The Steve Bannon Treatment

Steve Bannon and Contempt of Congress

• A D.C., jury found Steve Bannon guilty of contempt of Congress last week. Bannon vows to appeal. Why?
• Public opinion polls indicate that large numbers of Americans share Bannon’s criminal predilection.
• Critics of the Trump administration famously invoke obscure and arcane laws to punish opponents.
• Bannon is no stranger to this practice, having defied a congressional subpoena in the past

The Hollywood Ten

• Seventy-five years ago, when the Hollywood Ten flouted Congress's inquiries into their allegiance to Soviet communism, Washington also arrived late for a crisis.
• Ring Lardner, Edward Dmytryk, and their eight fellow Stalinists went to jail for refusing to say whether or not they belonged to the Communist Party. Despite all the histrionics, almost all continued to work in Hollywood, and a few earned Oscars.

Some congressional subpoenas are more equal than others

• Steve Bannon's career in Washington politics is not currently working out, but that does not mean he can return to Hollywood the way others convicted of contempt of Congress so seamlessly did
• Calling him a criminal based on the conviction on this charge does not stick
• Many crimes hang around the perpetrator like an albatross long after the sentence ends
  1. In other words, the fact that Steve Bannon’s career in Washington politics is not currently working out does not mean he can return to his work in Hollywood the way others convicted of contempt of Congress so seamlessly did.
  2. Gordon Liddy and Richard Kleindienst received convictions for the obscure crime, the members of the Hollywood Ten represent the last Americans to go to jail for contempt of Congress.
  3. A Washington, D.C., jury of Steve Bannon’s peers (Bannon’s peers voted 92 percent for Biden and 5 percent for Trump in 2020) found him guilty of contempt of Congress last Friday.
  4. So much power did they wield over their members that Albert Maltz, who refused as part of the Hollywood Ten to cower to the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1947, denounced in 1946 his own brilliant article outlining the intellectual perfidy of fidelity toward “art as a weapon” over “art for art’s sake” after a browbeating session led by such party goons as Mike Gold, Howard Fast, and V.
  5. The last time someone went to jail for contempt of Congress, the NFL featured a team called the New York Yanks, Americans still referred to Taiwan as “Formosa,” and rock ’n’ roll did not exist.
  6. Flynn, a senior editor of The American Spectator, is the author of Cult City: Harvey Milk, Jim Jones, and 10 Days That Shook San Francisco (ISI Books, 2018), The War on Football (Regnery, 2013), Blue Collar Intellectuals (ISI Books, 2011), A Conservative History of the American Left (Crown Forum, 2008), Intellectual Morons (Crown Forum, 2004), and Why the Left Hates America (Prima Forum, 2002).

https://spectator.org/steve-bannon-treatment-convicted-contempt-of-congress/