Steve Bannon’s criminal trial in Manhattan was supposed to be over before his former boss was back in the White House, but a judge on Monday pushed it back more than two months — positioning the case to play out during the pivotal first 100 days of Donald Trump’s incoming administration.
Bannon is now scheduled to be on trial starting Feb. 25, as the Manhattan district attorney’s office seeks to hold him accountable over his role in “We Build the Wall,” an effort to construct a privately funded border wall during the first Trump administration that ended up bilking donors. A federal case sentenced two Bannon associates, Brian Kolfage and Andrew Badolato, to prison for years. But Bannon narrowly escaped a federal trial by receiving a pardon from Trump during the president’s final hours at the White House.
Trump can’t kill the Bannon case this time because it’s in state court. However, the new timing of the trial means that the right-wing media figure will now have a close ally running the federal government while it plays out. And on the flip side, the details released during Bannon’s trial could serve as one of the first scandals involving Trump’s inner circle.
The delay changes the power dynamic, as one of Trump’s closest political cheerleaders fights to stay out of prison while the president works to fulfill campaign promises of “retribution” on journalists and government officials — a strategy that Bannon has been championing for years.
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New York Supreme Court Justice April A. Newbauer originally planned to have the trial start Dec. 9, but Bannon’s defense lawyers argued in court that it would harm their case if jurors only got a week or so to consider facts before end-of-year court closures. NOTUS spoke to Bannon’s defense team outside the courtroom after the pretrial hearing.
“We didn’t want to try it during the holiday time,” defense lawyer Joshua D. Kirshner said.
“It avoids a mistrial,” fellow defense lawyer John Carman interjected.
“Only eight days to squeeze this case in. It’s not enough time,” a third defense lawyer Harlan Protass added.
During the hearing, New York County prosecutors noted they were concerned about the American public discovering the names of witnesses before the trial, asking the judge to keep a recent court document sealed to avoid their release. Although some of that information is often made public, the office has in recent years taken a more cautious approach when dealing with Trump and his associates, citing fears about witness intimidation.
Trump has made threatening public statements about witnesses, jurors, prosecutors and even judges involved in cases against him and his closest allies. During Trump’s civil bank fraud, rape defamation and criminal-records-faking trials, judges had to keep the names of jurors secret as government officials got flooded with MAGA death threats.
Bannon, for his part, has remained defiant about the case and has called it mere political persecution — one that he intends to combat with a direct attack on those he deems the “deep state.”
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Jose Pagliery is a reporter at NOTUS.
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