Steve Bannon, who used to be the chief strategist for former President Donald Trump, is taking the fight to Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats.
As he prepares to go to trial next month for defying a congressional subpoena his attorneys have subpoenaed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the nine members of the House Select Committee investigating January 6, 2021, The Daily Mail reported.
David Schoen, Bannon’s attorney, said that the Democrats and others on the committee had conflicts that made them ineligible.
“It’s a party political abuse of the criminal system, in my opinion,” the attorney said.
“It never should have been done and it proves to me that they’re not interested in his testimony they were interested in making a spectacle and intimidating people,” he said.
They will get that spectacle on Thursday when the committee holds its hearings in prime time.
The subpoenas were accepted by the House counsel, Doug Letter, last Friday, but in a twist of irony Letter and the members could move to have the subpoenas dismissed based on the speech and debate clause.
The speech and debate clause appears in Article 1, section 6 of the United States Constitution and says that “for any Speech or Debate in either House, they [members] shall not be questioned in any other Place.”
“The subpoenas are asking for materials that belong to the American people. It would be pretty ironic for the committee to quash the subpoenas when they issued a subpoena demanding materials from Bannon, where Trump asserted executive privilege,” Bannon’s attorney said.
Steve Bannon, who was indicted for contempt of Congress and is set for a trial next month, has subpoenaed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other lawmakers, including members of the Jan. 6 committee, according to documents reviewed by Axios.https://t.co/HlZCn1os1P
— Axios (@axios) June 7, 2022
But that is precisely the strategy that one CNN contributor, Thomas Spulak, who served as general counsel to the House of Representatives in the 1990s, believes the subpoenaed members will use and he believes they will succeed.
“In this particular case I’m extremely confident that the staff members and members of the House would be shielded by the Speech and Debate Clause,” he said.
“I’m very confident that defense would be upheld, and they will not be compelled to produce anything or appear for anything,” he said.
Schoen said that it was a “sad irony.”
“Here you have Bannon, referred by this committee for criminal prosecution for not complying with a subpoena when executive privilege was invoked by the former president and his hands are tied, but then you would have the committee members saying they refuse to testify,” the attorney said.
“Their testimony and their documents belong to the American people and it shouldn’t be their role to refuse to testify.
“They want all the facts to come out then come out and testify about them and produce the documents,” he said.
Schoen said that there is evidence of some members having conflicts of interests, including some who are writing books on the January 6 investigation.
Rep. Adam Schiff is one example as he is penning the book “Midnight in Washington: How We Almost Lost Our Democracy and Still Could” which was published last October and the subpoena asks him to produce related documents.
“All documents in your possession which tend to show a conflict of interest involving any Select Committee member or staff (including but not limited to documents that pertain to payments for a book that was written by and/or promoted by any Select Committee member or staff from January 6, 2021, up until the present date),” it said.
Another book that makes reference to the events of January 6, 2021 “Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy,” was authored by Rep. Jamie Raskin, another committee member.
“Going inside Congress on January 6, he recounts the horror of that day, a day that he and other Democrats had spent months preparing for under the correct assumption that they would encounter an attempted electoral coup—not against a President but for one. And yet, on January 6, he faced the one thing he had failed to anticipate: mass political violence designed to block Biden’s election. With an inside account of leading the team prosecuting President Trump in the Senate, Congressman Raskin shares never before told stories of just how close we came to losing our democracy that fateful day and lays out the methodical prosecution that convinced Democrats and Republicans alike of Trump’s responsibility for inciting insurrectionary violence against our government,” the description of the book reads.
This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
