Court upholds Steve Bannon’s conviction for defying Jan 6 committee subpoena – as it happened (2024)

A federal appellate court ruled unanimously today to uphold Steve Bannon’s conviction of contempt for refusing to comply with a subpoena issued by the House special committee on the January 6 capitol attack. It’s a blow for the far-right media executive who helped usher Donald Trump into office in 2016 and was a key architect of the former president’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election. Bannon was originally sentenced to four months in prison; this ruling makes his incarceration a real possibility, although he could appeal the decision again.

Here’s what else happened today:

• Trump’s 2024 campaign will be “lean,” according to a Washington Post report, which also revealed numerous swing state officials’ worries that they lack critical campaign resources ahead of the 2024 election.

• Paul Manafort offered his consulting services to a Chinese media venture after Trump pardoned him in 2020 – and is likely to join the Trump 2024 campaign soon.

• Unsealed court documents reveal two political consultants pleaded guilty to charges that they conspired to commit money laundering with Democratic congressman Henry Cuellar of Texas, who the Department of Justice has charged with receiving bribes from foreign entities.

• Rudy Giuliani can’t stop fanning the flames of election conspiracy theories – a habit that got his show on the conservative talk radio station WABC, in New York, cancelled.

Rudy Giuliani’s show on the conservative talk radio station WABC in New York was cancelled after Giuliani continued to platform falsehoods about the 2020 election – a violation of the radio station’s policy.

According to the New York Times, which first reported the cancellation, Giuliani had been warned repeatedly to stop discussing election lies on air.

“We’re not going to talk about fallacies of the November 2020 election,” John Catsimatidis, who owns the station, told the New York Times. “We warned him twice.”

In a 9 May letter to Treasury secretary Janet Yellen, Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren this week urged the Treasury to step up measures recommended by the Treasury Advisory Committee on Racial Equity (TACRE).

“I am concerned that the recommendations made by members of the TACRE remain in limbo at Treasury,” Warren wrote in the letter, which was first reported by Reuters. Warren requested the department provide a timeline by May 23 for implementing the remaining proposals.

The Disney heiress and activist Abigail Disney blasted South Dakota governor Kristi Noem and the Republican Party in an email to voters, per an exclusive Guardian report from Martin Pengelly:

Evoking the classic Disney tearjerker Old Yeller, in which a family is forced to put down their beloved dog, the US film-maker and campaigner Abigail Disney exhorted voters to oppose the Republican party of Kristi Noem, the South Dakota governor whose story of killing Cricket, a 14-month-old dog, shocked the world and seemingly dynamited her hopes of being Donald Trump’s running mate.

“At least that’s what I thought until I read about potential Trump VP Kristi Noem shooting her family’s puppy – a story that has shocked so many of us.”

U.S. Department of Agriculture secretary Tom Vilsack announced today plans to unleash funding to mitigate the spread of bird flu in cattle – a measure intended to slow the spread of the virus.

The spread of the virus to dairy cows poses an immediate risk to the workers in close contact with livestock and has raised concerns about the virus mutating and spreading to humans.

Officials have promised nearly $200m for tracking and testing, and to compensate farmers who have taken a loss due to the spread of the virus.

Two months after the Supreme Court ruled that the state of Colorado lacked the authority to ban Donald Trump from the ballot there, a separate fight over ballot access is playing out in Ohio, over Joe Biden’s eligibility to appear on the ballot this fall.

The partisan fight that has been brewing for months escalated this week when the GOP-controlled state legislature blew past a Thursday deadline to pass legislation ensuring the president will have ballot access in November.

Because the Democratic National Convention falls after the state’s certification deadline for presidential candidates, the state legislature was tasked with passing a law to push that deadline ahead.

But Republicans in the state say they will grant Biden ballot access only if they garner the votes to also pass legislation banning foreign nationals from donating to state referendum campaigns – a push that stems from their anger over donations from a Swiss billionaire to Democratic-backed ballot measures in the state last year.

Unsealed court documents reveal two political consultants pleaded guilty to charges that they conspired to commit money laundering with Democratic congressman Henry Cuellar of Texas.

Cuellar’s former campaign manager, Colin Strother, and consultant Florencio “Lencho” Rendon, are now cooperating with the Department of Justice in its case against the Texas Democrat.

Cuellar and his wife, Imelda, were indicted last week for allegedly accepting nearly $600,000 in bribes from a Mexico City bank and an oil and gas company owned by the government of Azerbaijan.

Joe Biden and Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaigns are a study in contrasts.

While Biden spends his Friday fundraising on the west coast, making campaign stops in California and Washington, Trump sits through another day of his New York trial over Trump’s alleged falsification of business records in connection with hush money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels ahead of the 2016 presidential election.

And while the Biden campaign has launched a massive fundraising campaign, Trump’s operation appears strained amid his legal battles. According to a report today in the Washington Post, swing state GOP operatives are worried they lack critical campaign infrastructure ahead of the 2024 general election (the Trump campaign insists that’s not the case).

Donald Trump’s fixer and former lawyer Michael Cohen is expected to appear in court Monday – his testimony in the hush money case will be key, given Cohen’s role in facilitating the $130,000 payment to adult film actress Stormy Daniels. You can follow updates on the case on the Guardian’s live trial blog here:

In the unanimous decision by a federal appellate court to uphold Steve Bannon’s conviction of contempt, circuit court judge Brad Garcia wrote that Bannon “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.”

