MAGA loyalist Steve Bannon is dreading his soon-to-be-reality of being housed alongside sex offenders and violent criminals when he reports to prison in Connecticut on Monday, a source close to him told The Daily Beast on Friday.
Bannon, 70, was told to face the music on Friday when the nation’s highest court declined to indulge his pleas for a last-minute reprieve. With a one-sentence ruling, the Supreme Court ordered that he could no longer delay his sentence while he appeals the conviction.
Bannon is set to spend four months at FCI Danbury—a low-level prison in Connecticut where he’ll be housed alongside people convicted of sexual and violent crimes. The source said that’s something Bannon is “quite concerned with.”
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His charges stem from him blowing off a subpoena from the House committee investigating the Capitol riot. He has spent two years since then trying every avenue of appeal, arguing that he was only following the advice of his lawyer, who told him then-President Donald Trump had evoked executive privilege. (Multiple courts ruled that there was no executive privilege since Trump had already left office.)
Bannon, however, insists publicly that he has no regrets and will only benefit from a prison sentence, according to ABC.
“I’m a political prisoner… It won’t change me. It will not suppress my voice. My voice will not be suppressed when I’m there,” he told This Week co-anchor Jonathan Karl.
“If it took me going to prison to finally get the House to start to move, to start to delegitimize the illegitimate J6 committee, then, hey, guess what, my going to prison is worth it,” he said.
Similarly, Bannon’s frequent War Room podcast guest Mike Davis assured fans on X, “Promise you this: Steve Bannon is unfazed and determined.”
On the podcast, Bannon told fans not to write letters to him while in prison, because he would be busy “working outside of my job in prison, working the rest of the hours on what? Total and complete victory.”
He’s expected to surrender to prison on Monday with the help of his prison consultant, Sam Mangel, who also counts Trump’s locked-up pal Peter Navarro as a client.
NBC News reported that Bannon has already been assigned an inmate number by the federal Bureau of Prisons: 05635-509.
His sentence will overlap with that of Navarro, who started his four-month jail stint in March after being convicted on the same charges.
Unlike Navarro, however, Bannon has a separate criminal detainer placed on him related to his pending trial in Manhattan for defrauding supporters of the “We Build the Wall” movement. That means he must report to a low-level federal facility instead of a camp, which is must less strict on inmates and is where Navarro has been since the spring.
While Navarro’s biggest pain behind bars is likely sheer boredom and slow communications, a source said Bannon will be on a more rigid day-to-day schedule that has less freedom of movement, stricter check-ins, and will be surrounded by more dangerous criminals.
