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      Bannon and other top Trump officials face legal peril for defying subpoenas

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      Steve BannonBannon and other top Trump officials face legal peril for defying subpoenasDevelopments in select committee’s move to secure Bannon’s conviction come as Trump files lawsuit blocking the release of his White House records Hugo Lowell in WashingtonTue 19 Oct 2021 03.38 EDTLast modified on Tue 19 Oct 2021 04.03 EDTSteve Bannon and other former top officials in the Trump administration are facing legal peril for defying subpoenas issued by the House select committee investigating the Capitol attack, as the panel prepares to pursue criminal referrals for non-compliance.The legal jeopardy for Bannon – who is expected to be held in contempt by the committee on Tuesday – is anticipated after it emerged in a letter to his attorney, obtained by the Guardian on Monday, that he had claimed executive privilege protections on materials unrelated to the executive branch.Capitol attack panel’s message to Steve Bannon: we won’t forget about youRead moreThe House select committee chairman, Bennie Thompson, also said in the letter that even if the panel entertained the claims of executive privilege, Bannon had no basis to ignore the order since not even a president could grant him immunity from a House subpoena.The dual legal arguments in the letter, which served as Bannon’s final warning to cooperate a day before the select committee is expected to hold him in contempt of Congress, underscores the weakness of the executive privilege claim advanced by Donald Trump.The Guardian first reported that the former president would instruct his top four aides subpoenaed by the select committee – White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, his deputy Dan Scavino, defense department aide Kash Patel, as well as Bannon, his former chief strategist – to defy the orders.But even though Bannon is alone in defying a subpoena after Meadows and Patel were “engaging” with the panel over the potential scope of their cooperation and Scavino was served late, the letter shows similar attempts to invoke executive privilege appear treacherous.The missive from the select committee came in response to a previous letter from Bannon’s attorney, Robert Costello, who insisted his client was precluded from complying with the subpoena until claims about executive privilege by Trump were settled in a court ruling.Thompson said in his response that he rejected the entire argument leaning on Trump and considered Bannon as having violated federal law after he “wilfully failed to both produce a single document and to appear for his scheduled deposition”.The chairman of the select committee said the executive privilege claim could not apply in Bannon’s case, because the panel had in part sought his contacts with members of Congress and the Trump campaign, which are not covered by the presidential protection.Thompson added that even if the select committee accepted that some materials demanded by the panel were shielded by executive privilege, Bannon would not be exempt from complying with a congressional subpoena.The chairman also said that the select committee believed Costello’s interpretation of a previous case involving the testimony of a Trump administration official – the former White House counsel Don McGahn – actually undermined Bannon’s argument to defy his subpoena.In the case with McGahn, said Thompson, the US district court for the District of Columbia ruled that even senior White House aides were not entitled to absolute immunity from testifying. McGahn, pursuant to that ruling, ultimately testified to Congress in July.Furthermore, the citation referring to McGahn used by Costello “makes clear that a president lacks legal authority to order an aide not to appear before Congress based on a claim of executive privilege,” Thompson said.The legal rebuttals outlined in the letter were specific to Bannon’s non-compliance. But a source close to the select committee said the same arguments would be pressed against Meadows, Scavino and Patel should they also attempt an executive privilege claim.And with a reversal in position from Bannon not forthcoming before a 6pm ET deadline on Monday, the select committee is now expected to proceed with a vote recommending the House refer him to the US Attorney for the District of Columbia for criminal prosecution.The letter outlining the select committee’s arguments was earlier reported by the Washington Post.The developing contours of the select committee’s move to secure Bannon’s conviction – which would carry a maximum penalty of a one year sentence in federal prison and up to $100,000 in fines – came as Trump filed a lawsuit blocking the release of his White House records.Trump filed a lawsuit with the DC district court to stop the National Archives from releasing records to the select committee a tranche of records, after Joe Biden’s White House counsel, Dana Remus, declined to assert executive privilege protections.The Guardian first reported that Trump would sue to block the release of records from his administration last month. Trump’s legal counsel has indicated the former president is seeking to shield about 50 documents from scrutiny.TopicsSteve BannonUS Capitol attackHouse of RepresentativesUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Capitol attack panel’s message to Steve Bannon: we won’t forget about you

