Judge, for now, refuses to dismiss Steve Bannon's conviction in contempt of Congress case

There's something almost comic about the DOJ, now stocked with Trump appointees, marching into court to ask a judge to wipe away a conviction the department itself won under a different administration. That's the actual news here, not the January 6 committee stuff everyone assumes it's about. A judge said no, at least for now, and the request is still very much alive. This isn't over.

We've said for years that the Bannon prosecution always smelled more like a political trophy than a serious contempt case. Congress has plenty of members who've ignored subpoenas from committees they didn't like the politics of, and nobody frog-marched them into federal court. Bannon got the full treatment because he was Bannon, and the committee needed a scalp to justify its own existence. That doesn't mean the underlying law about testifying before Congress doesn't matter. It does. But selective enforcement dressed up as principle is still selective enforcement.

The awkward part is that a DOJ asking to undo its own prior conviction, on request from an ally of the president, is exactly the kind of move that invites the same criticism conservatives leveled at Biden-era prosecutors: that justice bends to whoever's in charge. If Bannon's conviction was unjust, say why with specifics and let a court rule on the merits, not because the political winds shifted. The judge apparently wants that argument made properly rather than waved through. That's not obstruction. That's just how it's supposed to work, for anybody, in either direction.