The chickens are coming home to roost for a slew of Donald Trump’s criminal cronies, and Steve Bannon is next on the docket.
The former Breitbart News chairman and short-lived White House chief strategist first came under scrutiny by a federal grand jury in 2020, and four years later he’s officially headed to prison. Bannon reported to federal prison today, July 1, on two charges regarding criminal contempt of Congress. He was found guilty in July of 2022 on both counts — one count of not providing documents, and one count of not testifying to Congress — and in early June, Judge Carl Nichols ordered Bannon to report to the Federal Correctional Institution in Danbury, Connecticut by July 1.
That date is officially here, which means Bannon is set to spend the next four months behind bars. Its a slap on the wrist compared to what he could have served, if not for Trump’s last-minute pardon, but it does show that even among the seemingly untouchable MAGAs, actions have consequences.
That’s not sitting well with the aforementioned MAGAs, and fellow January 6 apologist Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) is among the most perturbed. She posted an outraged message to her followers on X, declaring the move an all-caps “DISGRACE,” and labeled the soon-to-be inmate a “patriotic American.”
Included in the tweet was an interview between Bannon and Greene, in which the 50-year-old Congresswoman blasts the Democratic Party as a “dictatorship,” and disparaged the Jan. 6 Committee as “illegitimate” and a “failure” by Congress.
Considering that Greene was among the people who supported the Jan. 6 insurrection, her stance is no surprise. If the people who encouraged the infamous attempted coup are too closely examined, then Greene herself may come under fire. She can’t have that, so she has to push back at every opportunity, and work to paint the investigations as immoral and unlawful.
Bannon’s four-month sentence, which officially began around noon on July 1, is far less than he deserves, but at least it’s a (minor) comeuppance for a man whose familiarity with criminal activity seems to rival Trump’s. The MAGA movement is increasingly reshaping the Republican Party as the party of liars, cheats, and criminals, and with Bannon’s foray in to the federal prison system, he’s only reinforcing the new identifiers of the GOP.
