Criminal Contempt of Congress -- what do Mark Meadows, Steve Bannon, and G. Gordon Liddy have in common?

from "LawandCrime" dot-com

Now that former President Donald Trump’s ex-chief strategist Steve Bannon has been hit with two criminal contempt of Congress charges for refusing to comply with a House subpoena, legal scholars have to turn back decades for relevant precedent.

The indictment was filed Friday, and detailed Bannon’s ongoing defiance of the House Select Committee to Investigate the Jan. 6, 2021 Attack, chaired by Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.).

Although the indictment was not entirely unexpected—the House of Representatives voted in late October to hold Bannon in contempt—an actual conviction would be the first of its kind in almost half a century. The Department of Justice traditionally enjoys wide latitude over whether to convene a grand jury after receiving a contempt referral from Congress, and the vote from the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives hardly made Bannon’s charges inevitable. That a grand jury now has signed off on Bannon’s charges sets the stage for a rare prosecution—said to be the first contempt of Congress case brought after executive privilege was asserted.

In 1974, Watergate mastermind G. Gordon Liddy was found guilty of two counts of contempt of Congress for refusing to answer questions before a House subcommittee. He was given a suspended six-month sentence and one year’s probation, largely because he was already serving time for his role in the burglary of the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office building, as the New York Times reported.