A US federal judge has ordered Donald Trump’s former strategist Steve Bannon to report to prison by July 1 to serve four months.
The order came Thursday after years of legal wrangling, with an appeals court last month upholding Bannon’s 2022 criminal conviction for contempt of Congress.
The right-wing podcaster was found to have unlawfully refused to testify before a committee investigating the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot.
Bannon, 70, has denied any criminal wrongdoing, and his lawyers called the ruling a “terrible decision.”
After Thursday’s decision, Bannon said he and his lawyers would appeal “all the way to the Supreme Court” if necessary.
“There’s no prison I can put in,” he defiantly told reporters outside a Washington, D.C., courthouse.
He called the legal challenge against him a plan to “shut down the MAGA movement” – a reference to former President Trump’s “Make America Great Again” campaign slogan.
Bannon said he refused to follow legal advice as he testified before a House committee investigating Jan. 6, when rioters ransacked the U.S. Capitol in an effort to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s election victory.
Bannon’s lawyer, David Schoen, called his client’s case politically motivated and vowed to appeal to a higher court.
Schoen said if his client testified before Congress, he would be violating the legal concept of Trump invoking executive privilege, which allows the president to keep certain communications secret.
But a three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously rejected that argument when it upheld his conviction in May, saying his claims “conflict with established law.”
“This exact ‘counsel advice’ defense is no defense at all,” Judge Bradley Garcia wrote in the decision.
Thursday’s sentencing order could be delayed if the appeals court takes up the case and issues its own ruling halting execution.
Bannon was a key figure in Trump’s move to the Oval Office in 2016 and later became the White House’s chief strategist.
He left the administration in August 2017 after a violent far-right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, but remained a top ally of the former president.
Another top Trump aide, Peter Navarro, was jailed in March after being convicted of contempt of Congress.
