Stephen K. Bannon was indicted today by a federal grand jury on two counts of contempt of Congress stemming from his failure to comply with a subpoena issued by the House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6 breach of the U.S. Capitol.

Bannon, 67, is charged with one contempt count involving his refusal to appear for a deposition and another involving his refusal to produce documents, despite a subpoena from the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the U.S. Capitol.

The assertion in the Draft Resolution (p. 14) that the Department [of Justice] has provided documents only for 10 of the 22 subpoena items is incorrect. In fact, the Department has produced or made available for review documents responsive to 16 of the 22 subpoena items. As to 13 of these items, we delivered the documents to the [House Oversight] Committee or made them available for staff review (subpoena items 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 20, and 21). We provided access to documents responsive to three additional items (subpoena items 15, 17, and 18) in the course of briefings on sensitive law enforcement matters on October 5, 2011 and on subsequent occasions, as referenced in Section IV(C) below. We have not located any documents responsive to a 17th item (subpoena item 3). The documents responsive to the five remaining items (subpoena items 8, 9, 16, 19, and 22), as well as additional documents responsive to the other 16 items of the October 11 subpoena, pertain to sensitive law enforcement activities, including ongoing criminal investigations and prosecutions that raise significant concerns for the Department, as discussed in Section III(A) below, or are materials generated by Department officials in the course of responding to congressional investigations or media inquiries about this matter that are generally not appropriate for disclosure, as discussed in Section III(B) below.

White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer said GOP congressional leaders “pushed for political theater rather than legitimate congressional oversight. Over the past fourteen months, the Justice Department accommodated congressional investigators, producing 7,600 pages of documents, and testifying at eleven congressional hearings.

Democrats rejected the counterarguments lodged by Jordan and Gaetz, in part by pointing to Republicans’ own use of criminal contempt citations to punish recalcitrant witnesses in the past. Chief among those past witnesses are former Attorney General Eric Holder in 2012 and former Internal Revenue Service official Lois Lerner in 2014. In both of those cases, the officials made voluminous documents available or provided testimony to the committees before Republicans went forward with contempt.

Bannon has done neither, instead leaning on a claim of executive privilege that most legal experts see as bogus -- even if it touches on issues that may require lengthy litigation to resolve.