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      US Capitol attackCapitol attack panel’s message to Steve Bannon: we won’t forget about youRepublican Adam Kinzinger says pursuit of a criminal contempt referral was ‘the first shot over the bow’ for Trump allies Richard Luscombe@richluscSun 17 Oct 2021 13.36 EDTLast modified on Sun 17 Oct 2021 13.37 EDTAdam Kinzinger, one of two Republicans on the special committee investigating the deadly 6 January US Capitol attack, said on Sunday the pursuit of a criminal contempt referral against Steve Bannon was “the first shot over the bow” for allies of Donald Trump defying subpoenas to testify.“It’s very real, but it says to anybody else coming in front of the committee, ‘Don’t think that you’re going to be able to just kind of walk away and we’re going to forget about you’,” Kinzinger, a vocal critic of the former president, told CNN’s State of the Union.He added that the committee would not rule out calling Trump himself to testify, though he acknowledged that such a move was not imminent.Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist, has declined to appear before the committee, or respond to the subpoena demanding documents and testimony, claiming executive privilege. The committee will decide on Tuesday whether to make a criminal contempt referral to the full House of Representatives.Kinzinger, an Illinois congressman who was one of 10 House Republicans to vote for Trump’s impeachment in January following the insurrection, also said that Joe Biden was right to call for the prosecution of those who resisted subpoenas. Republican criticism of the president’s comments forced the justice department to issue a rare statement on Friday reaffirming its independence from the White House.“The president has every right to signal, I think he has every right to make it clear where the administration stands. God knows the prior administration every two hours was trying to signal to the justice department,” Kinzinger said, referring to Trump’s prolific pressuring of the DOJ.“But that has to do with other pretty horrific things, and I think the president has made it clear that we need answers to this. The vast majority of Americans agree, so this potential criminal contempt referral for Steve Bannon is the first shot over the bow.”The 6 January committee has issued a number of subpoenas in recent days and weeks to former Trump acolytes or administration officials thought to have key knowledge of the events of the day.Last week’s subpoena for the former top DOJ official Jeffrey Clark was seen as an escalation of its investigation into Trump’s efforts to overturn his election defeat and subsequent false claims that he was cheated out of victory, otherwise known as the big lie.The Guardian reported earlier this month that Trump had directed aides including Bannon, the former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, deputy chief of staff Dan Scavino and defense department aide Kash Patel not to testify.Trump granted clemency to Bannon over federal fraud charges in one of his last acts before leaving office on 20 January. Kinzinger was also asked if Trump would receive a subpoena.“We want to make sure we’re getting every piece of this puzzle, that’s going to include people that have already come in talking to us, it’s going to include people that we’ll potentially subpoena in the future, whose names you probably never heard [and] will have a very good incentive to come in and talk,” he said.“That begins to put the building blocks in this together. Speaking honestly, if we subpoena all of a sudden the former president, we know that’s going to become kind of a circus, so that’s not necessarily something we want to do up front. But if he has pieces of information we need, we certainly will.”TopicsUS Capitol attackSteve BannonUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Steve Bannon: Capitol attack panel to consider criminal contempt referral

