There’s an abundance of prima facie evidence that Bannon was a key plotter in a fascist coup to overturn the presidential election to keep Trump in power.
Steve Bannon, the former political guru to Donald Trump and architect of the false narrative over the stolen 2020 election, should be prosecuted for more than merely contempt of Congress. There’s an abundance of prima facie evidence that Bannon was a key plotter in a fascist coup to overturn the presidential election to keep Trump in power.
Not only that, Bannon’s media project to cultivate a popular base for Trump to repudiate the vote for Democrat rival Joe Biden was bankrolled by Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui. That makes Bannon and his patron Guo potentially guilty of high treason. Despite evidence of capital offenses – sedition and treason – Bannon and his Chinese sponsor remain at large, and not answerable to the law enforcement authorities. That’s curious, to say the least.
This past week has seen Trump’s former chief strategist being prosecuted for contempt misdemeanor charges. That follows Bannon’s defiant refusal last September to comply with a summons to give evidence at a Congressional hearing into the infamous January 6 attack on the Capitol in 2021. Those hearings which also concluded last week after more than a year of testimonies make it clear that Trump and his inner circle of aides, including Bannon, were bent on staging an electoral coup. The assault on January 6 followed months of deliberately stoked tensions over the “big lie” that the election was stolen by Biden and Democrat vote-rigging. Trump, Bannon and others fomented tensions to unleash thousands of Trump supporters – fascist armed groups like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers – who violently stormed the seat of U.S. government in a bid to stop the electoral process from confirming Biden’s presidential victory.
The question is, however: why is Bannon only being prosecuted on relatively minor misdemeanor charges for ignoring a Congressional subpoena?
There is already plenty of evidence from Bannon’s own public statements and broadcasts that he was the main player in hatching the fascist coup against the 2020 U.S. election. Bannon’s apparent sedition is compounded by his media operations being sponsored by Chinese mogul Guo Wengui. Guo has been living in the United States since 2015 as an exile from his native China where he is wanted on a range of corruption charges. He does not have U.S. citizenship which puts Bannon’s association with him in the category of working for a foreign entity.
In 2020, Guo and Bannon set up GTV Media Group. Bannon also received $1 million in consultancy fees from his Chinese patron. Those funds helped Bannon run his podcast show, the War Room, which broadcasts and interviews far-right and neofascist figures who still contend that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. Bannon’s podcasts were instrumental in instigating the coup attempt on January 6, 2020. The day before that event, he told his followers to “strap in” for something big. “It’s all converging, and now we’re on the point of attack tomorrow. … And all I can say is: strap in. You have made this happen, and tomorrow it’s game day,” Bannon told his listeners.
Guo and Bannon are still listed as directors of GTV even though Guo filed for bankruptcy this year and is under investigation by U.S. authorities for fraud. Bannon was also previously arrested on fraud charges over claims that he used a project to build an anti-immigration wall on the Mexican border as a means to swindle thousands of contributors. Guo has already been ordered to pay $539 million in fines to the US authorities for illicit capital raising.
GTV and its media offshoots such as GNews and Voice of Guo present their projects in a slick way but they all smack of glossy scams to inveigle investors. They mainly consist of re-runs of Bannon’s podcasts or Guo delivering diatribes on sundry conspiracy theories, such as how the Covid pandemic was allegedly caused by a Chinese bioweapon program.
The collusion between Bannon and Guo’s media to overturn the 2020 election was revealed by a recent report in the Mother Jones publication which obtained an audio tape of a secret meeting hosted by Bannon at his Washington DC townhouse only days before the November 3 vote. The meeting was pitched at how GTV would cover the election to undermine the actual result of Biden winning. Bannon revealed to half a dozen of Guo’s associates how then President Trump would simply assert on election night that he had won and that incoming mail votes for Biden were driven by fraud. Bannon relished at the “firestorm” that would ensue and how Trump “never has to go to a voter again”.
In other words, Trump was going to establish a presidential dictatorship. And Bannon – Trump’s chief strategist – knew all about it. Indeed, Bannon was most likely the master planner for the coup. A prosecution trial would endeavor to establish that.
The damnable thing is that nearly two years after the 2020 coup bid, Trump, Bannon, and other alleged co-plotters like Trump’s then White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and his lawyer Rudi Giuliani are walking around freely without public censure.
Bannon’s recent prosecution for misdemeanor contempt charges over not showing up to the Congressional hearings seems strangely lightweight and tangential. The hearings were focused on what was a grave attack on the United States’ constitution engineered by Bannon – and yet law enforcement go after him merely for not showing up to those hearings. Where are the far more serious charges of sedition?
The lack of prosecution of Bannon, Trump and others over the plotting of a fascist coup indicates that the U.S. establishment is deeply compromised by the scale of attempted assault on the nation’s democratic institutions. Trump’s Republican Party still retains a widely held belief that the 2020 election was stolen and that therefore incumbent President Joe Biden is illegitimate. That is a serious rupture in the American body politic. By not prosecuting Bannon, Trump and others over what should be a capital offense, the U.S. political establishment and media are deliberately choosing to suppress the disturbing reality – that the country was on the cusp of a fascist coup that nearly succeeded in overturning the electoral process to install a dictator. That reality makes a mockery of American pretensions that it is a democratic model for the rest of the world.
As for Bannon’s financial patron, Guo Wengui, he is now officially declared bankrupt but still living in the United States. Given his role in sponsoring a failed coup in the U.S., one would think that the authorities might be considering extraditing him to China where he is wanted on serious corruption charges. That doesn’t appear to be a likely outcome. Why not? It seems that Guo’s anti-China views and broadcasts to the Chinese-American diaspora are too useful for the U.S. establishment in pursuing its hostile policy towards Beijing.
Washington’s hostile agenda against China (dressed up as a purported security threat) is evidently a much bigger priority than defending its own democratic institutions.
