Judge in Bannon contempt case once fought Congress’ subpoena power

It’s a remarkable symmetry for the mild-mannered, longtime corporate lawyer, who now finds himself at the helm of one of the most important clashes between Congress and Trump — the man who put him on the federal bench in 2019. The Bannon case holds implications for the future of congressional investigations and for efforts to expose the secrets of those who stoked the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

Despite his Trump-era pedigree, Nichols won’t be easy to typecast. He’s already presiding over dozens of criminal cases stemming from the Jan. 6 attack, and his rulings and sentences have largely aligned with those from the rest of the judges in the District.

Nichols hasn’t been shy about lacing into defendants for threatening the peaceful transfer of power, and he has ordered the pretrial detention of one Jan. 6 defendant, Jeffrey McKellop, a retired special forces soldier. And prosecutors have cited Nichols’ words as they’ve urged stiff sentences for some Jan. 6 defendants.

“Democracy requires the cooperation of the citizenry,” Nichols said in a recent sentencing hearing for Jan. 6 defendant Thomas Gallagher. “Protesting in the Capitol, in a manner that delays the certification of the election, throws our entire system of government into disarray, and it undermines the stability of our society.”

Nichols sentenced Gallagher to two years of probation.

Nichols is also presiding over a series of civil defamation suits that voting equipment maker Dominion filed against pro-Trump figures such as Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell and Mike Lindell over their propagation of alleged falsehoods about the company facilitating voter fraud.

Trump has made clear that he expects judges he appointed to rule consistently in favor of him and his political allies, but Nichols is among those who have not done so. Giuliani, Powell, Lindell and others argued that their statements about Dominion were legally protected as part of the rough and tumble of politics, but in an August ruling, Nichols emphatically disagreed and ordered that the suits could continue to fact-finding.

“There is no blanket immunity for statements that are ‘political’ in nature,” Nichols wrote. “It is true that courts recognize the value in some level of ‘imaginative expression’ or ‘rhetorical hyperbole’ in our public debate. … But it is simply not the law that provably false statements cannot be actionable if made in the context of an election.”

Trump nominated Nichols to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia in 2018, and he was confirmed by a 55-43 vote of the Senate in June 2019. All Republicans and three Democrats — Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Doug Jones of Alabama — supported the nomination.

One of Nichols’ former courtroom adversaries told POLITICO the judge’s history with the Bush case should lead him to recuse from the Bannon matter. It’s unclear whether the judge will address this at a Thursday…