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      Steve BannonSteve Bannon: Capitol attack panel to consider criminal contempt referralHouse 6 January select committee to decide on Trump’s former strategist, who has snubbed subpoena requests, on Tuesday Hugo Lowell in WashingtonThu 14 Oct 2021 14.52 EDTFirst published on Thu 14 Oct 2021 13.54 EDTBennie Thompson, the chairman of the House select committee investigating the Capitol attack on Thursday announced the panel’s intention to consider a criminal contempt referral against Trump’s former strategist Steve Bannon for defying a subpoena as part of its 6 January inquiry.The vow to initiate contempt of Congress proceedings against Bannon – one of Donald Trump’s top advisers – puts the select committee on the path to enforce the subpoena issued to uncover what the former president knew in advance of plans to mount an insurrection.House Capitol attack panel issues subpoena to Trump official Jeffrey ClarkRead moreThompson said in a statement that the committee would move to consider prosecuting Bannon for refusing to comply with a subpoena demanding documents and testimony after rejecting his claims that he could not appear for a deposition because of executive privilege.“The select committee will not tolerate defiance of our subpoenas, so we must move forward with proceedings to refer Mr Bannon for criminal contempt,” Thompson said. “Witnesses who try to stonewall the select committee will not succeed.”The select committee will meet on Tuesday to decide whether to recommend the full House authorize a criminal referral for Bannon to the justice department, Thompson said, though with the panel’s members united in their fury, the decision is expected to be unanimous.House select committee investigators had ordered Bannon and Kash Patel, a former Trump defense department aide, to testify on Thursday, with additional closed-door interviews with Trump’s former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and his deputy, Dan Scavino, on Friday.Neither Bannon nor Patel ultimately appeared on Capitol Hill for the first set of scheduled depositions, after Trump instructed his aides to defy the subpoenas on grounds that any discussions that involved him were protected by executive privilege.The select committee temporarily postponed depositions with Patel and Meadows while their lawyers continued to discuss cooperation, according to a source familiar with the matter. Scavino was also granted a reprieve after having his subpoena served late.But Thompson made clear that he had run out of patience with Bannon, who twice told the select committee that he intended to defy his subpoena in its entirety, abiding by the former president’s instructions first reported by the Guardian.“Mr Bannon has declined to cooperate with the select committee, and is instead hiding behind the former president’s insufficient, blanket, and vague statements regarding privileges,” Thompson said. “We reject his position entirely.”The select committee chairman also rejected Bannon’s executive privilege claim, in part because the protection exists to protect the interests of the country, and not the private, political interests of a former president, the source said.Once the select committee adopts a contempt report, it is referred to the full House for a vote. Should the House approve the report, Congress can then send the request for a criminal referral to the US attorney for the District of Columbia.The earliest the select committee can vote to adopt a contempt report for Bannon is Tuesday, because House rules require Thompson to issue a three-day notice in advance of a business meeting at which members can discharge the report.Congresswoman Stephanie Murphy, a member of the select committee, said on MSNBC that the panel was moving to enforce the subpoenas as soon as it could. “I fully expect this Department of Justice to uphold and enforce that subpoena,” she added.House select committee investigators had expressed optimism when they first issued subpoenas to the four Trump administration officials that they would be able to hear from at least one of their marquee witnesses on the scheduled deposition dates.Yet the initial optimism rapidly turned sour in the weeks that followed, after Trump announced his intention to block the select committee at every turn and the prospects of deposing some of the closest aides to the former president vanished before their eyes.The move to consider launching a criminal referral for Bannon to the justice department sets up a potentially lengthy legal battle that is certain to test Congress’s oversight authority over the executive branch and ability to uncover presidential secrets.And in preparing for the first step to hold Bannon in contempt of Congress, the select committee now faces the prospect of fighting Trump in court on two fronts – over the release of White House records, as well as his power to block his aides’ testimony.The former president, however, faces a steep uphill struggle in both instances after the justice department previously authorized officials from the Trump administration to testify to Congress about the Capitol attack and Trump’s efforts to subvert the 2020 election.TopicsSteve BannonUS Capitol attackUS politicsHouse of RepresentativesnewsReuse this content More

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      House committee on Capitol attack subpoenas Trump’s ex-chief of staff and other top aides

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      US Capitol attackHouse committee on Capitol attack subpoenas Trump’s ex-chief of staff and other top aidesMark Meadows, Steve Bannon and Dan Scavino among advisers called to testify over president’s connection to 6 January events Hugo Lowell in Washington DCThu 23 Sep 2021 19.48 EDTLast modified on Thu 23 Sep 2021 20.30 EDTThe House select committee scrutinizing the Capitol attack on Thursday sent subpoenas to Trump’s White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and a cadre of top Trump aides, demanding their testimony to shed light on the former president’s connection to the 6 January riot.The subpoenas and demands for depositions marked the most aggressive investigative actions the select committee has taken since it made records demands and records preservation requests that formed the groundwork of the inquiry into potential White House involvement.House select committee investigators targeted four of the closest aides to the former president: deputy White House chief of staff Dan Scavino, former Trump campaign manager Steve Bannon, and the former acting defense secretary’s chief of staff Kash Patel as well as Meadows.“The select committee has reason to believe that you have information relevant to understanding important activities that led to and informed events at the Capitol on January 6,” the chairman of the select committee, Bennie Thompson, said in the subpoena letters.“Accordingly, the select committee seeks both documents and your deposition testimony regarding these and other matters that are within the scope of the select committee’s inquiry,” Thompson said.The select committee is expected to authorize further subpoenas and schedule closed-door interviews with key witnesses – as well as the inquiry’s second public hearing – in the coming weeks, according to two sources familiar with internal deliberations.The Trump aides compelled to cooperate with the select committee have some of the most intimate knowledge of what the former president was doing and thinking during the insurrection – and what he knew in advance of plans to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s election win.Several administration officials, such as Meadows and Scavino, remained by Trump’s side for most of the day on 6 January, while campaign aides such as Bannon strategized how to subvert the results of the 2020 election and reinstall Trump in the Oval Office.Meadows also accompanied Trump back to the White House after the conclusion of the “Stop the Steal” rally that swiftly descended into the Capitol attack, from where Trump told Republican senator Ben Sasse he was “delighted” at seeing the images of the insurrection.Patel, who was nearly appointed CIA director in the final weeks of the Trump administration four years after emerging from obscurity as a Hill staffer, may also hold the key to unlocking the full picture of the Capitol attack as one of the former president’s top lieutenants.The subpoena authorizations came after the Guardian first reported on Tuesday that House select committee investigators were considering issuing the orders to Meadows and other Trump aides as the panel ramps up the pace of its investigation.There is no guarantee that the subpoena targets will comply. Trump has suggested he will demand that the Biden administration invoke executive privilege over Trump-era executive branch records requested by the select committee and try to block damaging witness testimony.But it appears unlikely that the White House Office of Legal Counsel would assert the protection in the case of 6 January materials, given it previously allowed Trump DOJ officials to testify to Congress and the protection does not extend to an individual’s private interests.TopicsUS Capitol attackTrump administrationHouse of RepresentativesUS CongressSteve BannonUS politicsDonald TrumpnewsReuse this content More

