Steve Bannon, 68, whose trial for contempt of Congress began this Monday with the selection of the jury, already detailed Donald Trump's road map before the last elections.
“What Trump is going to do is simply declare his victory. It is understood? He is going to declare victory. But this does not mean that he is the winner,” Bannon, the prince of darkness of American democracy, told a group of supporters on the night of October 31, 2020, just three days before Election Day.
His strategy, based on the audio recently obtained and broadcast by the magazine Mother Jones, was to use that proclamation to later claim that the change in the result was due to a fraud in the count.
Things happened just as the strategist of the then president described them, both from within at the beginning of his government and later from the outside when he was forced to leave office. Trump appeared at the White House in the early hours of November 4, 2020, declared himself the winner, despite missing much of the count, and maintained that if he lost, it would be a scam. That is the cornerstone of what later became the Stop the steal campaign that mobilized Trumpism from the lie.
This audio takes on special relevance in the midst of the hearing of the Congressional committee investigating the failed coup of January 6, 2021. They say that it shows that the attempt to stop the confirmation of Joe Biden's victory was not a spontaneous event. . That it was something more than prepared is deduced from this investigation, which will have its eighth public session this Thursday.
That comment is a relevant element that justifies the committee's interest in questioning Bannon, who defied the subpoena from Congress and was indicted on two counts of criminal contempt last November for refusing to testify and provide documentation. In his testimony, he should answer questions about the meeting that he held on January 5, 2020 at the Willard Hotel in Washington, the considered headquarters of the uprising and seizure of the Capitol after the protest that Trump said "will be wild."
At the Willard, on the eve of the riot, he had two phone calls with the president. Following the talks, Bannon predicted on his podcast that "all hell is going to break loose tomorrow." And he added that "what you imagine will not happen, it will be very different."
Each charge can lead to a prison sentence of 30 days to one year. This is the first trial for contempt against a senior official of the previous administration. Peter Navarro, former Secretary of Commerce, has a summons for November.
Bannon fought the committee's request by citing an executive privilege waiver granted by Trump even though he was no longer president. A Trump-appointed judge denied him that privilege, as well as his argument that the jury will be intoxicated by information from the investigative committee hearings.
