Steve Bannon, former adviser to former president Donald Trump, has been charged with two counts of contempt of Congress for his refusal to provide testimony and documents to investigators looking into the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
Bannon failed to comply with a subpoena issued by the committee investigation the incident. The House referred Bannon to the Justice Department for prosecution in late October following his refusal to cooperate with the subpoena.
The House Select Committee subpoenaed four ex-Trump advisers, including Bannon and former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows.Also summoned were Dan Scavino, Trump’s former Deputy Chief of Staff of communications, and Kashyap Patel, assistant to Trump’s former acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller.
The four were instructed “to produce materials and appear at depositions,” the Committee said in a statement. Patel and Bannon have been ordered to appear on Oct. 14, with Meadows and Scavino told to appear the next day.
Bannon had based his refusal to comply with the subpoena to executive privilege, even though the former film producer and current podcast host left the White House in 2017 before the Capitol attack that shook the country in January.
In 2018, Trump said Bannon had “lost his mind” after Bannon criticized his son, Donald Trump Jr., in a soon-to-be published book.
“Steve Bannon has nothing to do with me or my presidency. When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind,” Trump said in a statement. “Steve was a staffer who worked for me after I had already won the nomination by defeating 17 candidates, often described as the most talented field ever assembled in the Republican Party.”
Bannon was fired as Trump’s chief strategist in August and returned to leading Breitbart News, the organization he left in summer 2016 to lead Trump’s presidential campaign.