Bannon has maintained that he refused to comply with the congressional subpoena from the special House committee investigating the January 6 attacks on the advice of his former lawyer, Robert Costello – a justification the appellate court has rejected.

Bannon could continue to appeal the case, including by turning to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Far-right Trump ally Steve Bannon has, since Joe Biden was elected president in 2020, maintained the lie that the election was stolen from Donald Trump. Even as other figures in the conservative movement shy away from the claim, Bannon has made the falsehood a rallying cry. In March, the Guardian’s David Smith wrote about Bannon’s incendiary role in right-wing politics:

It was a blunt reminder that Bannon, an architect of Trumpism variously compared to Thomas Cromwell, Rasputin and Joseph Goebbels, remains a potent force in American politics as the 2024 US presidential election looms into view and the re-election of Trump looks a clear possibility.

After Steve Bannon’s criminal conviction for refusing to comply with a subpoena from the special House committee investigating the January 6 capitol attack was upheld by a federal appeals court, the far-right political operative could soon be forced to begin a 4-month prison sentence initially ordered in 2022.

Leaked audio showed that ahead of the 2020 general presidential election, Bannon was familiar with Trump’s plans to declare an early victory. Since 2020, he has continued to push falsehoods about the 2020 election and host prominent conspiracy theorists on his influential War Room podcast.

When the House committee investigating the January 6 attacks issued a subpoena for Bannon, he refused to comply. The court’s decision to uphold his conviction delivers a blow to the Trump ally.

A three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals has reportedly upheld Steve Bannon’s conviction on contempt charges for defying a congressional subpoena issued by the United States House select committee on the January 6 capitol attack.

Paul Manafort returned to international consulting after Donald Trump pardoned him in 2020, The Washington Post reports.

Manafort, in the years since obtaining clemency, worked on a Chinese streaming media venture. Now, the Post reports, Manafort is poised to join Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign. Manafort denied that his work on the Chinese media project would form a conflict of interest in the U.S.-China relationship.

Before chairing Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, Manafort’s former firm, called Black, Manafort, and Stone notoriously lobbied U.S. congress on behalf of foreign governments – including on behalf of human rights-abusing dictatorships, among them the regime of Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines.

Former president Donald Trump has adopted the legal strategy of stalling and stalling to ensure his most sensitive trials will take place after the election. That strategy is working, reports Sam Levine:

As had been expected for months, Judge Aileen Cannon on Tuesday scrapped a 20 May trial date that had been set in south Florida over the former president’s handling of classified documents. The delay was almost entirely the doing of Cannon, a Trump appointee, who allowed far-fetched legal arguments into the case and let preliminary legal matters pile up on her docket to the point where a May trial was not a possibility.

On Thursday, the Georgia court of appeals announced it would hear a request from Trump to consider whether Fani Willis, the Fulton county district attorney, should be removed from the election interference case against him because of a relationship with another prosecutor. The decision means both that Trump will continue to undermine Willis’s credibility and draw out the case. “There will be no trial until 2025,” tweeted Anthony Michael Kreis, a law professor at Georgia State University who has been closely following the case.

The third pending case against Trump, a federal election interference case in Washington, also appears unlikely to go to trial before the election. The US supreme court heard oral arguments on whether Trump has immunity from prosecution last month and seemed unlikely to resolve it quickly enough to allow the case to move forward ahead of the election.

Swing state GOP officials say they have not received key campaign resources ahead of the 2024 general presidential election, The Washington Post reports. This comes amid a funding crunch for Donald Trump’s campaign, which is looking lean as the former president faces mounting legal costs.

Top campaign officials rejected the idea that their operation was suffering.

But Republican Party officials in Arizona, Georgia and Michigan said they worried that their funding and operations would be insufficient – and that the campaign had not built out enough of an infrastructure in those key states.

“There is no sign of life,” Kim Owens, an Arizona Republican Party operative, told the Post.

Good morning! After easily surviving an attempt to oust him by the far-right congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, House speaker Mike Johnson appears to be basking in it. In an interview with Politico, Johnson – the conservative Republican who developed his career in the legal world of the Christian right and joined his colleagues in contesting the results of the 2020 election – waxed poetic about bipartisanship and consensus.

He had high praise for House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries, and proclaimed – of bipartisanship – that the American political system “doesn’t work unless you understand the principles that undergird it.”

His praise came after the House easily quashed far-right congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene’s resolution to oust Johnson on Wednesday, as members of both parties came together in a rare moment of bipartisanship to keep the chamber open for business.

The vote on the motion to table Greene’s resolution was 359 to 43, as 196 Republicans and 163 Democrats supported killing the proposal.

Having said this, Johnson was just as quick to defend his role in attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Johnson, who led the effort to garner congressional Republican support for a Texas lawsuit attempting to overturn the election results in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, said he had no regrets over the legal maneuver.

Here’s what’s going on today:

• Amid the former president’s mounting legal costs, Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign is taking a “lean” approach, Washington Post reports.

• Trump returns to court today, rounding out a week marked by detailed testimony from adult film star Stormy Daniels about her alleged affair with Trump.

• Joe Biden will participate in campaign events on the west coast this afternoon.