Supreme Court Clears Way For Dismissal Of Contempt Case Against Steve Bannon

Authored by Matthew Vadum via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The U.S. Supreme Court on April 6 cleared the way for the Trump administration to dismiss the criminal contempt case against Steve Bannon over his failure to honor congressional subpoenas.

The high court granted Bannon’s petition in an unsigned order. The court did not explain its order. No justices dissented.

The Supreme Court sent the case back to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit for further consideration, as that court considers a pending motion to dismiss the indictment.

Bannon, an ally of President Donald Trump who served in the first Trump White House, was already convicted and imprisoned for four months in 2024 in the contempt case, but both Bannon and the Trump administration now want the case to be thrown out.

Bannon had been convicted by a federal jury in the nation’s capital on two counts of contempt of Congress for not providing documents or testimony to a Democratic-led House committee that was investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, security breach at the U.S. Capitol. At that time of the breach, Congress was in the process of certifying the results of the 2020 presidential election. Joe Biden was inaugurated as president on Jan. 20, 2021.

Bannon had said the committee’s investigation and the charges later brought against him by the Biden administration were politically motivated.

At the sentencing hearing, prosecutor J.P. Cooney said Bannon opted to “thumb his nose at Congress,” adding that Bannon was “not above the law, and that’s what makes this case important.”

The Supreme Court turned away Bannon’s request to delay his imprisonment while the appeal played out. He served the sentence and was released a week before Trump beat then-Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, in November 2024.

Bannon filed a petition with the Supreme Court in October 2025, asking the justices to throw out his convictions that were made under 2 U.S.C. Section 192, the criminal contempt-of-Congress statute.

The petition said the law is the only federal criminal statute in which “willful” mens rea—a legal term meaning criminal intent—requires merely “intentional” conduct. In that law, Congress criminalized “willfully ... [defaulting]” on a legally authorized congressional subpoena, the petition said.

The D.C. Circuit found that “willfully” required only intentional conduct, which meant the government did not have to prove the subpoena recipient understood his conduct was unlawful.

Three circuit court judges dissented from that court’s May 2025 ruling, finding that interpretation was inconsistent with 150 years of caselaw, violated basic rules of legal interpretation, and would seriously harm the separation of powers.

The separation of powers is a constitutional doctrine that divides the government into three branches to prevent any single branch from accumulating too much power.

The Supreme Court’s longtime position is that in the criminal context, “to prove willfulness, the Government must demonstrate that an individual knew that his conduct was unlawful,” the petition said.

“Congress conspicuously omitted ‘willfully’ when criminalizing a different set of actions. The use of two different mens rea requirements demonstrates that ‘willfully’ was meant to impose a heightened standard,” the petition added.

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) filed a brief in February supporting Bannon’s petition.

“The government has determined in its prosecutorial discretion that dismissal of this criminal case is in the interests of justice,” the brief said.

The government has filed a motion with the federal district court in which Bannon was convicted asking for the indictment to be dismissed with prejudice, the brief said. A dismissal with prejudice means the same charges cannot be refiled.

Bannon has had other legal challenges. In February 2025, he entered a guilty plea in New York state court to charges of deceiving donors in a private fundraising effort to complement Trump’s proposal to build a wall at the U.S.–Mexico border. Bannon was not sentenced to incarceration.

At the end of his first term, Trump pardoned Bannon after he and three others were involved in a campaign to build barriers along the southern border but were accused of keeping some of the money they raised.

Bannon had entered a not guilty plea and said the charges were a “political hit job.”

Approached by The Epoch Times, Bannon declined to comment on the Supreme Court’s new ruling.

The Epoch Times reached out to the DOJ for comment. No reply was received by publication time.

Reuters and Zachary Stieber contributed to this report.