Republicans will defend anything — even Steve Bannon

Republicans will defend anything — even Steve Bannon

By Paul Waldman

Columnist

Today at 12:50 p.m. EST

Stephen K. Bannon turned himself in to federal law enforcement authorities Monday, after being indicted for refusing to obey a subpoena from the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection. As repugnant a character as Bannon is, the fight over whether he’ll have to tell what he knows is much bigger than him.

But most disturbing of all is the fact that Bannon — one of the most toxic and discredited figures in recent American political history — is being given an outpouring of support from the Republican Party. One has to ask: They’re going to bat for this guy?

Indeed they are. To catch you up: Though Bannon has moved in and out of Donald Trump’s graces since Trump fired him from his White House job in 2017, in the days leading to Jan. 6, he used his podcast to encourage people to mobilize. Trump’s “second term is going to start with a bang,” he said two days before, because on Jan. 6, Trump’s supporters would “impose our will” on Congress.

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On the day of the insurrection, Bannon and other Trump figures, including Rudolph W. Giuliani and John Eastman, the lawyer who wrote a blueprint for Vice President Mike Pence to steal the election, manned a “command center” at the Willard hotel in Washington, coordinating efforts to overturn the results.

Naturally, the committee investigating the insurrection is interested in what went on, including questions about Trump’s communications with Bannon and others. So the committee subpoenaed him; he refused to answer the subpoena, claiming he was protected by executive privilege.

There is simply no serious person anywhere who thinks Bannon has the legal right to thumb his nose at this subpoena, or that his claim of executive privilege is anything but preposterous. He was a private citizen at the time of the events in question; he left the White House over three years before. Furthermore, executive privilege belongs to the office of the presidency, which gives the current president the right to assert it; former presidents don’t get to use it to hide their misdeeds and those of their cronies as long as they live.

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And finally, the events in question, and any communication Bannon had with Trump or other officials, had nothing to do with any legitimate executive branch business. The actions of the people involved may have been criminal, but even if they weren’t, they were solely political in nature, as they sought to overturn the 2020 election.

Across the Sunday shows, Republicans disagreed on Nov. 14 about the future direction of the party after Stephen K. Bannon was ndicted by a grand jury. (Zach Purser Brown/The Washington Post)

Yet Republicans seem unified in their defense of Bannon. As The Post reports, Republicans are “rallying around” him, “warning that Democrats’ efforts to force Bannon to comply with what they say is an unfair subpoena paves the way for them to do the same if they take back the House in 2022.”

You could barely ask for a better illustration of the contempt with which Republicans view the congressional oversight function. If Democrats keep investigating an insurrection against the United States, once we have the power we’ll haul Democrats in front of Congress and force them to answer questions about, you know, whatever!

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What can we surmise from the GOP’s vigorous defense of Bannon? First, the GOP is no less committed than ever to the principle that Republicans simply don’t have to follow the law. If you call Bannon’s indictment “the Soviet-style prosecution of political opponents,” as did Rep. Elise Stefanik (N.Y.), the third-ranking Republican in the House, you’re clearly taking the position that any private citizen should be able to ignore congressional subpoenas whenever they want.

Second, Republicans are very, very afraid of what the Jan. 6 committee is going to discover, in particular about Trump’s own involvement in the events leading up to that day. If the actual facts would make clear that no GOP official did anything wrong and Trump bears no responsibility for the violent insurrection, they’d be only too happy to have the people involved testify to that effect.

This should also serve as a reminder of just what a remarkable collection of thugs, criminals and far-right extremists Trump gathered around him — and who continue to animate his party to this day.

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Don’t forget, in 2020 Bannon was indicted by the federal government for a scheme in which he and others allegedly defrauded donors to “We Build the Wall,” a group claiming it would build Trump’s border wall. According to the indictment, Bannon diverted hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations to his own “personal expenses.”

The case never went to trial, however, because before Trump left office he pardoned Bannon along with a long list of other cronies accused or convicted of crimes, including Roger Stone, Paul Manafort and Michael Flynn.

But the case revealed Bannon to be not just a true believer in his vision of a worldwide far-right movement of xenophobic authoritarianism, but also a small-time grifter who views the conservative masses as gullible marks just waiting to be separated from their money.

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To what should be no one’s surprise, that fact has given Republicans nary a moment’s hesitation in defending his lawlessness, so long as it serves the greater and eternal cause of supporting Donald Trump.

Bannon’s testimony will likely end with him invoking his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination and refusing to answer any of the committee’s questions. Nevertheless, evidence keeps piling up that the Republican war on democracy that burst into view on Jan. 6 continues unabated.