What does Ben Cline have to say about his buddy, Steve Bannon, going to prison?

As Steve Bannon begins serving a four-month prison sentence for defying a congressional subpoena, it’s worth recalling Congressman Ben Cline’s two appearances last year on Bannon’s “War Room” podcast.

As I wrote after his first appearance, Bannon brought up Cline’s role on the House Judiciary Committee, chaired by Cline’s friend Jim Jordan, who is purporting to investigate the Biden administration’s “weaponization” of the Department of Justice and the intelligence agencies.

Cline explained: “When the DoJ and when our intelligence agencies don’t respond, that’s when they bring me in. I’m the chair of this little rump subcommittee called ‘Responsiveness and Accountability Oversight.’ And so they want me to haul these people up to the Hill, read them the riot act and try and convince them that cooperating with the Judiciary Committee is better than the alternative, which is being held in contempt… [Jordan] needs a bulldog at the subcommittee level to make their lives hell, quite frankly. And so he’s tasked me with that responsibility.”

I noted the irony that Bannon himself had been convicted and sentenced in 2022 for refusing to comply with a subpoena from the House of Representatives committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Apparently this wasn’t humiliating enough for Cline, so he appeared on Bannon’s podcast a second time.

(Bannon, former chief strategist for then-President Trump, was indicted in 2020 for collecting donations to build a U.S.-Mexico border wall and using some of the money to enrich himself. Trump pardoned him on his last day in office.)

On Monday, after Bannon ran out of appeals, he entered the federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut.

Not so strangely, Cline hasn’t said a word about this.

Gene Zitver is the editor of ClineWatch.