that, what you have there, if you have people in the room who should know better, who are lawyers, you have presumably some documentation, and now you have pat cipollone trying to tell his side of the story to the extent that it would seem to be bad for trump. i want to get you as well now on the banner news, this is an individual who was the first to defy the committee. and made a big deal that he was willing to face jail for stonewalling, washington post crossing and an important story tonight, the way they put it, i want to be clear, is that the headline says trump could waive claim of executive privilege for bannon. now, what is interesting here is number one trump hasn t engaged on the privilege claims for most of his aides, number two, bannon doesn t have legal privilege because he wasn t in the white house at the time and number three, unlike meadow and pat cipollone, you have someone in steve bannon who is facing the very real prospect of a federal criminal trial, which to brin
indicted. trump pardoned one of them, steve bannon. that leaves three, if my math is accurate. two of them have pled guilty, and the third one is facing trial. if convicted, and sentenced, they re all looking at three or four or so years in jail. so, i think there are two injustices here. one is that three people are being held accountable for a crime committed by four people. that s injustice number one. and then there s a related injustice. you touched on it. trump pardoned bannon. that is unfair, although within the plenary powers of a president, but it also means, and we talked about this on your show, that perhaps what trump was seeking was bannon s silence. one of the ways in which we get criminals to talk about other criminals is by holding them accountable for their crimes and exposing them to incarceration, so now if bannon doesn t have to worry about that at all, perhaps trump doesn t have to worry about bannon telling a grand
votes disappeared when it came time for meadows. meadows case is a bit different from bannon s. he was in the white house at the time so he does have a slightly stronger claim of executive privilege. he has a lot of friends on capitol hill. he was the head of the freedom caucus for several years. he has a lot of contacts, and bannon doesn t have those same friendships on the hill. so, you know, i don t think from what i saw out of those texts, i don t think a single republican abandoned meadows who was already with him. katie, expand on that reporting for me. we re talking about the idea, of course, we know steve bannon is held in criminal contempt. is there any plan to do the same for mark meadows here? sure. once that justice goes over to the justice department, it will be up to career prosecutors in washington to make that determination. once they make that decision, it goes to attorney general garland and he looks at it. he has always backed career
the votes of the electoral college. so i think the attorney general and the department of justice will take a look at the facts and the law, but the law is very clear. bannon doesn t have the right not to appear, not to respond to this subpoena, to blow off the congress and i m not going to speculate what if doj doesn t take action. i ll wait and see what they do. we heard from congresswoman liz cheney on the floor of the house that congressman jim banks, the republican who originally had been named to the committee, the committee you re on, the january 6th committee, but then pelosi said she wasn t going to seat him because he s an election liar. and then even regardless of that, mccarthy withdrew his name. that he has been sending letters to government agencies, every agency that your committee has requested information from. and he s claiming that he s a
was it a close call for you? it was not a close call at all. after all, the mission of the january 6 select committee is to secure all of the facts around the january 6 insurrection and to move forward. clearly steve bannon is somebody who has information about the planning of and the day of january 6, and he was given an opportunity to present his side of the story to the january 6 committee, and he chose not to. so we are moving forward as we intended to, which is that this committee means business, and nobody is above the law. so we are going to use criminal contempt to respond to his lack of willingness to work with us. a quick step of conjecture on bannon, then i want to ask you about what vice chair cheney said. why do you think bannon doesn t just come on and plead the fifth? one would think if he has