Steve Bannon, the prominent right-wing figure and former senior adviser to Donald Trump, was released from prison on Tuesday after spending nearly four months behind bars and just a week before the US election.
Federal Bureau of Prisons records showed that Bannon left a federal prison in Connecticut where he was serving a sentence for contempt of Congress.
“I’m not broken, I’m empowered,” the 70-year-old said. New York Times Out of prison.
Bannon was found guilty of defying a subpoena to testify before a congressional committee investigating the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol by Trump supporters.
Bannon said it was “1,000%” worth going to prison for refusing to testify.
“If you are not ready to go to prison to fight for your country, then you are not ready to fight for your country,” he said. The times.
Bannon is expected to speak to reporters later in New York at 1900 GMT.
When he entered prison on July 1, he defiantly said he was “proud” to serve his time “if that’s what it takes to stand up to Joe Biden.”
Bannon, one of the masterminds behind Trump’s successful 2016 presidential campaign, was sentenced to four months in prison in October 2022, but remains free while appealing his conviction.
Excuse me blanket
A federal appeals court upheld the conviction in May, and District Judge Carl Nichols, a Trump appointee, revoked Bannon’s bail at a court hearing, ordering him to report to prison by July 1.
A lot has changed in American politics since then, with Biden withdrawing from the race and being replaced by Kamala Harris as the Democratic Party’s nominee.
Bannon took a prominent role late in Trump’s 2016 campaign and later worked in the White House as his chief strategist, then left after seven months due to conflicts with other senior staff.
Although he no longer officially works for the former president, he has continued to use his influence to get him back into the White House, mainly through his podcast “The War Room.”
In 2020, he was charged with wire fraud and money laundering for taking for personal use millions of dollars contributed by donors to build a border wall with Mexico.
While others were convicted in the scheme, Trump issued a blanket pardon to Bannon before leaving office in January 2021, leading to the charges against him being dropped.
On the day of the D.C. riots, when thousands of Trump supporters invaded the Capitol to prevent the certification of Biden’s victory over Trump, Bannon spoke on the phone with the then-President.
Consequently, congressional investigators wanted to question Bannon about his role in those events.
Bannon entered prison on the same day that the conservative-dominated Supreme Court effectively delayed the possibility of Trump being tried in federal court for trying to overturn the 2020 election.
Another former Trump adviser, Peter Navarro, also served prison time for defying a congressional subpoena to testify on January 6, before being released in July.