The House filed a brief Monday in the appeal of Trump ally Steve Bannon that seeks to resurrect legal arguments that the House select panel investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol could not issue subpoenas because it was illegitimate.
The chamber’s filing at the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit takes the position of House Republican leaders to argue the panel broke the chamber’s rules when it was set up.
Bannon is currently serving a four-month sentence as he appeals his convictions on two counts of contempt of Congress, filed after he ignored a subpoena from the Jan. 6 committee seeking documents and his testimony about events leading up to the attack.
Although the brief said the House did not take a position on Bannon’s other arguments, it sought to revive legal arguments about the panel’s legitimacy that multiple courts have rejected.
Monday’s brief made two arguments: that the committee should have had 13 members, including five from the Republican minority; and that it should have had a ranking minority member, rather than a vice chair.
To issue lawful subpoenas — a requirement to find Bannon in contempt of Congress — the committee had to be set up with those features, the House argued.
“In this House’s view, none of these things happened,” the brief said.
Last month, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson, Majority Leader Steve Scalise and Majority Whip Tom Emmer said they had voted together to weigh in on Bannon’s behalf over the objection of Democratic leaders.
District Judge Carl Nichols of the District of Columbia rejected similar arguments from Bannon as part of the pretrial process.
Numerous courts have upheld the committee’s composition, including the D.C. Circuit itself, following a suit by former President Donald Trump seeking to keep the House from gaining access to his presidential records.
Now-Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson joined a unanimous three-judge panel that found the committee was properly constituted and that Trump had no legal ability to keep the Biden administration from handing over records.
Bannon was convicted on two counts of contempt of Congress in 2022 and has fought the conviction since, arguing that he relied on his attorney’s advice that executive privilege prevented him from cooperating with the subpoena.
In May, a three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit found that there was no executive privilege involved in the subpoena and that Bannon had a duty to at least respond rather than ignoring it. Bannon has since appealed that ruling to the full D.C. Circuit, leading to the House weighing in on Monday.
The only other witness prosecuted for contempt of Congress in the Jan. 6 select panel’s investigation, former trade advisor Peter Navarro, recently finished his four-month sentence. Navarro also has a pending appeal of his conviction, on different legal arguments.
House Republicans have for years criticized the panel, including a resolution last month from Rep. Eric Burlison, R-Mo., that would purport to rescind the subpoenas issued by the panel to Bannon and other recalcitrant witnesses who refused to cooperate.
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