(Sketch by Bill Hennessy)
Prosecutors rested their case against Steve Bannon yesterday, sticking with the approach of keeping things simple and straightforward for the jury.
To present its evidence that Bannon, a former adviser to former President Donald Trump, was in contempt of Congress by failing to comply with a subpoena in a House investigation on Jan. 6, the Justice Department called only two witnesses to the stand.
Through their questioning of House committee staffer Christine Amerling, prosecutors led the jury through a paper trail of documents, telling Bannon he had October deadlines to produce documents and testify. Bannon’s team, meanwhile, has seized on everything it can — including his recent offer to testify before the committee — to try to suggest that Bannon has reason to believe the deadline isn’t firm, while hinting at an alleged bias against him.
Here are four takeaways from the third day of proceedings and the second day of testimony:
The paper trail bolsters prosecutors’ case against Bannon
The pace of testimony Wednesday relied heavily on letters between the House special committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot and Bannon.
Several defenses Bannon might try to present were undermined by the paper trail of documents the committee sent him in connection with his subpoena, and the prosecution was able to expose those documents through its questioning of Amerling.
The documents show Bannon was warned that his failure to comply with the subpoena risked criminal referral. They showed the committee rejected his claims that Trump’s claims of executive privilege precluded him from cooperating. And they showed that the commission confirmed the terms of the summons and the expectations of the deputies that he would comply by then.
Amerling was also questioned about the responses the committee received from Bannon’s attorney. She testified that Bannon never asked for the deadlines to be moved, nor did he give the committee reasons the committee believed would help justify his lack of compliance, such as not understanding the subpoena’s directions.
Bannon’s team says the committee gave him flexibility
After a series of court rulings limiting his defense, Bannon finally got a right in his favor, with U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols on Wednesday giving his team permission to admit recent letters from his lawyer and to Trump so the committee can clear him to testify. With the decision, they also acknowledged a previously unreported letter sent last week by committee chairman Benny Thompson in response to Bannon’s offer to testify for the committee.
Bannon’s team had very little to do during this process. So being able to use the letters in the Amerling questioning was a rare opportunity for them to stretch Bannon’s defense — and allowed the topic of executive privilege to loom larger over the case than the Justice Department intended. Bannon’s team sought to use the correspondence to support the argument that Bannon had reason to believe the October return dates were not a hard deadline, but rather flexible inflection points in the negotiation process regarding Bannon’s cooperation.
In her question about Amerling, Corcoran directed her specifically to Thompson’s indication that she would still accept Bannon as a witness.
Bannon’s team hopes the jury sees this as evidence that even when the subpoenas have return dates, the process was open-ended, and that Bannon had reason to believe that when he passed the October deadline that his cooperation on more a late date would be acceptable to the committee. (The judge instructed the jury that any future compliance by Bannon with the subpoena was irrelevant to whether he was in default last year.)
The trial could go ahead with a jury as early as Thursday
The Justice Department quickly wrapped up its case Wednesday with a brief set of questions to its second witness, FBI agent Steven Hart, who read Bannon’s public statements saying he would stand with Donald Trump and links to his social media accounts. media outlets to stories describing him as out of line with the commission, even after one subpoena expired.
The question now will be how many witnesses, if any, the defense team calls to help Bannon’s cause. If no one is called — and Bannon doesn’t testify — the case could likely head to jury deliberations by the afternoon.
One defensive strategy: Call out the Democrats
Wednesday’s trial began with a discussion between lawyers and judges about whether the case would be a political circus. Judge Carl Nichols said he won’t let it become one.
Yet during the hours defense attorney Evan Corcoran questioned Amerling, he repeatedly probed her politics. The questions sought to show jurors in Washington, D.C., that she and the Democratic-leaning committee may have unfairly named Bannon among their thousands of witnesses.
Corcoran was able to ask Amerling, a two-decade Hill veteran, about the parties of legislators she has worked for and her political contributions. Her previous visit to a book club with a prosecutor on the case turned into a lively barrage of questions. But when Bannon’s lawyers turned to questions about the larger political dynamics of the House and the committee’s actions, the judge largely blocked them from going there.
Read more takeaways here.
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