Breaking: Bannon Heading to Prison

Catholic conservative vows to fight all the way to the US Supreme Court

Former Trump advisor Steve Bannon will be in a prison cell by July 1, barring a last-minute legal turnaround for the embattled conservative.

A federal judge on Thursday ordered Bannon to jail, denying the media bigwig's request for a stay of his four-month sentence, imposed in October 2022 after he refused to comply with a pair of Democratic subpoenas relating to the January 6 Capitol Hill event.

United States District Court Judge Carl Nichols had originally frozen the sentence, giving Bannon time to appeal.

But last month a DC Circuit Court of Appeals panel shot down Bannon's challenges to the case. Judge Nichols responded Thursday by allowing the sentence to move forward, denying Bannon's appeal to continue the freeze while he tries to advance his appeal upward to the US Supreme Court.

Nichols said that after the DC Court of Appeals ruling, there is "no legal basis" for continuing the stay of sentence.

However, Nichols noted in his decision Thursday that Bannon could seek a stay of the judge's order, potentially postponing his surrender date.

Nichols' ruling has come as a surprise to some conservatives. A Trump appointee, he has opposed Biden prosecutors' use of the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act to amplify charges against January 6 defendants. In one case, for example, Nichols ruled that Sarbanes-Oxley does not apply to the January 6 event, as it did not involve "some action with respect to a document, record, or other object in order to corruptly obstruct, impede or influence an official proceeding."

Bannon, meanwhile, is vowing to continue his appeal, "all the way to the Supreme Court if we have to," he said following Thursday's hearing.

He also denounced his prosecution as a political ploy aimed at "shutting down the MAGA movement, shutting down grassroots conservatives, shutting down President Trump."

"There's nothing that can shut me up and nothing that will shut me up," he told reporters. "There's not a prison built or a jail built that will ever shut me up."

"We're going to win at the Supreme Court," Bannon declared.

Writer, editor and producer Stephen Wynne has spent the past seven years covering, from a Catholic perspective, the latest developments in the Church, the nation and the world. Prior to his work in journalism, he spent eight years co-authoring “Repairing the Breach,” a book examining the war of worldviews between Christianity and Darwinism. A Show-Me State native, he holds a BA in Creative Writing from Pepperdine University and an Executive MBA from the Bloch School of Business at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

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