A federal judge on Thursday told Stephen K. Bannon, a longtime adviser to former President Donald J. Trump, to surrender by July 1 to start serving a four-month prison term imposed on him for disobeying a subpoena to give testimony to the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
But the judge, Carl J. Nichols, said that Mr. Bannon could delay beginning his sentence if a federal appeals court granted him more time to challenge his conviction.
After Mr. Bannon was sentenced in October 2022 on contempt of Congress charges, Judge Nichols allowed him to remain free while he appealed. Last month, Mr. Bannon lost the first round of that challenge as a three-judge panel of a federal appeals court in Washington decided that his guilty verdict on charges of ignoring the House committee’s demand for his testimony was proper.
Lawyers for Mr. Bannon have promised to ask the full appeals court to reconsider the panel’s ruling. Judge Nichols said that Mr. Bannon would have to start serving his sentence in less than four weeks unless the full appeals court takes the case and issues its own ruling to pause the sentence from being enforced.
Another former aide to Mr. Trump is already serving a prison term for refusing to take part in the House committee’s wide-ranging investigation into Mr. Trump’s efforts to remain in power after losing the 2020 election.
In March, Peter Navarro, who once worked as a trade adviser to Mr. Trump, reported to federal prison in Miami to begin serving his own four-month prison stint after a jury found him guilty of contempt of Congress for ignoring one of the committee’s subpoenas.
Mr. Bannon’s legal travails are likely to continue after — or even during — his stint in prison.
A few months after he was found guilty of contempt of Congress in Washington, state prosecutors in Manhattan accused him of misusing money he helped raise for a group backing Mr. Trump’s border wall. In his final hours in office in 2021, Mr. Trump pardoned Mr. Bannon in a separate federal case that focused on similar accusations.
Mr. Bannon’s fraud trial is scheduled to take place later this year in the same Manhattan courthouse where Mr. Trump was recently convicted himself on charges of falsifying business records to cover up a sex scandal that threatened his 2016 run for the presidency.
