Steve Bannon, former advisor of Donald Trump, attends a hearing at the New York Criminal Court, in New York City, NY, February 11, 2025. Curtis Means/Pool via REUTERS
Political scientist Austin Sarat on Wednesday warned that Donald Trump's Justice Department is making a "virtually unprecedented" demand on behalf of MAGA activist Steve Bannon that would effectively "rewrite the past" and further encourage supporters to break the law on his behalf.
Writing in a piece for The Hill this week, Sarat, a professor of political science at Amherst College, highlighted an extremely unorthodox legal request submitted by the DOJ last month, asking a federal judge to dismiss the contempt of Congress indictment leveled against Bannon over four years ago. This would, in turn, essentially vacate his conviction on that same charge.
Bannon, a former adviser to Trump and outspoken proponent of the MAGA agenda, was initially indicted by Congress in late 2021 for refusing to answer a subpoena from the House select committee investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol. By the summer of 2022, he was convicted and sentenced to serve four months in prison and pay a $6,500 fine. Despite years' worth of appeal efforts, all the way up to the Supreme Court, Bannon ultimately ended up serving his time from July to October 2024 at a federal prison in Connecticut.
While the DOJ's new request on Bannon's behalf might fly under the radar for many as another in a long line of efforts by Trump to reward his loyalists, Sarat argued that this effort to dismiss a conviction after the prison sentence has been completed is "unprecedented" and would represent a new escalation in Trump's efforts to incentivize loyalty towards him at all costs.
"To dismiss an indictment after a prison sentence has already been served is virtually unprecedented and shows the lengths to which the administration will go to whitewash history and rewrite the past," Sarat wrote. "The judge, Trump appointee Carl Nichols, would be well advised to refuse."
It is not unheard of for prosecutors to ask that indictments or convictions be overturned, though Sarat said it is "extraordinarily rare" for it to happen after a sentence has been completed. Typically, such requests are only made after new evidence of the convict's innocence has been discovered or if there is a clear argument that their constitutional rights were violated.
"Again, none of that applies to Bannon," Sarat wrote.
Trump previously decried Bannon's indictment and conviction, claiming that the attempt to compel his testimony before Congress was a violation of his legally dubious assertions about "executive privilege." In the request from February, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche called the original subpoena "improper" and claimed that the DOJ is attempting to "undo the prior administration’s weaponization of the justice system."
"Bannon had his day in court. He was tried and convicted. He appealed all the way to the Supreme Court and lost before going to prison," Sarat wrote. "The only thing that has changed is that his friends have returned to power. What the Justice Department is doing in the Bannon case is just the latest example of why, as former Secretary of Labor Robert ReichRobert Reich puts it, 'Trump justice is an oxymoron.'"