(PatrioticPost.com)- Democrats got what they wanted when Steve Bannon was arrested on criminal contempt charges last week … or so they thought.
After threatening legal action against Bannon if he didn’t cooperate with a subpoena issued by their January 6 investigating committee, the House formally adopted criminal contempt charges against him, which the Department of Justice proceeded with.
Now that Bannon has already appeared in court twice, though, it’s becoming clearer that this entire ordeal could backfire on the liberals.
Bannon, a one-time senior adviser to former President Donald Trump, refused to comply with the subpoena to testify in the investigation of the January 6 attacks on the U.S. Capitol building.
Democratic members of the House believed the treat of charging him with a crime — and then the threat of jail time for that crime — would be enough to convince him to cooperate. Even that doesn’t seem like it’s likely to happen now, though, as Bannon appears ready, willing and able to fight the charges all the way through.
And in the meantime, he’s smartly taking advantage of every opportunity this case is giving him to be in the media spotlight.
When he was arrested earlier this week, Bannon was the lead story in many major media outlets throughout the country. Outside the courtroom, he livestreamed comments on the social media platform Gettr, which is popular among conservatives who are in the pro-Trump camp.
Bannon isn’t afraid of this kind of limelight. In fact, he seemingly loves all the attention and is thriving on it. In effect, it’s serving as an obvious wake-up call to Democrats who somehow thought their strong-armed tactics were going to work on a close ally of Trump’s.
In a column written for The Hill recently, Niall Stanage wrote:
“In seeking to get details of what exactly was said between Trump and Bannon, the former aide’s adversaries have restored him to the center of the political stage. From there, he is sure to amplify Trump’s fictions about election fraud, among other things.”
In other words, Democrats’ move to charge Bannon with criminal contempt have given him a platform to say whatever he wants to in front of the entire world — even on liberal-backed media outlets where he normally wouldn’t get any coverage.
It’s all coming together quickly as a major potential catastrophe for the liberals.
Stanage wrote that many Democratic leaders were saying how Bannon’s indictment was proof that they would hold everybody to the full rule of the law. But, as he also wrote:
“For Democrats, the problem is that the enemy — Bannon and the GOP — gets a vote too.
“In Bannon’s case, that means characteristically pugnacious rhetoric outside the courthouse about how he is ‘taking down the Biden regime’ and how his criminal prosecution is going to be ‘the misdemeanor from hell’ for [President Joe] Biden, [Attorney General Merrick] Garland and others.
“More substantively, the door is now open to future use of the same process by Republicans at whatever point they win back control of Congress — an outcome that looks odds-on to happen a year from now.
“Some Trump loyalists are already salivating at the prospect.”
