UPDATE (Oct. 29, 2024; 11:54 a.m.): This post has been updated to include comments Steve Bannon made following his prison release on Tuesday.
Having served a four-month stint behind bars on a conviction for contempt of Congress, Steve Bannon was released from prison on Tuesday, exactly one week before Election Day.
Bannon exited the federal correctional facility on Tuesday morning in Danbury, Connecticut, where he has been locked up for the past 120 days, a Federal Bureau of Prisons spokesperson told NBC News.
A former Donald Trump adviser and a staunch — and incendiary — supporter of the Republican nominee’s re-election bid, Bannon was sentenced to four months in prison for defying a congressional subpoena to testify in the House select committee’s investigation into the Jan. 6 Capitol attack. He was convicted on two counts of contempt of Congress in 2022 but continuously sought to appeal his conviction in a bid to avoid serving time. The Supreme Court ultimately rejected his eleventh-hour appeal in June, and he was ordered to report to prison.
Like Trump, Bannon has issued ominous warnings about the future of the country if the GOP nominee should lose the election. He also parroted Trump’s baseless claims about election fraud, right up until he began serving his sentence. Just days before reporting to prison, he told NBC News there was “no chance” Democrats could win the election unless “they’re stealing it.”
“If we don’t win the — first of all, they shred the Constitution. It is the death of the constitutional American republic we know,” he said.
On the day his sentence began, Bannon told reporters outside the correctional facility that he was “proud to go to prison” — despite having tried hard to avoid doing so — and framed it as a courageous move to “stand up to” what he characterized as Democrats’ weaponization of the justice system.
With seven days until Election Day, Bannon’s release comes at a critical juncture in the race, as polls show Trump and Kamala Harris practically deadlocked in key battleground states. Bannon’s popular podcast, “War Room,” has continued to air with guest hosts while he was in prison, and Bannon jumped right back into the role of one of Trump’s most vocal and pernicious allies on Tuesday. Appearing on his podcast shortly after his release, Bannon said his stint behind bars “not only didn’t break me, it empowered me,” He also echoed his past remarks, calling himself a “political prisoner.” Bannon told The New York Times in an interview on Tuesday as he left the correctional facility that he would encourage Trump to once again prematurely declare victory if the vote tallies on Election Day — before all votes are counted — showed that the Republican nominee was ahead. “He should stand up and say: ‘Hey, I’ve won this. And we have teams right now that are going to make sure that this thing is not going to be stolen,’” Bannon told the Times.
Clarissa-Jan Lim is a breaking news reporter for MS NOW. She was previously a senior reporter and editor at BuzzFeed News.
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