According to a source speaking to CNN, former Trump adviser Steve Bannon says he will not comply with a subpoena from the House committee investigating the January 6 Capitol riot, saying that he “stands with Trump.”
As The Washington Post reported this Thursday, Trump’s legal team sent a letter to allies and former aides of Trump who were sent subpoenas by the committee, instructing them not to comply, citing “executive and other privileges, including among others the presidential communications, deliberative process, and attorney-client privileges” as justification.
During a segment on CNN this Friday, legal analyst Elie Honig slammed Bannon’s justification for defying the subpoena, saying that according to the law, executive privilege applies to current presidents, not prior ones.
“It seems more clear in our law that [executive privilege] is the province of the current president than the prior president,” he said. “And by the way — Steve Bannon was not a member of the executive branch at the time.”
Honig also characterized Bannon’s invocation of attorney-client privilege as “utterly nonsensical.”
“Steve Bannon and Donald Trump, neither of them is an attorney,” Honig said. “They’ve never been in an attorney-client relationship, and even if they’d had some conversation together with an attorney, that privilege is waived when you have another person there.”
Watch the video below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEkgDPJgGsg