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      Sounds about right: why podcasting works for Pence, Bannon and Giuliani

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      What do Steve Bannon, Rudy Giuliani, Michael Cohen, Mike Pence and Anthony Scaramucci all have in common?
      They worked for Donald Trump, obviously, and several have been implicated in alleged crimes connected to the former president, but as of this month, each of these one-time high-profile Trump acolytes also has his own podcast.
      Pence became the most recent to announce his own show this week, with the announcement that the oft-derided former vice-president will launch a podcast to “continue to attract new hearts and minds to the conservative cause”.
      Like his one-time associates, Pence will enjoy the benefits of a regulation-free platform to share his thoughts on any topic of his choosing, and similarly to Bannon et al, Pence will also be able to keep himself in the public sphere – although the dry, mild-mannered Pence is likely to differ in tone from the Bannons and Giulianis of the podcast world.
      On his War Room podcast, Bannon has called for the beheading of Anthony Fauci – something Pence is unlikely to do – while Giuliani’s Common Sense podcast has been used to further often unhinged claims of political fraud, which Pence might leave alone.
      Cohen and Scaramucci’s podcasts, which are critical of Trump, may not fit in with the Trump worshippers’ efforts, but the fact that five of Trump’s most prominent acolytes chose this format for propagating their views – over television, radio or the written word – is pretty remarkable.
      So, why podcasts? One major factor is one of the oldest in politics: money.
      “I think in part it’s because it’s an easier medium to get into than something like radio or television. The overhead costs are much much lower. If you have an avid base, and the Trump base tends to be an avid base, you can make a ton of money doing this,” Nicole Hemmer, author of Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics, said.
      “So there’s a real revenue opportunity for them.”
      Bannon et al will get paid through advertising, the amount varying depending on how many downloads they get.
      “If you have audience of just 35,000 people, you can make a profitable podcast,” Hemmer said. “If you have an audience of 100,000 people, now you’re starting to talk real money, and if you’re getting millions of downloads, you can build kind of an empire.”
      Everyone likes money, but Bannon, Giuliani and Pence will also be pushing their version of conservative politics.
      Meanwhile, the very title of Cohen’s podcast, Mea Culpa, sets out his own, different goal – specifically, an earnest attempt to re-enter polite society. The aims of the notoriously self-promoting Scaramucci – his podcast is co-hosted with his wife and is called Scaramucci and the Mrs – probably include keeping himself famous.
      Podcasts give their hosts the freedom to push all those agendas to a potentially huge audience.
      Bannon, who was pardoned by Donald Trump on the former president’s last day in office, recently claimed that his podcast, Bannon’s War Room, had been streamed 29m times. Bannon is known to lie, but the architect of Trump’s “America first” policies has undoubtedly found an audience, including among those who ransacked the US Capitol on 6 January.
      “It’s all converging, and now we’re on the point of attack tomorrow. It’s going to kick off, it’s going to be very dramatic,” Bannon told his listeners on 5 January. “It’s going to be quite extraordinarily different. And all I can say is strap in. You have made this happen and tomorrow it’s game day.”
      Bannon’s podcast was banned from YouTube after the insurrection, while Giuliani has also had episodes removed, but the power of podcasting is that there is always somewhere for the series to run – both shows are still available on Apple Podcasts, on Bannon’s and Giuliani’s websites, and elsewhere.
      “You have an independence and a freedom if you have a podcast – you’re not going to get de-platformed by social media, you’re not going to get kicked off of Fox News, you’re not going to get kicked off of radio stations,” Hemmer said.
      “You have control and independence, which is a big selling point right now on the right.” More

