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“Ask yourself: Is this piece of evidence affected by politics?” the defense attorney said.

The prosecution, by contrast, portrayed the case against Bannon as exceedingly simple: The Jan. 6 select committee issued a binding directive for Bannon to appear — part of an effort to understand and remedy the causes of the violent attack against Congress last year — and Bannon refused.

No claims of privilege or excuses justify Bannon’s defiance, Assistant U.S. Attorney Amanda Vaughn said, and his conduct crossed the line into criminality.

“At the end of this case, you might say to yourself that this whole case is just about a guy who refused to show up? Yes. It is that simple,” Vaughn declared.

“Ours is a nation of laws, and our system doesn’t work if people think they’re above them,” the prosecutor told the jury of nine men and five women, including alternates. “Our system can’t do the work … if citizens can simply ignore the government’s orders.”

While not dwelling on the events of Jan. 6, Vaughn did mention to jurors that Bannon seemed to predict on a podcast a day earlier that something serious would unfold at the Capitol the following day. She also said Bannon’s defiance had undermined the House committee’s work to get to the bottom of the violence that broke out and what led to it.

“The defendant prevented the government from getting the important information it needed about what happened on Jan. 6 and how to make sure it didn’t happen again. That, ladies and gentleman, ignoring a legal order, a subpoena from the United States government, from Congress, that’s a crime,” she said.

The full story behind Bannon’s refusal is, however, more complex. His attorney argued to Congress that the subpoena invaded former President Donald Trump’s executive privilege, although the committee asserted Trump never properly asserted it. In recent days, Trump retreated from that assertion and Bannon expressed willingness to testify, although he insisted he would do so only at a public hearing, not a closed-door deposition.

Jurors are expected to see letters exchanged by Bannon’s lawyers and the panel, but U.S. District Court Judge Carl Nichols ruled that legal precedents barred Bannon from arguing in the criminal case that the privilege fight excused him from complying with the subpoena and from arguing that his attorney’s legal advice meant he lacked any criminal intent.

“The meaning of the privilege the defendant claimed … really is not relevant for our purposes,” Vaughn told jurors during her opening. She also objected twice to the defense’s references to politics, but Nichols allowed Corcoran to press on with that message to the jury.

The arguments on Tuesday teed up the prosecution’s first witness in the case: Jan. 6 committee chief counsel Kristin Amerling. The Capitol Hill veteran took the stand Tuesday afternoon and is expected to return Wednesday morning in a case that prosecutors said they believed might reach the jury by the weekend.

Amerling gave jurors some more direct reminders about the events of Jan. 6, referring to it as a “brutal assault” that left police officers injured and resulted in “some” deaths. She also said that underscored why stalling undercut the panel’s ability to carry out its task.

“There is an urgency to the focus of the select committee’s work,” Amerling said. “The select committee is looking at the violent assault on the United States Capitol on law enforcement officials, on our democratic institutions, and we have a limited amount of time to gather information.”

She also provided the basic facts behind the contempt case against Bannon, including how the subpoena was issued and that he never showed up at the appointed time or delivered any documents.

As Bannon left the courthouse following the trial’s first testimony, he unleashed a fusillade of verbal attacks on the House committee and bemoaned the unfairness of his trial. Such bombast from defendants in the middle of a jury trial is highly unusual and could provoke a backlash from the judge overseeing the case.

“It is outrageous,” Bannon shouted, denouncing a series of figures involved with the House panel, including its chairman, Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.).

“Bennie Thompson is a total, absolute disgrace, and this show trial that they’re running is a disgrace,” Bannon said. He lambasted the committee members for lacking the “guts and courage” to testify at the trial and instead sending staffers like Amerling. “They should be here, the senior people on the committee,” Bannon declared.

Bannon also used the bank of TV cameras to take some shots at his political opponents, like President Joe Biden, and to keep pushing the unfounded election fraud claims that fueled the Jan. 6 violence.

“We have a constitutional crisis in this nation right now,” Bannon said. “Trump won. Joe Biden’s illegitimate.”

The start of the trial followed weeks of intense wrangling between the Justice Department and Bannon’s legal team over the evidence that would be permitted during the trial.

Opening arguments were delayed for a few hours on Tuesday after disagreements and confusion erupted during a hearing aimed at sorting out how much jurors would be told about the back-and-forth between the congressional panel and Bannon’s attorney over executive privilege and other issues.

While Nichols has ruled that Bannon cannot argue in the criminal case that he chose not to comply with the subpoena because he believed executive privilege or other immunities permitted him to defy it, the judge allowed one potential defense: that Bannon believed the deadline to respond to the subpoena was flexible because his lawyer was still in talks with the panel or past experiences indicated those dates were not solid.

“It seems to me pretty clear that I had left open the possibility … that Mr. Bannon could introduce evidence that he did not understand the return dates to be firm for various reasons,” said Nichols, a Trump appointee.

Bannon’s defense team argued on Tuesday that leaving those explanations in the letters would confuse the jury — particularly since the judge has ruled Bannon is not allowed to present most evidence related to his view of executive privilege.

Nichols said he was prepared to allow some mention of the privilege claim as an explanation for any confusion on Bannon’s part about the deadline, but the judge suggested that the letters Bannon exchanged with the committee be redacted to delete the substance of the privilege arguments.

Corcoran said the judge’s clarifications on Tuesday amounted to a “seismic shift” in the case that merited delaying the trial by a month to allow the defense team to reset its case. Nichols denied this proposed delay, a week after he denied an earlier defense request for a three-month delay in the trial over publicity related to the House Jan. 6 committee hearings.

“I’m very concerned about redaction on the fly of documents and trying to keep track of how that affects the case,” Corcoran said.

Eventually, Bannon’s lawyers essentially acquiesced, agreeing that given the prior rulings in the case, the letters containing Bannon’s executive privilege claims and the committee’s counterarguments could be shown to the jury in full.

That means jurors are likely to see the privilege arguments advanced by Bannon’s attorney last year, but will later be instructed by Nichols not to consider those arguments.