Steve Bannon, an adviser to former President Donald Trump and one of the most influential figures on the American far right, was released from prison early Tuesday after serving a four-month prison sentence for defying a subpoena as part of the Congressional investigation into the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, according to the Associated Press, citing a spokesperson for the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
Bannon has left the Federal Correctional Institution in Danbury, Connecticut, and plans to hold a news conference later in Manhattan.
His release from prison comes a week before the day of the US presidential elections, November 5, during which Trump intends to become president again.
The right-wing podcast host has remained a Trump supporter and even when he was imprisoned in a federal prison in Connecticut last July, he insisted he would influence the presidential race from prison and that his show War room (war room) would continue to motivate the supporters of the former president, recalls CNN.
During his incarceration, Bannon remained in touch with a small group of followers, and some acted as guest hosts on his podcast, according to two sources familiar with the matter contacted by the USA Network.
Bannon was convicted in 2022 of defying a parliamentary subpoena requiring him to appear before a commission investigating the 2021 assault on the Capitol, in which Trump supporters broke into the parliamentary headquarters to prevent the certification of President Joe Biden’s victory in the November election.
The committee wanted Bannon to testify because it believed he had some prior knowledge of what was going to happen on January 6, 2021, when thousands of Trump supporters stormed Congress. This incident left five dead and nearly 140 police officers injured.
Additionally, in December 2020, Bannon, who continued to informally advise Trump, advised him to focus his efforts on January 6, the date the election results were to be certified, according to the book. Dangerby journalists Bob Woodward and Robert Costa.
The former adviser worked on the campaign that brought Trump to the presidency in 2016 and served as chief strategist at the White House from the mogul’s inauguration in January 2017 until August of that year.
He stayed less than seven months in the White House, in part because his talk of dismantling the political class and ending elites hardly sat well with the Trump administration, which quickly filled itself with millionaires. He also clashed with congressional Republicans over his opposition to cutting taxes on the wealthy.
Considered one of the prophets of the populist alt-right, Bannon has stated that his goal is to become “the global infrastructure of the global populist movement” and has supported numerous far-right and populist political movements across the world, particularly in Europe.
