Steve Bannon Might Be In Serious Legal Trouble For Defying House Subpoena

The House Select Committee has prepared criminal referrals for Steve Bannon and several other former Trump aides who defied subpoenas to provide materials to the Committee last week. The referrals have been drafted, but so far they have not become an action item, which really is all that matters. The Committee is trying to scare Bannon into complying, but he believes he has executive privilege on his side, so the Committee needs to act immediately. Ring of Fire's Farron Cousins explains what's happening.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

Well, it doesn't happen too often, thankfully, but I will always be the first to admit when I was wrong. And folks, I was wrong about this story I'm about to tell you. On Monday, I mentioned that Bannon had defied the subpoenas and that nothing was going to happen to him. Well, something is happening to him. Something glorious is happening to him as Bannon and several other Trump associates who defied subpoenas last week, have now been referred for criminal action. The house select committee has written up, basically their contempt report for these individuals, Bannon obviously being the headliner of them all because they didn't turn over the documents that the house select committee had requested and actually subpoenaed. So they put together this contempt report and they are now referring it for criminal action. Meaning Steve Bannon has a good chance of actually being arrested at this point.

If the criminal action is in fact acted upon. Now, I had said nothing would happen. I had said these were going to be empty threats by the committee to try to force Bannon and these others to comply. Well, thankfully, the committee decided to go a little bit harder on them as they should. So I am impressed with the committee. I give them full absolute credit for doing the right thing here, because this is what needs to happen. Bannon needs to be arrested. These other individuals need to be arrested for defying these subpoenas. It's the same thing that would happen if you or I were given a subpoena from a court and we chose to ignore it. We would be immediately arrested and it wouldn't take a week before that happened. Usually it would just take a couple of hours. If you don't show up, they're going to send somebody going looking for you.

But this is Congress. Things are a little bit different. And hopefully Bannon is prosecuted for this. I don't want them to just force him to comply. I certainly do want him to be forced to comply. But, I don't want this to just drop if he complies. You were given the deadline, you were given the instructions. He needs to be fully prosecuted for openly defying that. And here's the reason Bannon is actually taking all the headlines here. And it's because Bannon is the one with the least logical legal argument as to why he didn't turn anything over. The other people were all members of the Trump administration in some way shape or form. So when they claim executive privilege, even though they're no longer a part of the executive branch, there's still a tiny possibility they might be able to get away with not complying under the banner of executive privilege.

Bannon did not have that. Bannon was not a member of this administration. So he was not protected under executive privilege, nor were the documents that the house committee was seeking from Steve Bannon, because they were not involving anyone else from the executive branch. These were communications that Bannon had with sitting members of Congress, therefore in no possible way, is this guy covered by executive privilege. Yet, that is what he tried to claim with these particular documents. Legally speaking, he's screwed. He doesn't have an argument. He doesn't have a justification for defying the subpoena.