Inside "setup US kangaroo court" case-Steve Bannon's conviction

The hallmark of any authoritarian regime is politicized justice. Under that system, your opponents go to jail, your supporters can do whatever they want and this reveals that the state exists not to serve the people who live in it, but to preserve itself and to crush all dissent.

A federal jury has found former Trump adviser Steve Bannon guilty of contempt of Congressfor defying a subpoena from the House select committee

Hate to think we've reached a point anywhere near that here in the United States because there's nothing worse than that or scarier or harder to fix, but in fact, we have reached that point. That's where we are.

Yesterday, for example, a man leaped on stage at a campaign event and tried to stab Lee Zeldin. Zeldin is sitting member of Congress. He's challenging the unelected incumbent, Kathy Hochul, in the governor's race in New York.

So ordinarily, attempting to assassinate a federal officeholder would be considered a big deal. But Lee Zeldin is a Republican, so it's not a big deal anymore. The man who tried to murder Lee Zeldin was released immediately with no bail. Less than 24 hours later, by contrast, former Trump adviser Steve Bannon was convicted of crimes that until recently were not crimes at all, for which he now faces a prison term of two years. Bannon has been declared guilty of something called contempt of Congress. That may strike you as an unintentionally hilarious term, since most of the time Congress invites our contempt. But the point is, this is a crime the Democrats are not convicted of ever.

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Attorney General Eric Holder and IRS executive Lois Lerner were once found to be in contempt of Congress, both of them, and for real crimes. In Holder's case, it was gunrunning in Mexico. In Lerner's case, it was targeting conservatives for audits, but neither one went to trial. Holder claimed executive privilege, which was enough, even after a judge ruled that executive privilege did not apply in Eric Holder's case, but it didn't matter. He walked. Lois Lerner cited the Fifth Amendment. It was as simple as that. Both of them, today, Lerner and Holder are free and richer than ever, but these standards do not apply to Steve Bannon.  

Former Trump White House chief strategist Steve Bannon speaks with the media during the opening day of his trial on contempt of Congress charges stemming from his refusal to cooperate with the U.S. House Select Committee investigating the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, at U.S. District Court in Washington, July 21, 2022.  (Reuters/Michael A. McCoy/File Photo)

Steve Bannon was subpoenaed by the January 6 committee despite the fact he had literally nothing to do with January 6. We know that because he left the White House three years before it happened, but it didn't matter. He annoyed the wrong people, so he's going to jail. Now, this shouldn't surprise you, really, because we've been building toward this moment for some time. You might recall Greg Craig, that would be Barack Obama's former White House counsel. He was acquitted of violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act, FARA. Back in 2019, he'd been working for Ukraine. Now at almost exactly the same moment. Paul Manafort, who hired Greg Craig to work on Ukraine, was convicted of violating the same law, FARA, on the same account for Ukraine. How does that work exactly?  

It seems like a double standard and indeed it is a double standard. But it's a consistent standard. We've seen it again and again and again. Former Clinton attorney Michael Sussmann was just acquitted by a D.C. jury of lying to the FBI. That happened in May. The theory was that really who knows what Michael Sussmann told the FBI about nonexistent Russian servers in Trump Tower. Okay. As long as you're using that theory, does it work for everyone? Well, it didn't work for George Papadopoulos, didn't work for Michael Flynn. On the other hand, neither one of those guys had a key card to FBI headquarters like Michael Sussmann did and that came in handy, that relationship.

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But Mike Flynn didn't have that relationship. His life was destroyed. Why? Because of handwritten notes by Peter Strzok, you can now see on MSNBC about their conversation in the White House about Russian sanctions.

"Get him to lie," the head of counterintelligence of the FBI wrote to Strzok, speaking of Flynn. So, on the basis of that, the setup, they hounded Mike Flynn into poverty. The same thing happened to George Papadopoulos. Papadopoulos' crime? Not being as forthcoming as possible about his job status with the Trump campaign, unpaid. That's what the DOJ told the court in a filing, "The defendant did not provide substantial assistance." Oh, that's the standard. So, Papadopoulos went to prison, so did the 69-year-old grandmother recently call Pam Hemphill. She's currently serving a two month sentence in federal prison. Why? Because she, "paraded in the Capitol on January 6," didn't hurt anyone. She's got breast cancer. She's going to prison.

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