fought for you for years!” the 52-year-old governor told the crowd at the event in Sioux City. “The only reason that we have this country is because of the good that he did when he was in that White House—and how he still continues to tell the truth out there every single day.”
Asked by a reporter at the event whether she would consider the Trump VP slot, Noem smiled and replied, “I think anybody in this country, if they were offered it, needs to consider it.” Later, she retweeted the clip.
Noem’s name has been popping up on vice-presidential shortlists in the media—and in Republican focus groups—for a while now. The way that she has defended and mimicked Trump’s actions for the past several years suggests that as his VP, she would be more of an enabler than a moderating force—and aggressive on Trump’s behalf in a way that Mike Pence never was. Picking Noem as his running mate would signal that Trump will be even less willing in a second term to kowtow to the Republican establishment. Compared with two other names that also appear regularly in shortlists, Noem would be more comfortable in MAGA world than the GOP conference chair Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, but less kooky than the Trump loyalist and Senate candidate Kari Lake. Noem also has more actual governing experience than either.
It’s still early in the primary season. Republicans have yet to settle on a nominee, and although all signs point to Trump, even his own team claims it hasn’t officially begun the brainstorming process for a running mate. “Much too soon for any of that talk,” Jason Miller, a senior adviser on Trump’s campaign, told me. Typically, a VP candidate is not announced until around the time of the convention, months after the presidential primary is concluded. Unofficially, though, the audition process began long ago.
Noem will be “very competitive,” Steve Bannon, Trump’s former White House chief strategist, told me. “She’s burnishing her MAGA credentials, and the more she comes across as a fire-breathing populist, that’ll help her.” (The governor did not respond to my requests for an interview.)
Noem, a former farm girl and South Dakota beauty queen, was elected in 2018 as the state’s first female governor. Before that, she spent four years in the state legislature and another eight in the U.S. Congress as South Dakota’s sole House representative. But most Americans probably heard Noem’s name for the first time in 2020, when she made national news for her laissez-faire approach to the coronavirus pandemic.
Like most governors, at the start of the virus’s spread, Noem closed schools and ordered businesses to follow CDC guidelines. But quickly, taking cues from the Trump administration, she let up on those regulations. Noem never issued a statewide mask mandate, and she encouraged counties to return to business as usual sooner than other states did. She welcomed the return of the annual Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in late summer of 2020, which ultimately resulted in “widespread transmission” of the virus throughout the Midwest, according to a study from the CDC. Her office used $5 million in pandemic-relief funds for an ad campaign promoting state tourism.
Her pandemic-era decisions were evidence of bold, freedom-loving leadership, Noem has said, and her handling of the crisis remains a top bragging point as she travels the country giving speeches and hosting fundraisers. In other ways, too, Noem has perfectly reflected the zeitgeist of the modern Republican Party. She has repeated Trump’s claims that the 2020 presidential election was “rigged.” In 2022, she signed legislation banning transgender girls and women from playing on female sports teams; last year, she called upon an adviser from the conservative Hillsdale College to rework the state’s social-studies curriculum as part of a broader effort to eliminate “critical race theory” from public schools. “She’s brought legislation that is increasingly far-right for South Dakota—more so than any previous governor,” Bob Mercer, a longtime journalist in the state’s capital, Pierre, told me.
Noem has also seemed much more focused on securing national media attention than past state leaders. In 2020, she built the first TV studio in the state capitol, and she’s become a regular on Newsmax, Fox News, and other major conservative outlets. Last spring, she signed a gun-related executive order onstage during a speech at the annual NRA convention in Indiana. (In that address, Noem boasted that her 2-year-old granddaughter already had a shotgun and a rifle.)
She has also brought in several aides with national political experience, including the former Trump adviser Corey Lewandowski. And she kicked off a new national “Freedom Works Here” ad campaign that urges Americans living all over the country to move to South Dakota for jobs. Noem has starred in each of the spots, cosplaying as various members of the South Dakota workforce, including a welder, a plumber, and a nurse.
Trump has always favored a culture warrior, and Noem’s political choices alone are enough to warrant VP consideration. But the governor, who is married with three children, can also claim the kind of corn-fed American backstory that voters love and that most Republican politicians wish they had. She spent her childhood pulling calves and driving grain carts on the family farm. As a teenager, she was crowned South Dakota Snow Queen, and her 2022 memoir, Not My First Rodeo, is chock-full of folksy idioms and Bible verses; Noem’s political MO, she writes, citing Matthew’s Gospel, is to “be wise like snakes and gentle like doves.” The book also recounts her life’s biggest tragedy: When Noem was pregnant with her first child, her father was killed in a grain-bin accident, forcing her, she writes, to leave college and go home to run the farm. Noem ended up earning her college degree by taking online classes during her time in Congress.
