WASHINGTON-
Jury selection began Monday in the trial of Steve Bannon, a top adviser to former President Donald Trump. He faces criminal contempt of Congress charges after refusing for months to cooperate with the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol uprising.
Bannon is charged in Washington federal court with defying a Jan. 6 committee subpoena seeking his records and testimony. He was indicted in November on two counts of contempt of Congress, a month after the Justice Department received a referral from Congress. Each charge carries a minimum of 30 days in jail and up to a year behind bars.
By early afternoon, several jurors had sat through a slow process. Much of the questioning of potential jurors by Bannon’s attorney, a court proceeding known as voir dire, centered on the number of Jan. 6 hearings they watched and whether they had opinions about the committee and its conclusions.
The trial follows a flurry of activity in the case since July 9. More than a week ago, the former White House strategist notified the committee that he is now willing to testify. His former attorney, Robert Costello, said the change was because Trump had given up his executive privilege to prevent testimony.
Bannon, 68, had been one of the most prominent of Trump’s allies in refusing to testify before the committee. He had argued that his testimony was protected by Trump’s executive privilege, which allows presidents to withhold sensitive information from the courts and the executive branch.
Trump has repeatedly asserted executive privilege, even though he is a former president, not the current one, to try to block witness testimony and the release of White House documents. In January, the Supreme Court ruled against Trump’s efforts to bar the National Archives from cooperating with the committee after a trial judge, Ketanji Brown Jackson, now on the Supreme Court, noted, in part, that ” presidents are not kings.”
The committee also noted that Trump fired Bannon from the White House in 2017, and therefore Bannon was a private citizen when he was consulting with the president in the run-up to the riots.
US District Judge Carl Nichols rejected motions to delay the contempt trial in separate hearings last week, including Thursday, when Bannon’s attorneys raised concerns about a CNN report that has since aired about their client and which they said were damaging comments made during a hearing last week. by House committee.
“I am aware of the ongoing concerns about publicity and bias and whether we can put together a jury that is proper and fair, but as I said before, I think the proper course is to go through the voir dire process,” Nichols said. Thursday. The judge said he intended to get a jury that “is going to be proper, fair and impartial.”
While the judge allowed the trial to move forward, Nichols left open the possibility that the letters about Trump’s waiver of his privilege and Bannon’s offer to cooperate with the committee could be referenced at trial, saying the information was ” at least potentially relevant” to Bannon’s defense. .
Roscoe Howard Jr., a former federal prosecutor in Washington, said Bannon’s best case is if information about his offer to cooperate reaches the jury. Even if he does, however, the claim that executive privilege prevented him from cooperating sooner will be a difficult argument to make because Bannon refused to respond to the subpoena, Howard said.
“You have to show up to invoke the claim of privilege. You can’t call on the phone,” she said.