U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro signed a motion Monday to dismiss with prejudice the contempt of Congress indictment against former Trump aide Steve Bannon — ending, permanently, what Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche called a product of "the prior administration's weaponization of the justice system."
To dismiss with prejudice means the case is permanently closed and cannot be refiled by the same party over the same matter. Five years of legal warfare, a conviction, and four months in a federal prison cell — all of it now heading for the dustbin.
The motion, filed in D.C. federal court before U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols, carried a single justification:
"The government has determined in its prosecutorial discretion that dismissal of this criminal case is in the interests of justice. Defendant Bannon does not oppose this motion."
The motion was not signed onto by any career prosecutors. Pirro alone put her name on the filing. That detail tells you something about who inside the Justice Department was willing to keep prosecuting this case — and who wasn't.
The district court filing wasn't the only move Monday. The Washington Examiner reported that Solicitor General D. John Sauer also petitioned the Supreme Court on Monday to vacate the lower court's decision, which would effectively clear Bannon's record. Sauer wrote to the justices that the government did not intend to pursue the case any further.
This was a two-front operation — dismiss below, vacate above. If U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols agrees to dismiss the case, Bannon's jury conviction would likely be erased and his appeal at the Supreme Court would likely end.
Blanche left no ambiguity about the administration's view of the underlying prosecution. He called the Jan. 6 committee's subpoena to Bannon "improper" and labeled the panel the "Unselect" Committee:
"Today the Department of Justice told the Supreme Court that Steve Bannon's conviction arising from the J6 'Unselect' Committee's improper subpoena should be vacated. Under the leadership of Attorney General Bondi, this Department will continue to undo the prior administration's weaponization of the justice system."
Bannon was convicted for defying a subpoena from the House Jan. 6 committee in 2021. He refused to comply with the subpoena for his testimony and request for documents, citing Trump's assertion of executive privilege.
The House — which had a Democratic majority at the time — voted to recommend charging Bannon with contempt of Congress in 2021, and the Justice Department brought charges against him soon after that. A D.C. jury convicted him on two counts in 2022.
The timeline is worth laying out:
The man served his time. He did the four months. And he kept fighting — not to stay out of prison, but to clear the record. That matters.
The Jan. 6 Select Committee was, from its inception, a partisan enterprise. Speaker Pelosi rejected Republican-chosen members, hand-picked the committee's composition, and ensured it functioned as a messaging vehicle rather than a genuine investigative body.
Bannon's legal team had raised the question of whether the committee's composition affected its authority to issue subpoenas at all — at the Supreme Court, Bannon's attorneys urged the justices to decide whether the composition of the Jan. 6 panel affected its authority to issue subpoenas.
The Biden-era DOJ treated that subpoena as holy writ. Bannon's argument — that he was following legal counsel's advice while executive privilege claims were being resolved — was barred from his own trial.
Bannon's appeal largely centered around his argument that he was relying on advice from his attorney when he ignored the congressional subpoenas. Nichols ruled that the advice-of-counsel argument could not be used during the trial, and the DC Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed that decision in 2024.
Think about that for a moment. A man follows his lawyer's advice on a live legal dispute about executive privilege, and the court won't even let the jury hear that defense. That's the system Blanche is describing when he says "weaponization."
White House trade adviser Peter Navarro, who had a similar contempt conviction for defying a Jan. 6-related subpoena, also tried delaying his prison sentence in 2024. The Supreme Court declined to take up Navarro's emergency bid as well. Both Bannon and Navarro served four months in prison following their convictions.
In a similar move last year, the department said it would no longer defend the conviction of Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro, who also reported to prison for defying a congressional subpoena from the Jan. 6 committee. Navarro's appeal of that conviction remains ongoing.
Two Trump allies. Both subpoenaed by a committee stacked by Pelosi. Both convicted. Both imprisoned. Both now seeing the Justice Department reverse course. The pattern isn't subtle — and the correction isn't either.
The Biden DOJ weaponized contempt of Congress charges against political opponents of the regime's preferred narrative. That's not conspiracy theorizing. That's what the current Justice Department, under Attorney General Pam Bondi, is now formally arguing in federal court filings.
Deputy Attorney General Blanche says the Democrat-led House January 6 Select Committee did not properly form itself and therefore its subpoena to Bannon trying to compel testimony was unlawful. Blanche told Just the News that the Democrat-led House January 6 Select Committee was part of a larger weaponization machine that abused the justice system.
The left will frame this as favoritism. They'll call it an abuse of prosecutorial discretion. What they won't reckon with is the original abuse: a committee designed for maximum partisan damage issuing subpoenas to political enemies, then leveraging a compliant DOJ to criminalize noncompliance with what may have been an illegitimate demand in the first place.
Congressional subpoena power exists. No one disputes that. But when the issuing body itself is constitutionally suspect — when its members were hand-selected by one party's Speaker, when its mandate was narrative rather than legislative — the entire enforcement chain built on top of it deserves scrutiny. That's what this dismissal represents.
Steve Bannon already paid the price. He sat in a cell for four months while the legal system ground forward. Now the very government that put him there says it never should have happened. Monday's motion marks the latest development in Bannon's five-year legal saga — and, if Judge Nichols grants it, the last.
