WASHINGTON — The House voted Thursday to find Steve Bannon in criminal contempt of Congress for stonewalling the investigation into the Jan. 6 Capitol attack, pressing for information from a close ally of Donald Trump as Republicans moved to insulate the former president from accountability.
The vote of 229-202, mostly along party lines, came after Bannon refused to comply with a subpoena from the House select committee investigating the assault, declining to provide the panel with documents and testimony. The action sent the matter to the Justice Department, which now must decide whether to prosecute Bannon and potentially set off a legal fight that could drag on for months or years.
But what was clear Thursday in the debate that preceded the vote was that, nine months after the deadliest attack on the Capitol in two centuries, many Republicans in Congress remain bent on whitewashing, ignoring or even validating what took place as their party continues to embrace the lie of a stolen election. Only nine Republicans joined Democrats in voting to enforce the panel’s subpoena.
The rest followed the lead of Trump, who in a statement hours before the vote, derided the election he lost as a crime and praised the violent mob attack on Jan. 6 — which injured 140 police officers and claimed several lives — as a legitimate response.
“The insurrection took place on November 3, Election Day,” Trump wrote. “Jan. 6 was the protest!”
Before the vote, Republicans argued that the investigation — which Democrats undertook after Republicans blocked the formation of an independent, bipartisan inquiry — was a partisan exercise devised to smear Trump and persecute his supporters for their political beliefs.
On the House floor, Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio and an ardent Trump supporter, accused the committee of harassing Bannon and organizers of the “Stop the Steal” rally that led to the riot.
“You’re involved in political activity? They’re going to investigate you,” Jordan said. “You know what this is really about: getting at President Trump.”
Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., condemned the former president’s comments and the way Republicans continued to follow his lead.
“We live in an age where apparently some put fidelity to Donald Trump over fidelity to the Constitution. I find that disgusting,” McGovern said.
“He is so feared,” McGovern added, “that my Republican colleagues are going to keep denying what happened that day.”
The question of what will happen to Bannon will now go to the Justice Department, where Attorney General Merrick Garland has declined to say whether he will move forward with charges.
“We’ll apply the facts in the law and make a decision, consistent with the principles of prosecution,” he told the House Judiciary Committee on Thursday during an oversight hearing.
President Joe Biden has endorsed prosecuting those who do not cooperate with the investigation, and on Thursday, he made a point of condemning the riot and its origins.
“The violent, deadly insurrection on the Capitol nine months ago — it was about white supremacy,” Biden said during a speech Thursday to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the Martin Luther King Jr. monument in Washington.
Robert J. Costello, Bannon’s lawyer, has informed the committee that his client will not comply with its subpoena, citing Trump’s directive for his former aides and advisers facing subpoenas to invoke immunity and refrain from turning over documents that might be protected under executive privilege.
Under federal law, any person summoned as a congressional witness who refuses to comply can face a misdemeanor charge that carries a fine of $100 to $100,000 and a jail sentence of one month to one year.
Members of the investigative committee, which is controlled by Democrats, believe that Bannon has crucial information about plans to undermine Biden’s victory, including conversations Bannon had with Trump in which he urged the former president to focus his efforts on Jan. 6.
In a report recommending the House find Bannon in contempt, the committee repeatedly cited comments he made on his radio show on Jan. 5 — when Bannon promised “all hell is going to break loose tomorrow” — as evidence that “he had some foreknowledge about extreme events that would occur the next day.”
Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo. and the committee’s vice chairman, has suggested that Trump’s insistence on executive privilege is evidence he was intimately involved in the plot to overturn the election on Jan. 6.
“Mr. Bannon’s and Mr. Trump’s privilege arguments do appear to reveal one thing, however: they suggest that President Trump was personally involved in the planning and execution of Jan. 6,” Cheney said.
She was one of nine Republicans to join House Democrats in voting to find Bannon in criminal contempt. The others were Reps. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, the other Republican member of the panel; Anthony Gonzalez of Ohio; John Katko of New York; Nancy Mace of South Carolina; Jaime Herrera Beutler of Washington; Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania; and Fred Upton and Peter Meijer, both of Michigan.
All but two of them — Mace and Fitzpatrick — voted in January to impeach Trump on the charge of inciting an insurrection.
“Mr. Bannon refused to comply with a valid subpoena from a duly formed congressional committee, claiming broad executive privilege,” Meijer said in a statement. “There exists no conceivable interpretation of executive privilege that would encompass an individual outside of government conferring with senior government officials on nonofficial matters.”
Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., had encouraged fellow Republicans to oppose the contempt referral. He called the committee’s subpoena “invalid,” and said he agreed with Bannon that a court should decide whether or not the former Trump adviser should comply.
“They are using this to target their opponents,” McCarthy said.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times .