The Justice Department is taking steps to throw out Stephen K. Bannon’s conviction for defying a congressional subpoena about the Jan. 6, 2021, riot, its latest shift in a legal position to benefit a close ally of President Donald Trump.

In a Monday legal filing, the department asked the Supreme Court to send Bannon’s case back to the district court, where the U.S. attorney filed a separate motion seeking to dismiss the charges against him.

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche characterized the move, in a statement, as a course correction from “the prior administration’s weaponization of the justice system.”

Bannon, a top Trump strategist who left the White House in 2017, served four months in federal custody in 2024 after a jury in U.S. District Court in D.C. found him guilty of contempt of Congress for ignoring a subpoena from the House select committee that investigated the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

Trump last year pardoned more than 1,500 defendants who were charged in that event, in which a mob of his supporters disrupted the vote count to certify Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election. Trump has also directed a purge of prosecutors and federal investigators who worked on those cases.