Steve Bannon, former White House chief strategist under the Trump administration, is set to be released from prison on Tuesday and details have emerged of his life behind bars, in which he gravitated to hanging out with other white prisoners.
The news website Notus posted an investigation in which it corresponded with several of Bannon’s fellow inmates at a prison in Connecticut.
According to inmates serving time with the close Donald Trump ally and far-right figure, Bannon gravitated toward the “white car” among the different racial, religious and geographic groups into which his and many other American prisons are unofficially divided.
The group includes mobsters serving time for fraud and similar racketeering practitioners, Notus reported.
“Your boy [Bannon] is in the white car, sits with the Italians, the Godfather type,” Fred Carrasco Jr, an inmate serving time for armed drug trafficking told Notus.
“He basically sticks to his crew [and] hangs out with one guy” who is “pretty tough”, Carrasco told Notus, adding that white inmates in the prison had their own table that they sit at and Bannon was a regular there.
Bannon will be released on Tuesday from FCI Danbury, a suburban Connecticut prison following a four-month sentence. A jury found him guilty of two counts of contempt of Congress: one for refusing to sit for a deposition with the committee, the other for refusing to submit documents.
In addition to his political career, Bannon is the host of The War Room, a podcast that has garnered millions of listeners and is a popular pick among Trump supporters.
He is expected to continue his media and political careers, reigniting controversial calls for “retribution” on Democrats and other critics of the Maga movement.
“I would not be surprised to see him immediately hitting the campaign trail, as well as hosting his ‘War Room’ show for four hours each day,” Raheem Kassam, a conservative British activist told Notus.
Kassam said he had been “in touch with Steve almost every day”.
Bannon also spent his time behind bars teaching weekly civics classes to felons, according to Rolling Stone.
“Trump’s 34 felony convictions have taken some of the sting out of being a felon,” Bannon is reported to have told his students at one of these classes.