Noem has always been adept at appealing to voters by using “the great mythology of America that you can pull yourself up by the bootstraps,” Michael Card, a political-science professor at the University of South Dakota, told me. Those rural bona fides could be effective if she makes the Republican presidential ticket. But gender could work in her favor at least as much.
“Trump is well aware of his deficiencies as a candidate,” Sarah Longwell, an anti-Trump Republican strategist and the publisher of The Bulwark, told me. And his weakness among women voters—compounded by a penchant for baiting women he perceives as a challenge and the long list of sexual-harassment allegations against him—makes choosing a female running mate seem advisable. He’ll likely try to find “somebody who normalizes him somewhat,” Longwell said, and exploit “the excitement of a woman on the ticket, someone to push back on the idea that the party is sexist.” Bannon agreed: Trump’s MAGA movement is mostly woman-led, he claimed—“smart to engage that base and make your case to suburban women.”
Noem has downsides as a VP contender. It’s not as though Trump would need her on the ticket to win over rural voters; they already love him. Vice-presidential candidates can be chosen to deliver a state that might not be in the nominee’s column, but South Dakota is a safe Republican state, and, with only three Electoral College votes, it’s not a particularly useful pickup. And although Noem has yet to come under national scrutiny, she’s already had her share of controversy. In the spring of 2022, a Republican-controlled panel of South Dakota lawmakers found that one of Noem’s daughters had received special treatment in an application for her real-estate-appraiser license. (Noem has denied any wrongdoing.) And last fall, the New York Post and the Daily Mail ran reports about an alleged affair between Noem and Lewandowski. (In response, the governor’s spokesperson dismissed the allegation as “a false and inflammatory tabloid rumor.”)
Trump has other options. He could run on a ticket with his current primary opponent Nikki Haley, as a way to appease moderate Republicans. The pairing doesn’t seem particularly plausible right now, given the sharp words both candidates have had for each other during this campaign, but Bannon sees it as a possibility—even if he and others in MAGA world don’t approve. “Haley has two constituencies—the Murdochs and the donors—and they are trying to buy her way on the ticket as VP,” he told me.
As for Noem’s other potential rivals for a Trump VP pick, a lawmaker with Stefanik’s Ivy League credentials and political experience on the ticket could help Trump shore up support from moderates, some strategists said. “Elise could at least pass as somebody who eats with a fork in Washington circles but would satisfy the MAGA base,” Jeff Timmer, a Republican strategist and senior adviser at the anti-Trump group the Lincoln Project, told me. But Stefanik perhaps has to work harder to win over the MAGA crowd—she was dutifully parroting Trump’s lines on Meet the Press this weekend by referring to the convicted January 6 rioters as “hostages.” Aside from Lake, the former newscaster and failed Arizona gubernatorial candidate whom I profiled in 2022, other women who could get consideration include Senator Katie Britt of Alabama and Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee.
If Trump has secured the nomination, the VP-selection process could look very different from the way it did eight years ago. Back then, Trump was still looking to consolidate support among Republicans; now his lock on the party is airtight, unquestionable. “He gets to pick whoever he wants,” Timmer said. Which makes competition for the spot pretty unpredictable: Trump could follow his gut and pick a MAGA-style politician and relative outsider like Noem, or make a more strategic choice with a GOP insider like Stefanik. Regardless of whether Republican leaders like either, “they’re gonna smile and go along with it.”
One thing is certain: No candidate will be considered for the Trump VP slot without having demonstrated sycophantic devotion to the former president—a willingness to defend him no matter what. Noem is not the only one to clear that bar, but she has jumped higher than most.
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Elaine Godfrey
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A second Trump administration will 'come after' people in the media in the courts, an ally says
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NEW YORK (AP) — A Donald Trump ally who worked in his Justice Department said Tuesday that if the former president is elected again, his administration will retaliate against people in the media “criminally or civilly.”
Kash Patel, who was also chief of staff in the Defense Department and held a role on the National Security Council, made the comment on Steve Bannon‘s podcast. He said that, in a second Trump administration, “We will go out and find the conspirators not just in government, but in the media,” over the 2020 election, which Trump lost to Democrat Joe Biden.
