Steve Bannon has been ordered to report to prison by July 1 to serve time over his refusal to turn over documents related to Congress’ investigation in the deadly riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6.
The right-wing podcast host and former adviser to Donald Trump will serve four months in prison after he was convicted of two misdemeanor counts of contempt of Congress in 2022. This means one of the MAGA movement’s most prominent voices will be behind bars for a large portion of Trump’s presidential campaign.
The far-right conservative who once led Breitbart News is now the second Trump White House official to go to prison for refusing to release documents and cooperate with the committee. Former trader adviser Peter Navarro is currently serving a four-month term for the same crime.
U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols, a Trump appointee, made the order on Thursday after a federal appeals court rejected Bannon’s push to overturn his misdemeanor conviction. Bannon was sentenced in October 2022 but has avoided jail time while he appealed his conviction. Nichols granted the Department of Justice’s request that Bannon serve his four-month sentence while awaiting his appeal.
Nichols could “no longer conclude that [Bannon’s] appeal raises substantial question of law,” the judge said as he made the order and revoked Bannon’s bail. Bannon and his legal team have less than a month to appeal the revocation of his bail and appeal his conviction.
Bannon was found in contempt in Congress after he refused to hand over documents to a congressional panel investigating the deadly series of events that led to the storming of the Capitol. He long argued that his lawyer told him he did not have to comply with the subpoena and therefore he did not commit a crime. The justice system disagreed.
Outside of the courthouse on Thursday, Bannon said the order was politically motivated.
“All of this about one thing. This is about shutting down the MAGA movement,” he said. “Shutting down grassroots conservatives. Shutting down President Trump. Not only are we winning, we’re going to prevail.”
“There’s nothing that can shut me up and nothing that will shut me up,” he continued, saying there wasn’t a jail sentence that would silence him. “We’re going to win on November 5 in a landslide,” he screamed as protestors yelled “Lock him up” and “You’re going to jail.”
Last month, the three-judge panel on D.C.’s Circuit Court of Appeals rejected Bannon’s appeal that he did not “willfully” break the subpoena, writing “because none of Bannon’s other challenges to his convictions have merit, we affirm [the conviction].” In addition to the four-month jail sentence, Bannon is also required to pay a $6,500 fine.
The government originally looked to slap him with a $200,000 fine and six months in jail. “A person could have shown no greater contempt than the Defendant did in his defiance of the Committee’s subpoena,” prosecutors wrote in the sentencing memo in October 2022.
Bannon’s close ties to the former president were continuously referenced in his sentencing. “The defendant chose allegiance to Donald Trump over compliance with the law,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Molly Gaston said then during closing arguments.
Presiding over sentencing then, Nichols said Bannon “has expressed no remorse” for his actions.
“The Jan. 6 committee has every right to investigate what happened that day,” Nichols said in 2022, noting that Bannon “has not provided a single document” or “testimony on any topic,” and that “others must be deterred from committing similar crimes.”
Trump gave an 11th-hour pardon to Bannon on the last day of his presidency after Bannon was charged in August 2020 with scamming thousands of donors into thinking their campaign donations to Trump would be spent on making a border wall. The funds were instead used to pay for his expenses and the salary of another campaign staffer.
Trump was not happy that Bannon was ordered to prison, writing on Thursday that it is a “Total and Complete American Tragedy that the Crooked Joe Biden Department of Injustice is so desperate to jail Steve Bannon,” adding that he believes the members of the House Jan. 6 Committee should be indicted instead.
Trump told Sean Hannity on Wednesday night that he would have “every right” to prosecute his political enemies should he win back the White House this November.
President Donald Trump discussing Venezuela at a press conference at Mar-a-Lago.
Why Venezuela Could Be a Turning Point in Gen Z’s Support for Trump
When Donald Trump called himself “the peace president” during his 2024 campaign, it was not just a slogan that my fellow Gen Z men and I took seriously, but also a promise we took personally. For a generation raised in the shadow of endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it felt reassuring. It told us there was a new Republican Party that had learned from its failures and wouldn’t ask our generation to fight another war for regime change. That belief stood strong until the U.S. overthrew Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
Growing up in the long wake of the wars in Iraq in Afghanistan shaped how my generation learned to see Republicans. For us, “traditional” Republican foreign policy became synonymous with unnecessary conflicts that caused young people to bear the consequences. We heard how Iraq was sold to the public as a necessary war to destroy weapons of mass destruction, only to become a long conflict that defined the early adulthood of many millennials. Many of us grew up watching older siblings come home from deployments changed, and hearing teachers and coaches talk about friends who never fully came back. By the time we were old enough to pay attention, distrust of Bush-era Republicans wasn’t ideological, it was inherited from what we had heard.
As the 2024 election was rolling around, that dynamic had flipped. After watching wars in Ukraine and Gaza dominate headlines while Joe Biden was president, the Democrats were now the warmongers. My friends constantly told me how a vote for Kamala Harris was a vote to go to war. On the other hand, Donald Trump and the Republicans were the ones my friends thought could keep us safe. “I’m not voting for Trump because I love him,” one friend told me. “I’m voting for him because he cares about us and I don’t want to go fight in a stupid war.” For many of my friends, much of their vote came down to one question: Who was less likely to send us to fight? The answer to them was pretty clear.
Fast forward to now, and Venezuela has begun to complicate that belief. Even without talk of a draft or a formal declaration of war, the renewed focus on U.S. involvement and troops on the ground has brought back the same language of escalation my generation was taught to distrust. Young men online have been voicing the same worries, concerned that the ousting of Maduro mirrors the early stages of wars they were raised to fear. When I asked a friend what he thought about Venezuela, he shared that same sentiment. “This is how all these wars always start,” he told me. “They might try to make it sound like it’s not actually a war, but people our age always end up being the ones that pay the price for it.” For young men who supported Trump because they believed he represented a break from interventionist politics, Venezuela blurs the line between the “new” Republican Party they thought they were backing and the old one they were raised to reject.
For many young men, Venezuela has become a major part of a broader shift of how they view Trump. A recent poll from Speaking with American Men (SAM) found that Trump’s approval rating has fallen 10 percent among young men, with only 27 percent agreeing with the statement that Trump is “delivering for you”.
Gen Z men’s support of Trump was never about ideology or party loyalty, it was about the idea that he had their back and would fight for them. But that’s no longer the case. Recently, Trump proposed adding $500 billion to the military budget. Ideas like that will only hurt the president with young men. My friends don’t want more military spending that could get us entangled in foreign wars; they want a president who keeps them home and fights for their economic and social needs. As Trump pushes for a bigger military and more intervention abroad, the promise that once made him feel like a protector of young men now feels out of reach.
For my generation, Venezuela isn’t just another foreign policy dispute, it’s a conflict many young men worry they could be the ones sent to fight. Gen Z men didn’t support Trump because he was a Republican, but because they believed he was different from the old Republicans. He would be a president who would have their back, fight for their interests and keep them from fighting unnecessary wars. Now, that promise feels fragile, and the fear of being the ones asked to face the consequences has returned. For a generation raised on the effects of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the idea of another war isn’t abstract, it’s personal.