Steve Bannon, a former advisor for former President Donald Trump, lost his appeal for going against a congressional committee subpoena regarding the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
A U.S. federal appeals court upheld the conviction Friday, Reuters reported.
In 2022, Bannon was convicted of two misdemeanor counts of contempt of Congress. He refused to turn over documents or testify to the House of Representatives committee that was investigating the Capitol riot.
He was sentenced to four months in prison. He has remained free pending his appeal.
In his appeal, Bannon said his lawyer told him he did not have to comply with the subpoena. Since that was the case, there was no intention on his part to commit a crime.
“Bannon’s argument would ‘hamstring Congress’s investigatory authority,’ by making it more difficult to prosecute witnesses who spurn congressional investigations, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit found,” per Reuters.
Bannon can still appeal to the full D.C. Circuit court and the U.S. Supreme Court.
The House panel, led by Democrats, investigated Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results and his hand in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot on the Capitol to attempt to stop the formal certification of the vote.
Bannon, who referred to the investigation as politically motivated, predicted the day before the riot that “all hell is going to break loose tomorrow.”
Peter Navarro, another Trump advisor, is serving a four-month prison sentence for going against a subpoena in the same investigation.
