Federal prosecutors in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday filed a motion asking U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols to order the former Trump adviser Steve Bannon to start serving your four-month prison sentence after an appeals court last week maintained his conviction for disrespecting Congressional charges.
On a motion presented Tuesday, prosecutors said there was “no legal basis” for the judge to continue suspending Bannon’s sentence after the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia rejected Bannon’s appeal for all reasons.
“Consequently, there no longer exists a ‘substantial legal issue likely to result in a reversal or an order for a new trial,’” prosecutors wrote in the motion. “In these circumstances, the Court will ‘order’ that the defendant ‘be detained’, therefore the suspension of the sentence must be lifted.”
Nichols has not yet ruled on the motion. But in an order issued Tuesday, the judge ordered Bannon to respond to the motion by Thursday.
The office of David I. Schoen, Bannon’s lawyer, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Bannon was sentenced to four months in prison and fined US$6,500 in October 2022, after being found guilty on two counts of contempt of Congress for defying a subpoena from House January 6 Committee to provide documents and testimonies. The judge, however, postponed the sentence pending Bannon’s appeal.
A three-judge panel of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia last week upheld Bannon’s conviction.
In a statement last week following the appeals court ruling, Schoen said he plans to ask the entire D.C. Circuit to hear his client’s case.
“That’s the next step,” he said.
This article was originally published in NBCNews. with
