After four years of Donald Trump’s reign, Americans pulled our county back from the brink with their votes. The ex-president would have taken us into a stone-cold dictatorship but the heroic actions of an outnumbered Capitol Police force saved us. The Select Committee asked a number of people fairly close to the ex-president to come in and voluntarily testify. Trump advisor Steve Bannon fell from grace during the Trump years, because his boss was jealous of all the attention his acolyte was receiving, even The Time Magazine cover. So during the time leading up to the January 6 failed coup, Bannon was strictly a volunteer.
The man who wears two shirts refused to testify before the Select Committee by ignoring his subpoena, so it regretfully voted to prosecute him for Contempt of Congress for his refusal to appear. The vote was nine to zero. His subpoena legally has nothing to do with Donald Trump’s supposed executive privilege. The Committee wanted to know about Bannon’s communication with the former president regarding the attempted coup.
In a January 5 podcast, the president’s former adviser said:
‘All hell is going to break loose tomorrow.’
In his opening comments, the Select Committee Chair Bennie Thompson (R-MS) offered anyone else who was thinking about breezing past their subpoenas some good advice:
‘Mr. Bannon will comply with our investigation, or he will face the consequences. Maybe he’s willing to be a martyr to a disgraceful cause of whitewashing what happened on January 6th, or demonstrating his complete loyalty to the former president. So, I want our witnesses to understand something very plainly. If you thinking of following the path Mr. Bannon has gone down, you are on notice that this is what you’ll face.’
Representative Thompson continued, saying that this process was “a grave one:”
‘The process we’ve begun tonight is a grave one. It seldom happens. And we’d rather avoid it, altogether. But it’s not reserved just for Steve Bannon. If other witnesses defy this committee, if they fail to cooperate, we will be back in this room with a new report with the names of whoever else mistakenly believes that they are above the law.’
The Committee chair concluded that no one could ignore their subpoenas, “The stakes are just too high:”
‘We hope no other witnesses put themselves in the situation Mr. Bannon has through his own conduct, but we cannot allow anyone to stand in the way of the select committee as we work to get to the facts. The stakes are just too high. We won’t be deterred. We won’t be distracted. And we won’t be delayed.’
It was difficult to estimate crowd size that day, because it is a no-fly zone. But there were 500 Capitol Police on duty that day, The TMZ reported, up against as many as 10,000 enraged and armed rioters, according to The Conversation. Of that number, 31 of them “are suspected of playing a role in the Capitol riot,” per the Associated Press. Four of them committed suicide afterward. By early May, over 70 had quit.
Featured image is a screenshot via YouTube.
Three White Lions podcast, Gloria Christie reads her week’s most important news/ commentary stories in the liberal online newspaper The Bipartisan Report. Gloria Christie Report her newsletter for people on the go. Written in her own unique style with a twist of humor in a briefer version of Bipartisan Report. Christie’s Mueller Report Adventures In Bite-Sizes a real-life compelling spy mystery. Find her here on Facebook.
