Also influential in Europe, this 70-year-old populist ideologue was sentenced in October 2022 to four months of imprisonment for his refusal to cooperate with the parliamentary investigation into the assault on the Capitol by supporters of Donald Trump on January 6, 2021.
This sentence was confirmed on appeal in May and Steve Bannon began serving his sentence on July 1, in a prison in Connecticut (north-east).
His expected release was confirmed by the American prison services on Tuesday morning, in the final stretch of a daggers-drawn campaign between Republican Donald Trump, who has never acknowledged his defeat in the 2020 presidential election, and Democrat Kamala Harris.
The tense end of the campaign has raised fears of post-election chaos if the results are contested by Donald Trump’s supporters.
“Reinvigorated”
Shortly after his release, Steve Bannon took over his podcast, “War Room” to say that Democrats “have no intention of giving up power.” Suspecting, without establishing it, cheating to come, he called on Donald Trump’s supporters to vote en masse, before a “second” phase where it will be a question of “ensuring that they cannot steal the election “. “I’m not broken. I feel invigorated,” he added to the New York Times, while he is also scheduled to give a press conference on Tuesday in New York.
The former adviser to Donald Trump had been one of the spokespersons for the never-proven accusations of rigging the 2020 presidential election for the benefit of Joe Biden. Led by Trump, then in the White House, and his allies, this speech reached its climax on January 6, 2021 when thousands of the Republican’s supporters stormed the seat of the American Congress, in an attempt to prevent the certification of the Democrat’s victory.
The day before January 6, he predicted that “all hell” would break loose. And the same day, he spoke on the phone with the outgoing president. Less than two weeks later, Donald Trump pardoned his former adviser in a federal case of misappropriation of funds allegedly intended for the construction of a wall on the border between the United States and Mexico.