Trump and his allies have repeatedly claimed the election was stolen, despite the fact that numerous federal and local officials, a long list of courts, top former campaign staffers and even his own attorney general have all said there is no evidence of the fraud he alleges. Trump has also promised “retribution” as a central part of his campaign message as he seeks a second term in the White House.
Trump’s campaign distanced itself from Patel’s comments in a sharply worded statement, saying that proclamations “like this have nothing to do with” them.
The campaign did not respond to questions about whether Trump is considering the plans Patel described.
Patel is a fellow at the Center for Renewing America, a conservative think tank that is part of a network of conservative groups that is preparing for a possible second White House term for Trump or any conservative who aligns with their views.
In his interview with Bannon, Patel said: “We’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections. We’re going to come after you, whether it’s criminally or civilly. We’ll figure that out. But yeah, we’re putting you all on notice.”
Trump has long targeted the media, labeling news organizations as “Fake News” and the “Enemy of the People,” a phrase linked to Soviet dictator Josef Stalin.
In a post on his Truth social network in September, Trump repeated both phrases and vowed to investigate NBC News and MSNBC for “Country Threatening Treason” and try to curb their access to the airwaves.
“I say up front, openly, and proudly, that when I WIN the Presidency of the United States, they and others of the LameStream Media will be thoroughly scrutinized for their knowingly dishonest and corrupt coverage of people, things, and events,” Trump said in the post. “Why should NBC, or any other of the corrupt & dishonest media companies, be entitled to use the very valuable Airwaves of the USA, FREE? They are a true threat to Democracy and are, in fact, THE ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE! The Fake News Media should pay a big price for what they have done to our once great Country.”
In the interview, Bannon suggested Patel might be a possible director of the CIA if Trump wins another term.
The Trump campaign did not respond to a question about whether Patel was being considered for a role as CIA director.
Patel was a guest at Trump’s kickoff for his 2024 presidential campaign last year at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. In June, he attended Trump’s speech at his Bedminster resort following the former president’s appearance in court on federal charges he mishandled classified documents.
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Associated Press writer Jill Colvin in New York contributed to this report.
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What Investigators Found In Trump’s Secret Documents
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Some, like Iran (#1) and Venezuela (#4) are no surprise, but seeing Estonia as #2 was pretty shocking. Authorities are unable to determine why Mongolia appears three times on the list (#17, #82, and #104), or why the U.S. government seems to think Myrtle Beach (#31) is its own country.
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Mehdi Hasan Exposes The Democrat Pushed By Some Of Trump’s Biggest Backers
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“A candidate willing to condemn the consolidation of corporate power, the evils of environmental racism and ever-increasing income inequality ― and a Kennedy to boot!” he said on Sunday night. “What more could Democrats ask for?”
Kennedy even met with Trump at one point to discuss a job in his administration.
“So forgive me if I don’t buy Kennedy’s left-wing ‘credentials’ and I’m not surprised he went on Tucker Carlson’s White Power Hour on Fox to promote his Democratic presidential bid,” Hasan said.
Then, he noted that while Kennedy has support from figures on the right, many of the “people who know him best” have publicly denounced his views: his own family.
See more from Hasan’s Sunday night show:
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Why Pence’s testimony before grand jury will be particularly significant
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Why Pence’s testimony before grand jury will be particularly significant – CBS News
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Chinese billionaire arrested and charged in alleged fraud conspiracy that bilked investors of more than $1 billion | CNN Politics
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New York
CNN
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Chinese billionaire and proclaimed dissident Guo Wengui was arrested Wednesday and charged with defrauding thousands of followers out of more than $1 billion through complex investment schemes, US prosecutors announced Wednesday.
Guo, a staunch critic of the Chinese government who is exiled in Manhattan and close to former Donald Trump adviser Steve Bannon, was taken into custody in New York on Wednesday morning. He is charged with defrauding or misappropriating investor money using different schemes, including his media company GTV Media Group, a farm loan program through Himalaya Farm Alliance, and a cryptocurrency called Himalaya Coin.
Guo is also known as Ho Wan Kwok and Miles Guo.
Prosecutors said instead of using the money the way he promised potential investors, Guo directed the funds to invest in a hedge fund to benefit GTV and a relative, to cover the maintenance payments for his $37 million, 145-foot luxury yacht, a New Jersey mansion and a custom-built Bugatti sports car valued at $4.4 million. Prosecutors said in a letter to the judge that they are seeking his detention, arguing he poses a serious risk of flight.
