The episode he recorded Monday will be his last for four months, but the longtime adviser to Donald Trump has no intention of surrendering his influence.
Stephen K. Bannon may have been obliged to report to federal prison on Monday, but he wasn’t going to let that get in the way of putting on an eye-catching, fiercely defiant grand finale.
Mr. Bannon, a longtime adviser to former President Donald J. Trump, spent the morning live-casting his popular podcast, “War Room,” from various locations around Danbury, Conn., near the site of the low-security facility where he’ll spend the next months in confinement. Cheered on by flag-waving supporters, members of Congress and other allies, he spent his final hours of liberty repeatedly poking a rhetorical finger in the eye of the Justice Department and the Biden administration.
“I’m a political prisoner,” said Mr. Bannon at a news conference held outside of a church a half-mile away from the federal facility where he surrendered shortly after noon Eastern time. Surrounded by a clutch of supporters holding up signs recommending, among other things, that he be awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, Mr. Bannon smiled and mugged for television cameras. “I’m proud to go to prison,” he added. “If this is what it takes to stand up to Joe Biden, I’m proud to do it.”
Mr. Bannon lost his last-ditch bid to avoid incarceration on Friday after the Supreme Court denied a request to postpone the sentence while he appealed a jury verdict that found him guilty of contempt for refusing to appear for a deposition before the House committee investigating Jan. 6 and for defying a subpoena for documents from the committee.
As a result, the very public figure will remain out of view — and off the air — until just a few days before the Nov. 5 election; opening his show from a makeshift studio in a hotel on Monday morning, he referred to himself as “federal prisoner 05635-509.”
But the right-wing firebrand insists that swapping his studio mic for a prison job, and his trademark double-stacked collared shirts for government khakis, will have little impact on his podcast, which he claimed, in a high-spirited interview over the weekend, had millions of listeners. In fact, Mr. Bannon claims, it will “only get bigger and more powerful” while he’s in custody.
