Law Expert Wonders Why A Grand Jury Isn't Mulling Sedition Charges Against Steve Bannon

Harvard constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe is wondering why the Department of Justice isn’t convening a grand jury to consider sedition charges against Donald Trump ally and former White House strategist Steve Bannon.

Tribe was referring Thursday to Bannon’s boast the previous day on his “War Room” podcast that “we told” Trump before the Jan. 6 insurrection: “You need to kill this administration in the crib.”

Bannon also had a “war-room-type meeting” with Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s former personal attorney, and others in Washington on the eve of the insurrection, Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Robert Costa reported in their new book, “Peril.” They also reported on Bannon’s comment that night about killing the Biden presidency “in the crib.”

Bannon played a clip on his podcast of an MSNBC interview with Woodward and Costa discussing Bannon’s role, and he didn’t deny it.

Bannon repeated the Biden comment but attempted to reframe it as a metaphorical death of his administration through “its own incompetence and its illegitimacy” — implying that he wasn’t calling for the violence that erupted Jan. 6.

It's increasingly hard to see how DOJ can sit on this kind of revelation without convening a grand jury to inquire into seditious conspiracy leading to insurrection, letting the chips fall where they may . . . https://t.co/J1sorUOxLw — Laurence Tribe (@tribelaw) September 23, 2021

Tribe tweeted Wednesday after Bannon’s podcast that it was “mounting evidence of a criminal conspiracy to commit sedition against the US Government and to give aid and comfort to an insurrection.”

It’d be hard to justify DOJ inaction in the face of this rapidly mounting evidence of a criminal conspiracy to commit sedition against the US Government and to give aid and comfort to an insurrection. See 18 USC secs. 2383 & 2384. https://t.co/V6Fy4XOw7x — Laurence Tribe (@tribelaw) September 23, 2021

According to an account in “Peril,” it was Bannon who persuaded Trump, who’d been at Mar-a-Lago in Florida, to return to Washington to prepare for Jan. 6.

“You’ve got to return to Washington and make a dramatic return today,” Bannon said to Trump, according to the book. “You’ve got to call [Vice President Mike] Pence off the fucking slopes and get him back here today.”

The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection has issued subpoenas for Bannon, former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, former Trump social media chief Dan Scavino and former Defense Department official and House Intelligence Committee aide Kash Patel.