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      To be Trump, or not: what Shakespeare tells us about the last five years

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      The time is out of joint. When lost for words, as many have been over the past five years, William Shakespeare is a useful go-to guy. His plays have helped us make sense of plague, political upheaval and a mad monarch, delivering soliloquies by tweet.
      “While maintaining his career as the most-produced playwright in the world, he is also moonlighting as the most-cited provider of metaphors for the Trump era – and particularly its denouement,” Jesse Green, the chief theater critic of the New York Times, observed last month. “Hardly a thumb-sucking political analysis goes by without allusion to one of the 37 canonical plays, however limited or far-fetched the comparison may be.”
      But as the dust settles on the Trump presidency, Green’s exhortation – brush down your Shakespeare, stop quoting him now – seems unlikely to gain much traction.
      Books have been written. Jeffrey Wilson, a Harvard academic, is the author of Shakespeare and Trump, published last year. The book’s cover features its title emblazoned on a red cap, in lieu of the words “Make America great again”, beneath a pair of donkey’s ears.
      “The thesis of the book is tragedy but we’ve got a little bit of comedy in there too,” Wilson says. “So the cover alludes to Shakespeare’s character Bottom, who’s this kind of huckster blowhard who gets his head turned into a donkey to symbolise the stupidity. Plus, Bottom’s just obsessed with building a wall in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”
      Which other characters parallel Trump? “There’s going to be Julius Caesar, who thinks he’s a god over people, not one of them. There’s going to be Richard III, this power-hungry criminal whose clownishness seduces supporters. There’s going to be Macbeth, whose thirst for power is wrapped up in his fragile masculinity.
      Book embed
      “There’s going to be Henry VI, this child king whose weak leadership creates this fractious counsellor infighting all around him. There’s going to be Angelo in Measure for Measure, a self-declared law-and-order guy who is himself a criminal. And there’s going to be King Lear, who so completely binds the personal and the political that the collapse of his government is also the collapse of his family.”
      When the pandemic finally ends and theatres spring back to life, that list will offer rich pickings to directors. There is a long tradition of holding up the mirror of Shakespeare to specific cultures, from Akira Kurosawa’s Throne Of Blood, The Bad Sleep Well and Ran to irreverent productions in South Africa that critiqued apartheid.
      Some are subtle, others on-the-nose. In 2017, the director Oskar Eustis’s production of Julius Caesar in New York’s Central Park depicted the eponymous character with blond hair and red tie. It all caused a brouhaha in conservative media: corporate sponsors pulled support, protesters stormed the stage and Eustis received death threats.
      Wilson reflects: “When I asked [Eustis], he insisted he wanted it to be a very blunt instrument. The fascinating thing for me about that production is that it may or may not have helped us better understand Donald Trump but it helped me better understand Julius Caesar as a text.
      “It allowed us to use Trump as a lens for understanding the way that Shakespeare wrote this play, which is so filled with comedy in the first half, the kind of outrageous, obnoxious, satirical comedy that is so associated with Trump. That’s how Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar should be performed.”
      The play, he says, “is drawing upon tropes of the 17th-century clown, the antichrist who comically comes on stage and thinks that he’s the most glorious thing ever invented and is revealed to be a total fraud.
      “You don’t really get that sense of Julius Caesar when you watch most Shakespearean stagings of the play but by using Trump as a lens to understand that, we can use the accessible emotions and knowledge that we have from current events to rethink how we should read this distant, old, obscure literature.”
      Wilson’s book also considers how America has seen Shakespeare in the age of Trump. A month after his victory in 2016, for example, students at the University of Pennsylvania took down a portrait of Shakespeare and replaced it with a photo of Audre Lorde, an African American writer, feminist and civil rights activist.
      Steve Bannon, who led Trump’s winning campaign and became a White House strategist, was previously a banker, media executive and Hollywood producer who in the 1990s co-wrote two Shakespearean adaptations: a Titus Andronicus set in space, complete with ectoplasmic sex, and a hip-hop Coriolanus, based in South-Central LA.
      The screenplays are not publicly available but Wilson tracked them down – and found an insidious racism. He writes: “Specifically, Bannon’s Coriolanus suggests that African Americans will kill themselves off through Black-on-Black crime, while his Andronicus tells the story of a ‘noble race’ eliminating its cultural enemies on the way to securing political power.”
      Wilson adds: “NowThis did a table read of Coriolanus and actors were just sprinting to get through the lines. One of them said, ‘It sounds like he’s never met a Black person in his life.’” More

