Donald Trump’s closest allies in Congress greeted the indictment of Steve Bannon with a warning: It’s payback time once we take back the House. But getting revenge won’t be so simple.
Bannon turned himself into authorities on Monday after getting charged with contempt of Congress for refusing to cooperate with a subpoena from the House’s Jan. 6 select committee. The former Trump campaign chief had cited executive privilege and other protections to avoid testifying, but Bannon was left exposed for defying investigators after President Joe Biden waived those claims.
Yet Bannon’s case may well have no bearing on the GOP enthusiasm for hauling in the Biden White House. Legal experts say the Bannon indictment stands apart from nearly any other contempt of Congress charge in memory — from the brazenness of his defiance to his weak claim of executive privilege, which is meant to protect presidential talks with top advisers, not a private citizen’s help for a former president trying to overturn the results of an election.
“That is an apples and helicopters situation,” said national security attorney Kel McClanahan of the GOP effort to compare Bannon’s situation to a future demand for testimony from Klain, Sullivan or others. “The person in power, whether they be Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians or Greens — when they own the White House, they own executive privilege, full stop.”
Still, Republicans in Congress are viewing DOJ’s Bannon charge as a significant precedent for their own future investigative efforts. As they seethe, they’re strategizing about how to take advantage of the Jan. 6 committee’s legal and oversight moves in 2023 and beyond. “I think they’ve set new precedent for oversight and how you can obtain documents,” Comer said. “The traditional rule [is] you can't have access to those until five years after the presidency. But they said, ‘Well, this is an extreme situation, what happened on Jan. 6.’ What if we think it was an extreme situation what happened with the Afghanistan debacle?”
“There will definitely be not just a push, but a demand, from Republican voters that Republicans do the same thing the Democrats have done here, next time we can’t get information out of someone when we control the House,” said one Republican House staffer who works on investigations.
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