Ex-Trump strategist Steve Bannon freed from prison

Completing his four-month term for contempt of Congress, Bannon said: ‘I’m not broken, I’m empowered’.

A former Trump strategist who was jailed for defying a Congressional subpoena to testify about the January 6, 2021, riot at the United States Capitol has been released from prison.

Steve Bannon, 70, a right-wing media executive and ex-Trump strategist, completed his four-month prison term early Tuesday for contempt of Congress.

Speaking to the New York Times outside a federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut, Bannon said, “I’m not broken, I’m empowered”.

Much has changed in the four months since Bannon was jailed, with President Joe Biden dropping out of the race and his Vice President Kamala Harris taking the Democratic nomination for president.

Now, with just a week before election day, Bannon is expected to use his influence and media savvy to rally the Republican presidential candidate’s die-hard base.

While Bannon no longer works for Trump, he has continued to amplify the former president’s message through his podcast “The War Room”. He is expected to appear on the show Tuesday morning and hold a press conference in New York in the afternoon, reported Axios.

“Bannon is one of the most talented broadcasters among his peers, in terms of taking current events, pulling out a kernel of truth from them, and then spinning an elaborate conspiracy theory on top of it, which then becomes the fuel for the action that’s taken by the grassroots in response to these lies,” Madeline Peltz, Deputy Director for Rapid Response at the left-leaning media watchdog Media Matters, told CNN.

“There’s really no one who has quite the same level of talent for that particular misinformation approach.”

A decade before joining Trump’s 2016 campaign team, Bannon co-founded Breitbart News, which he saw as a “platform for the alt-right“. Bannon served as Trump’s chief strategist in the White House in 2017 but left after just seven months, reportedly due to conflicts with other top staffers.

In 2020, he was charged with wire fraud and money laundering for misappropriating millions of dollars contributed by donors for the construction of a border wall with Mexico.

While others were found guilty in the scheme, Trump issued a blanket pardon to Bannon before leaving office in January 2021, leading to the dismissal of the charges.

During the same month, Bannon used his influence to bolster Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results. The day before the January 6 assault on the capital, he warned, “all hell will break loose tomorrow”.

If Trump loses the election again, Pelz from Media Matters anticipates that Bannon may amplify claims denying election results once more.

“I think, really, you’ll see it kick into high gear in the post-election chaos that we’re all sort of anticipating”, he told CNN.

Despite his conviction, Bannon should be eligible to vote in New York, where he has registered in the past.

A New York law passed in 2021, restored the right to vote for a person convicted of a felony upon release from incarceration, regardless of if they are on parole or have a term of post-release supervision.

Other states, such as Florida – where Bannon has also previously registered to vote –  have rules making it difficult for convicted felons to restore their constitutional right to vote.

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Al Jazeera and news agencies