(FreedomBeacon.com)- Donald Trump’s former senior adviser Steve Bannon filed a motion in federal court on Wednesday seeking to delay his trial for his various charges for contempt of Congress.
In the filing, Bannon cited the ongoing very public and televised hearings that the House’s January 6 investigating committee is conducting. Bannon is being charged with contempt of Congress for refusing to comply with a subpoena issued by that very House committee.
The House committee wanted to talk to Bannon about his potential involvement in the events of January 6, 2021, specifically in terms of how he might’ve incited violence before the day’s events. Bannon refused to comply with the subpoena, saying that he couldn’t do so because Trump was claiming executive privilege in the case.
The House committee referred Bannon to the Department of Justice for criminal charges, and the DOJ eventually indicted him in November for those charges.
In the time since his indictment, Bannon has been trying to get all the charges thrown out, attempting to serve subpoenas to members of the committee.
His team of attorneys — which includes Robert Costello, Evan Corcoran and David Schoen — are now hoping to delay his trial since there is so much attention being paid to the committee’s investigations with the public hearings they’ve been holding.
Bannon’s trial was set to begin on July 18, but his legal team is requesting it be delayed until October 25. Their arguments are that the public hearings could influence potential jurors. As they wrote in the court filing:
“Public impact is not limited to the hearings themselves, but to the media coverage that magnified the hearings. In Washington, D.C., where [the] trial will take place — and where the acts alleged in the Indictment took place — every major media outlet treated the hearings as a top news story.
“Those broadcasts have been repackaged and re-broadcast in countless forms, creating a saturation of the information sources available to Washington, D.C., residents.”
The attorneys are hoping to get as objective a jury as possible, and they are arguing that it would be nearly impossible to do that now, with the public hearings the committee is holding too fresh in their minds.
Just this week, a former staffer for then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, Cassidy Hutchinson, gave “bombshell” testimony that tried to paint Trump as heavily involved in the planning of the attacks at the U.S. Capitol building on January 6.
Information like this that is being blast all over the media in the nation’s capital is exactly why Bannon’s attorneys feel their client’s trial should be delayed. They are also saying that the July 18 trial date is just too aggressive, and that the case should be considered later in 2022.
As they added in their court filing this week:
“When trial was scheduled, neither the Court nor the parties were aware of the June and upcoming July media blitz by the Select Committee.”
