WASHINGTON (AP) — Steve Bannon, a longtime ally of President Donald Trump, won a Supreme Court order on Monday that is expected to result in the dismissal of his criminal conviction for refusing to testify to Congress.
Pushed by the Trump administration, the justices rejected an appeals ruling that upheld Bannon’s conviction after he ignored a subpoena from a House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by a mob of Trump supporters.
The move leaves the trial judge free to address the Republican administration’s pending request to dismiss Bannon’s conviction and indictment “in the interests of justice.”
The firing was largely symbolic. In 2022, a jury found Bannon in contempt of Congress, and Bannon was sentenced to four months in prison. A federal appeals court in Washington upheld the verdict.
The justices also issued a similar order in the case of former Cincinnati City Councilman PG Sittenfeld, who was pardoned by Trump last year.
Sittenfeld served 16 months in federal prison after a jury convicted him of bribery and attempted extortion in 2022. The high court order allows lower courts to consider dismissing the case against him.
The Justice Department prosecuted Bannon while Democrat Joe Biden was president, but reversed course after Trump took office again last year.
Bannon initially argued that his testimony was protected by Trump’s claims of executive privilege. But the House panel and the Justice Department found that claim questionable because Trump fired Bannon from the White House in 2017, so Bannon was a private citizen when he consulted with the then-president in the run-up to the Capitol riot.
Bannon separately pleaded guilty in New York state court to defrauding donors in the private construction of a wall on the U.S. southern border as part of a plea deal that allowed him to avoid jail time. The conviction is not affected by the Supreme Court proceedings.