While Steve Bannon serves a four-month federal prison term, the conservative strategist now has a December date for a different trial in New York, where he is charged with scheming to con donors who gave money to build a border wall with Mexico.
With Bannon excused from court because of his incarceration, a judge on Tuesday scheduled jury selection to start on 9 December in the “We Build the Wall” case.
The trial had been expected as soon as September. It was postponed because Bannon, a longtime ally of Donald Trump, is in a federal penitentiary in Connecticut after being convicted of defying a congressional subpoena related to the attack on the Capitol on 6 January 2021.
With his release expected in late October, Judge April Newbauer said she wanted to allow enough time afterward for Bannon to meet with his lawyers and review the case, trial exhibits and things she described as “difficult to go over during counsel visits in prison”.
After the jury is seated and opening statements are given, testimony is expected to take about a week.
Bannon’s lawyers, John Carman and Joshua Kirshner, declined to comment after court.
Prosecutors say Bannon helped funnel more than $100,000 to a co-founder of the non-profit WeBuildTheWall Inc, who was getting a secret salary, though Bannon and others had promised donors that every dollar would be used to help construct a wall along the US-Mexico border.
“All the money you give goes to building the wall,” Bannon said at a June 2019 fundraiser, according to the indictment. It does not accuse him of pocketing any of the money himself, but rather of facilitating the clandestine payouts.
Bannon, 70, has pleaded not guilty to money laundering and conspiracy charges. He has called them “nonsense”.
Yet the accusations have dogged him from one court to another. He initially faced federal charges, until that prosecution was cut short when Trump pardoned Bannon in the last hours of his presidential term.
But presidential pardons apply only to federal charges, not state ones. And Bannon found himself facing state charges when the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, took up the “We Build the Wall” case.
Three other men did not receive pardons and are serving federal prison time in the case. Two pleaded guilty; a third was convicted at trial.
Meanwhile, a federal jury in Washington DC convicted Bannon in 2022 of contempt of Congress, finding that he refused to answer questions under oath or provide documents to the House investigation into the Capitol insurrection.
Bannon’s attorneys argued that he did not refuse to cooperate but that there had been uncertainty about the dates for him to do so.
An appeals court panel upheld his conviction, and the US supreme court rejected his last-minute bid to delay his prison term while his appeal plays out further.
Bannon turned himself in on 1 July to start serving his time, calling himself a “political prisoner” and condemning the attorney general, Merrick Garland.
