OAN Staff Addie Davis and Brooke Mallory
6:45 PM – Monday, April 6, 2026
The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) issued an order vacating a lower court ruling on Monday that had upheld conservative commentator Steve Bannon’s conviction for contempt of Congress.
This move effectively clears a major procedural hurdle, allowing the Trump administration’s Department of Justice (DOJ) to move forward with dismissing the case — if they so wish.
A former adviser to President Donald Trump who was convicted of contempt of Congress, the ruling now goes back to the lower court, where the DOJ has filed a motion to dismiss his indictment.
In the Monday order, the court sent the case to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit “for further consideration in light of the pending motion to dismiss the indictment.”
In 2022, under former President Joe Biden’s DOJ, Bannon was found guilty of two counts of contempt of Congress, one for refusing to testify to the January 6th committee and a second for refusing to provide documents, serving four months in prison.
However, on February 9, 2026, the DOJ — acting under the Trump administration — officially filed a motion to dismiss the criminal indictment against Bannon. In a subsequent petition to SCOTUS, Solicitor General D. John Sauer argued that the government sought the dismissal because continuing the prosecution would not serve the “interests of justice.”
Separately, Bannon also pleaded guilty to fraud, which won’t be affected by SCOTUS’ decision.
The DOJ’s motion to dismiss Bannon’s indictment followed a period of intense public scrutiny regarding his ties to the late pedophile sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. These details emerged through massive tranches of DOJ documents released between November 2025 and January 2026, a process mandated by the Epstein Files Transparency Act.
The millions of pages of emails, texts, and logs did not depict a coordinated plot to completely “sabotage” President Trump per se, but rather, revealed a complex and often hypocritical alliance. The records suggest that both men sought to leverage the MAGA movement for their own objectives while privately expressing disparaging views of the broader movement and Trump himself.
Based on 2018–2019 documents, Bannon had also discussed removing Trump from office via the 25th Amendment. While Bannon often publicly championed Trump, his private correspondence with Epstein told a different story.
In texts from January 2019, Bannon reportedly expressed a “deep cynicism” toward the Trump administration. In another exchange, he and Epstein also discussed how they could possibly use the MAGA movement to “stave off” the #MeToo era and the investigations into Epstein’s own criminal history.
Based on the massive document releases between November 2025 and January 2026, there is no evidence of a personal “close tie” or contact between Trump and Epstein in 2019. Trump has consistently maintained that he cut ties with Epstein in the early 2000s, and the millions of pages released under the Epstein Files Transparency Act support the timeline of a falling out nearly two decades ago.
Officials have reiterated that while the Epstein revelations caused significant intense public scrutiny, the DOJ has maintained that the dismissal of Bannon’s case is based on the “interests of justice” regarding his original prosecution.
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