CNN has reached out to Guo’s lawyer for comment.
Guo co-founded two nonprofit organizations, the Rule of Law Foundation and the Rule of Law Society, that prosecutors allege he used to attract a following who believed in many of his ideas.
Those nonprofits were linked to a group promoting the theory that the novel coronavirus was likely engineered in a Chinese lab. The Rule of Law organizations were co-founded by Guo and Bannon.
Bannon has not been charged in this case.
Bannon was arrested in 2020 on Guo’s yacht on unrelated fraud charges stemming from a border wall fundraising effort. Bannon was pardoned by Trump but indicted on similar state charges. Bannon has pleaded not guilty.
Prosecutors said they have seized $634 million from 21 bank accounts and a Lamborghini Aventador SVJ Roadster.
In addition to criminal charges of conspiracy, wire fraud, securities fraud, international money laundering and obstruction of justice, Guo was also sued by the Securities and Exchange Commission.
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Why the American far right adopted Brazilian ex-President Jair Bolsonaro | CNN
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Sao Paulo
CNN
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This Saturday, as American conservatives flock to the Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland, they’ll get a taste of just how far and wide their own ideas have spread. Former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro will speak on the same stage where a few hours later former US leader Donald Trump will deliver the event’s closing remarks — a man the Brazilian leader has intentionally mirrored from the beginning of his presidency.
Far from his home country, Bolsonaro has found a warm reception in America: on social media, mostly Brazilian fans post videos of meeting Bolsonaro outside his south Florida rental and running into him in parking lots, food courts, and grocery stores, where the former president appears in shorts and sandals, grinning and posing for photos with children.
Bolsonaro has made a number of appearances in US hotel conference rooms and evangelical churches targeting Brazilian expats, giving speeches that come across as both timid and awkward, as he pauses to wait for interpreters to catch up to him, not always seeming certain of what is being said.
In early February, he spoke in the auditorium of a Trump hotel just outside Miami, hosted by none other than conservative activist and far-right organizer Charlie Kirk. Kirk, who admitted to not knowing much about Brazil, was nonetheless flanked by the flags of both nations: a gold-fringed, star-spangled banner and Brazil’s unmistakeable bright green flag with a yellow diamond and blue circle in the center. “The fight against socialism and Marxism knows no borders,” Kirk said by way of introduction to an audience of mostly Brazilians who were there to see Bolsonaro – “the myth,” or legend, as they call him.
In a separate podcast interview, Kirk and Bolsonaro enthusiastically described common ground between the Brazilian and American right. Describing his decision to snub Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s swearing in, Bolsonaro said: “I didn’t want to be accused of collaborating with the clumsy way they began their mandate, because we have completely opposing political views: conservative, on the right, and theirs, closer to socialism on the left.”
“Sounds very similar to what we’re dealing with in the United States,” Kirk responded.
The commonalities go on. From expanding gun rights and downplaying COVID-19 to opposing abortion and advocating for tougher immigration policies, Bolsonaro and Trump had plenty in common while in office. The two have continued to mirror each other since then; both shunned their successors’ inauguration ceremonies and fled to the embrace of conservative society circles in Florida, where Trump moved his residence and where Bolsonaro has been living for more than two months.
But there’s another reason for Bolsonaro’s tour of the United States: his continued appearances on US stages serve strategic purposes for far-right movements in both countries.
For Bolsonaro, participating in US political events shores up his claims that he has not exited politics and will eventually assume again leadership of Brazil’s rightwing opposition, despite his current sojourn abroad.
For the American right, publicly allying with a foreign figure helps expand their reach and creates the appearance of confirming conspiracy theories that originate in the US. In 2022, it was Hungarian hardline leader Viktor Orban who made headlines at CPAC. This year, it’s Bolsonaro.
Deputy Director of Rapid Response at Media Matters Madeline Peltz, who researches right wing media and has been tracking the way extreme rightwing figures like Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones talk about Brazil, says American and Brazilian activists can see each others’ countries as laboratories in which to test and observe tactics.
After a bruising midterm election, Peltz adds, Republicans are now wondering whether to continue down the path of being pushed farther to the right or to take a more measured approach, distancing themselves from election denialism and the violent acts of January 6, 2021, conveniently chalking that kind of behavior to the radicals of their party.
