After a scheduling hearing for his upcoming fraud trial, self-styled right-wing warrior Steve Bannon stood outside Manhattan Criminal Court on Tuesday afternoon and threatened top law enforcement officers in the city, state, and nation.
He mentioned in particular Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, New York State Attorney General Letitia James, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland, Associate Attorney General Lisa Monaco, and special prosecutor Jack Smith.
“The hunted are to become the hunter,” he said.
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One prosecutor Bannon did not mention was Audrey Strauss, who was acting U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New when she brought charges against Bannon and three codefendants for defrauding, in her words, “hundreds of thousands of donors, capitalizing on their interest in funding a border wall to raise millions of dollars, under the false pretense that all of that money would be spent on construction.”
Rather than be outraged by just the idea that anybody would hoodwink folks who reached into their own pockets to help Build The Wall, Trump pardoned Bannon in the final hours of his term. Trump did nothing for the others, who were all convicted in federal court. That included Brian Kolfage, an Air Force veteran who lost both legs and a hand to an enemy rocket in Iraq in 2004. He is presently serving a 51-month term in a Bureau of Prisons medical facility. He is not due to be released until September of 2026. He has two young children at home.
In a move that does seem a little more aggressive than simple enforcement of the law, AG James and DA Bragg stepped in and indicted Bannon on a state variation of the federal charges for which Bannon had been pardoned. That is the case that brought Bannon to court a week after the election. No matter how powerful Trump may now become, he cannot do anything about the state case.
Bannon stepped onto Centre Street from a gleaming black Suburban in a black shirt, a brown jacket, and gray pants with a black stripe down the leg. He declared that “the American people” had sent a message to MAGA’s political opponents.
“You know what the American people told them to do? Go f--- themselves,” he said.
He looked better than his usual scuzzy self. Maybe it was an afterglow of the MAGA victory. Or maybe it was that he had just served four months in federal prison on an unrelated charge, refusing to obey a subpoena to testify before Congress about the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. Maybe he is that rare soul that prison agrees with.
A bit of time in the slammer may have enabled him to better play the part of a political prisoner.
But while politics may have had something to do with Bragg bringing state charges, the case itself is about money laundering and conspiracy to defraud some of those same American people. Bannon was just another accused criminal on bail as he rode an elevator up to the 13th floor.
He entered Part 51, Room 1324, two floors below the one where Trump was tried and convicted on 34 counts of falsifying business records while paying hush money to a porn star, with whom Trump had a one-night stand in 2006. Trump once said that he could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and not lose any votes—and he demonstrated at the polls last week that he could be convicted of 34 felonies on Centre Street and actually gain votes.
Had Trump lost the election, Judge Juan Merchan likely would have gone ahead with the sentencing scheduled for Nov. 26. But as the former president became the next president, Trump’s lawyers moved to have the conviction dismissed. Assistant District Attorney Matthew Colangelo wrote a letter to Judge Merchan stating, “The People agree that these are unprecedented circumstances.”
Both the prosecution and the defense asked Merchan for more time to assess the new reality and stay any further rulings until Nov. 19, 2024. The judge granted the joint application at 10 a.m. Tuesday.
Halfway down the hallway from Merchan’s courtroom stood a sign attesting to a different meaning of ballots in this grimy palace of justice, where there is no rightful place for politics and a grand jury indictment is followed by a jury trial.
ATTENTION JURORS
Petit Jury Service
Red Ballots
Report to
Central Jury Room
--
Grand Jury Service
Blue Ballots
Report to
Grand Jury Room
Ballots here are cards given to news arrivals when they are sent to serve either as regular jurors or as grand jurors. The Central Jury Room is at the far end. Here the jury pool for criminal trials awaits possible selection. The room was filled with dozens of citizens who had been summoned to assume a vital role in the rule of law. The clerk who addressed them was nearly as difficult to understand as a subway announcement, but there was a clarity to her purpose. She was saying that at around 3:40 p.m. an email would notify her team that there were no more cases for the day. Anyone who had not been chosen would then be free to go for the day.
“For there will be no reason for you to sit around,” she said.
Back in April, the prospective jurors in the Trump case had been selected before that deadline. The trial began on April 15 and they spent six weeks listening to testimony and studying the evidence. They found him guilty on May 30 after deliberating for nine-and-a-half hours. He was originally scheduled for sentencing on July 12, four days before the Republican National Convention.
But delay followed delay and now it seems that Trump might never be sentenced. A sitting president cannot be jailed even for a token few days. And the law is not clear when it comes to a president-elect who should be busy preparing his new administration.
Down on the 13th floor, Judge April Newbauer had scheduled the hearing in the Bannon case for 2:15 p.m. Bannon had previously been so slow in paying his lawyers that they sued him, but he had a new legal team that arrived a few minutes early. A court officer asked how many seats they needed at the defense table.
“Four plus one,” one of the current attorneys replied.
The plus one was Bannon, on time and with somebody who was at least a doppelganger for longtime Trump bodyguard Keith Schiller. Bannon took a seat at the defense table with his hands folded before him as news photographers were admitted to take a few pictures. He then threw his right arm over the back of the chair next to him.
The trial is presently set to start on Dec. 9, but defense attorney John Carman now asked the judge to delay it until January so his team can address evidence the prosecution is preparing to introduce.
“They’re attempting to smear Mr. Bannon by showing that he took money,” Carman said. “The money that he was taking was money that he was entitled to take.”
The judge held off making any ruling regarding the trial until after another hearing, this one at 9:30 a.m. Monday morning, on whether that evidence is admissible.
In a variation of the routine when Trump was on trial, the court officers ordered the press and the spectators to remain seated while Bannon and his legal team departed. He descended to the street, where other court officers had reserved a place for his Suburban directly in front of the courthouse.
His anger seems to have been fulminating long before MAGA, and he seemed happy to vent it by declaring war on what he calls lawfare. A malaise hung in the air after he departed and it seemed that the elemental rule of law, as embodied by the citizens up in the central jury room—where a red ballot as opposed to a blue ballot has nothing to do with politics—is itself threatened by a gathering fury.