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      Donald Trump pardons Steve Bannon amid last acts of presidency

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      Donald Trump has pardoned former senior adviser Steve Bannon, among scores of others including rappers, financiers and former members of Congress in the final hours of his presidency.Among the 73 people pardoned was Elliott Broidy, a leading former fundraiser for Trump who has admitted illegally lobbying the US government to drop its inquiry into the Malaysia 1MDB corruption scandal and to deport an exiled Chinese billionaire. Also on the list was Ken Kurson, a friend of Jared Kushner who was charged in October last year with cyberstalking during a heated divorce.Rappers Lil Wayne and Kodak Black – who were prosecuted on federal weapons offences – and former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, who is serving a 28-year prison term on corruption charges, were also pardoned. A further 70 people had their sentences commuted.Trump did not attempt to give himself a pre-emptive pardon, and has not pardoned members of his family or Rudy Giuliani, his former personal lawyer with whom he has fallen out. Julian Assange was another figure subject to speculation who was not on the list. Prosecutors and scholars have, however, said a grey area in the constitution means a president may be able to issue “secret” pardons, without notifying Congress or the public.The New York Times and CNN described the pardoning of Bannon, a former editor of Breitbart as a last-minute pre-emptive move to protect Bannon from his upcoming fraud trial. Bannon faces trial in May following his arrest in August last year on a luxury yacht off the Connecticut coast, accused of siphoning money from We Build the Wall, an online fundraiser for Trump’s contentious border wall with Mexico.Federal prosecutors allege Bannon used a non-profit he controlled to divert “over $1m from the … online campaign, at least some of which he used to cover hundreds of thousands of dollars in personal expenses”.Officials said We Build The Wall raised more than $25m. Bannon has denied one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and another of conspiracy to commit money laundering.The news on Bannon and Broidy brought swift outcry. Noah Bookbinder at legal watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington said: “Even Nixon didn’t pardon his cronies on the way out. Amazingly, in his final 24 hours in office, Donald Trump found one more way to fail to live up to the ethical standard of Richard Nixon.”Democrat Adam Schiff tweeted: “Steve Bannon is getting a pardon from Trump after defrauding Trump’s own supporters into paying for a wall that Trump promised Mexico would pay for. And if that all sounds crazy, that’s because it is. Thank God we have only 12 more hours of this den of thieves.”Bannon was recently banned from Twitter for calling for the beheading of Dr Anthony Fauci and the FBI director, Christopher Wray.He and Trump have been estranged since the former adviser left the White House and made critical remarks about the president in a tell-all book about the president called Fire and Fury by journalist Michael Wolff. Trump said his former consigliere had “lost his mind”.Despite Trump’s last-minute move on Bannon, reportedly delayed because the president was so torn on the issue, it would not protect his former adviser from charges brought by state courts.Trump has also been mulling future political ambitions, according to the Wall Street Journal, reportedly speaking to aides about the possibility of forming a new political party. The president favoured the name Patriot Party, it reported.Multiple Republican party figures defending Trump in his second impeachment, for inciting the Capitol attack on 6 January, counseled him not to offer pardons to any of the more than 100 people arrested as a result.Presidential pardons and acts of clemency do not imply innocence. Presidents often bestow them on allies and donors but Trump has taken the practice to extremes.Previous recipients include aides and allies Michael Flynn, Roger Stone, George Papadopoulos and Paul Manafort, all convicted in the investigation of Russian election interference and links between Trump and Moscow, and Charles Kushner, the father of Trump’s son-in-law and chief adviser, Jared Kushner.Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump were reportedly closely involved in the process deciding Trump’s final pardons.Trump is due to leave Washington on Wednesday morning, ahead of Joe Biden’s inauguration as the 46th president. He will fly to Florida, stripped of the legal protection of office.Trump faces state investigations of his business affairs and could face legal jeopardy over acts in office including his attempts to overturn election defeat and his incitement of the Capitol riot on 6 January, over which he was impeached a second time.If Trump is convicted in his second Senate trial, he could be barred from running for office again. More