The Justice Department is taking steps to throw out Stephen K. Bannon’s conviction for defying a congressional subpoena about the Jan. 6, 2021, riot, its latest shift in a legal position to benefit a close ally of President Donald Trump.
In a Monday legal filing, the department asked the Supreme Court to send Bannon’s case back to the district court, where the U.S. attorney filed a separate motion seeking to dismiss the charges against him.
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche characterized the move, in a statement, as a course correction from “the prior administration’s weaponization of the justice system.”
Bannon, a top Trump strategist who left the White House in 2017, served four months in federal custody in 2024 after a jury in U.S. District Court in D.C. found him guilty of contempt of Congress for ignoring a subpoena from the House select committee that investigated the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
Trump last year pardoned more than 1,500 defendants who were charged in that event, in which a mob of his supporters disrupted the vote count to certify Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election. Trump has also directed a purge of prosecutors and federal investigators who worked on those cases.
The Jan. 6 committee’s subpoenas in part sought information about the “Green Bay Sweep,” a plan from Bannon and other Trump advisers to have supporters in Congress contest the electoral results from six swing states as Trump pushed false claims that the election had been stolen from him.
Bannon had argued he was following legal advice and waiting for his claims of executive privilege to be resolved when he was prosecuted and eventually convicted of two counts of contempt of Congress. An appeals court later affirmed the convictions, and the Supreme Court declined to intervene in the case before Bannon’s sentence began.
In a two-page legal filing Monday, the U.S. attorney for D.C., Jeanine Pirro, said a federal judge should dismiss Bannon’s indictment “in the interests of justice.” She was the only prosecutor from her office to sign the government’s filing. She said Bannon does not oppose the request.
Separately, Solicitor General D. John Sauer urged the Supreme Court’s justices to send his appeal back to the judge overseeing Bannon’s case — Trump appointee Carl J. Nichols — to facilitate the dismissal of charges.
“The government has determined in its prosecutorial discretion that dismissal of this criminal case is in the interests of justice,” Sauer wrote. He noted that prosecutors may seek to have charges dismissed “even after a jury finds the defendant guilty.”
Under federal law, prosecutors have wide latitude to pursue or drop criminal cases, and judges rarely second-guess prosecutors’ moves to dismiss criminal charges.
Bannon and his attorneys did not immediately respond to a request for comment Monday.
In a similar move last year, the department said it would no longer defend the conviction of Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro, who also reported to prison for defying a congressional subpoena from the Jan. 6 committee. Navarro’s appeal of that conviction remains ongoing.
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