Steve Bannon requested in a court filing on Wednesday that a trial stemming from multiple contempt of Congress charges be delayed in light of the ongoing televised hearings.
Bannon, who worked for several months as a senior adviser to former President Trump, was indicted by the Justice Department in November after failing to respond to a subpoena levied against him by the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot.
Since then, the Republican insider has levied several attempts to counter-subpoena and have his charges thrown out. Now he hopes to delay his trial with the help of attorneys David Schoen, Robert Costello, and Evan Corcoran.
This week, Bannon’s legal team asked for his trial’s start date to be pushed back from July 18 to Oct. 25, arguing the series of public hearings scheduled by the Jan. 6 panel could influence jurors' opinions.
"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," Bannon's camp wrote.
"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 filing added.
The attorneys further claimed that the July 18 date was too aggressive and should be picked up by the committee later in the year.
"When trial was scheduled, neither the Court nor the parties were aware of the June and upcoming July media blitz by the Select Committee," they added.
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