“The Republican Party was sort of testing this thesis about, do we continue down this path of Trumpism, of extreme election denial, and that was being reflected in the right wing media’s commentary on Brazil as well — they were testing that thesis both in the American elections and in the Brazilian elections,” Peltz said.
The blueprint hasn’t shown the expected results, she said. “Republicans underperformed, to be charitable, and Bolsonaro lost.”
In this balancing act, Bolsonaro is trying to figure out where he fits in. Though he denounced the invasion of Brasilia on January 8 by his supporters, in the days following the election he welcomed peaceful demonstrations while his party filed petitions for an audit of voting machines, alleging fraud. He fed his followers crumbs of misinformation about election fraud and made vague comments hinting at a potential coup.
Isa Soares speaks with an arrested Bolsonaro supporter
When asked if Bolsonaro was not too problematic and messy to be brought into American politics — as a one-term president who infamously defended rape, torture, and a military dictatorship and is currently facing multiple criminal investigations at home — Peltz quipped, “They get their power from problematic and messy.” Shock value and controversy can actually confer clout in the American political universe, she said.
Prominent American conservatives have long lent support to Bolsonaro. “(Steve) Bannon has long considered himself to sort of be the international boogeyman of the left,” and his “next act” after leaving the White House was to form a sort of global coalition of far right movements, Peltz said. Brazil was one winning example of his political penetration.
Bolsonaro brought in Bannon to advise his first presidential campaign back in 2018 – and Bannon in turn began mentioning the South American leader more and more to his American audience, posing for photos with Bolsonaro’s children on US visits, and voicing his support for the president on his social media whenever he was under fire.
He is not the only one. In the days that followed the Brazilian presidential elections in November, as Bolsonaro and his party filed petitions for tens of thousands of votes to be thrown out, another prominent conservative voice joined in. Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson raised questions about whether the vote was legitimate – despite Brazilian courts rejecting fraud claims and a military investigation finding no evidence of rigged voting machines.
Rodrigo Nunes, a philosophy professor at University of Essex and author of “From Trance to Vertigo,” a book of essays about Bolsonarismo, said that Bolsonaro’s value to US conservatives comes from two factors.
First, “he’s a former president of a fairly important country. Geopolitically, he was a fairly important ally to Trump, because he was 100% aligned with Trump.” As a former leader in the global far-right and part of the “ecology,” Bolsonaro’s voice can be amplified in the US whenever his ideas are relevant, Nunes said.
Second, Bolsonaro frequently mimics and echoes the discourse of the far right in the US, which can be fed back into the US as offering further confirmation of what the far right are saying there, Nunes explained.
“That’s a lot of how this ecological approach to political organization works. When you’re using the internet, how do you make something real? You spread sufficient sources of it so that it looks like it’s coming from several different places at the same time, and suddenly, this produces an effect of reality, it looks like it’s real, because there’s a lot of people saying it and where there’s smoke, there’s fire.”
In a way, the cycle is exemplified in the copycat insurrection that took place in Brasilia on January 8. It’s impossible not to see the influence of January 6 in the actions of the rioters there, and yet “the Brazilian Jan 6” was defended by Carlson and Bannon even as the reaction from Bolsonaro and many in his camp was mixed.
In pictures: Bolsonaro supporters storm Brazilian Congress
The day after the Brasilia riots, Bolsonaro condemned the acts in a tweet. “Peaceful demonstrations that follow the law are part of democracy. However, depredations and invasions of public buildings as occurred today, as well as those practiced by the left in 2013 and 2017, escape the rule,” he said.
But in American politics, what Bolsonaro thinks or says matters less than what the invasion of public buildings thousands of miles away means for American voters who believe that their own election was stolen.
“The way his narrative is built, to a large extent, as a copy or a mirror image of the narrative that they have in the US is very useful in the sense of showing people this is happening in other places, too. This proves the whole idea that there is a global conspiracy, a global left wing conspiracy to keep us, the people who represent the real people, out of power,” Nunes said.
In another recent speaking event, Bolsonaro took the pulpit of an evangelical church in Boca Raton, Florida, and told a crowd of Brazilians, “My mission is not over yet.”
In the same breath as he exalted the wonders of Brazil, (“There is nothing like our own land”), he urged his supporters to not be discouraged, and said he was planning to return to Brazil in the coming weeks to lead the opposition against Lula. If that is true, CPAC could be his last appearance in American politics before going home to an uncertain political future.
To Peltz, it would be the natural conclusion of what she described as Bolsonaro’s “strange, directionless detour to America,” given CPAC’s waning influence in the American political landscape. “CPAC no longer launches the careers of hopefuls looking to make an impact, rather, it’s now simply a box to check off. And without much otherwise on his to-do list, Bolsonaro might as well check it off.”
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Steve Bannon’s ex-lawyers sue him over nearly $500,000 in unpaid legal bills | CNN Politics
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CNN
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A law firm that represented former Donald Trump strategist Steve Bannon during his fight against a subpoena from the House January 6 committee and other cases is suing Bannon for nearly $500,000 in unpaid legal bills.
The lawsuit states that Davidoff Hutcher & Citron LLP worked for Bannon from November 2020 through November 2022 and represented him on several high-profile cases, including investigations into Bannon’s crowdfunding border-wall effort and the subpoena from the House select committee investigating the US Capitol attack on January 6, 2021.
“This action simply seeks payment of an outstanding bill for legal services rendered in the amount of $480,487.87 in addition to scheduling a hearing on the reasonable attorneys’ fees DHC is contractually entitled to as the prevailing party in this litigation,” the law firm wrote.
Bannon’s spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.
While Trump pardoned Bannon in the federal border wall case, the Manhattan DA’s office announced an indictment last year charging Bannon with state charges of fraud, conspiracy and money laundering related to the effort. Bannon has pleaded not guilty to the charges.
The lawyers representing him in that case – from a different firm – have sought to withdraw from representing him and said there were “irreconcilable differences.” Bannon is due in court next week to update the judge on his efforts to find new lawyers.
In his criminal case related to the House January 6 investigation, a jury convicted Bannon of failing to turn over documents and appearing for testimony last summer. Bannon has appealed his contempt of Congress conviction for defying the committee’s subpoena.
Robert Costello, an attorney at Davidoff Hutcher & Citron, had represented Bannon opposite the House subpoena, but became a witness in the case so Bannon had a different legal team at trial.
The Davidoff firm said in the lawsuit that its “bills for fees and expenses totaled $855,487.87. Defendant paid only $375,000.00 of the total bill leaving a total of $480,487.87 outstanding.”
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EU to Steve Bannon: You don’t scare us … anymore
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BRUSSELS — The EU was “scared” of Donald Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon during the European parliamentary election in 2019 — but those fears are gone ahead of the 2024 ballot, European Commission Vice President Věra Jourová said.
Referring to Bannon’s attempts to form a “club” to support far-right populists such as the Netherlands’ Geert Wilders and France’s Marine Le Pen in the run-up to the last EU-wide election, Jourová said Brussels was genuinely concerned his ideas would take off.
“We were scared by Steve Bannon organizing the pan-European campaign comprising Mr. Wilders, Madame Le Pen, and all the rest — finding everywhere useful partners and willing collaborators,” Jourová told journalists at a gathering on Thursday night.
“It was a combination still of the effect of the migration crisis, of terrorism, and Trump,” Jourová said. “It was also the Cambridge Analytica case” — revelations that the infamous British data analytics firm had illegally accessed people’s social media data to target them in a number of elections and was linked to Trump’s successful 2016 U.S. presidential campaign. “It was also the time of rising disinformation, targeted disinformation campaigns — these were things which were relatively new for us.”
Bannon, “with his simplified vision of Europe, could easily trigger something, which the others who know Europe could use as a platform. This was my fear,” Jourová said. But, “it didn’t happen. And I believe that now it will be a similar thing.”
Jourová, who is the European commissioner for values and transparency, said she believed Russia’s war on Ukraine would see Europeans make safe bets in the 2024 election, during which citizens in the EU’s 27 member countries will vote to elect the members of the European Parliament.
“I don’t think there will be a rise of extremist parties — far right or left,” Jourová said. “Because the people now see, especially in the time of crisis, it’s not the time for experiments.”
Asked whether the revelations of corruption and influence-buying by countries such as Qatar and Morocco in the European Parliament would drive extremist sentiment in the ballot, Jourová said it was “hard to say,” as the election was still a year away.
But, she added, “if I take a broader picture, when people see the politicians in jail, there are two kinds of instincts: ‘They are all rotten, they are all bad, we knew it.’ But then when the people see the system works, and when cases of corruption are closed and people are punished, I think that paradoxically, such scandal can even increase the trust of people in democratic institutions.”
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Zoya Sheftalovich
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