Stephen K. Bannon, the combative and calculating strategist who helped elect Donald J. Trump to the White House and later used his influence as one of the most powerful voices of the hard right to sow baseless doubts about the 2020 election, was released from federal prison early Tuesday.
At 3:15 a.m., Mr. Bannon walked through a gate at the low-security prison in Danbury, Conn., embraced his daughter and wasted little time reprising his role as one of the leading provocateurs of the former president’s political movement. In an interview immediately after his release, he promised to help Mr. Trump in the final stretch of his campaign, which has already vented false, racist and misogynistic rhetoric out to voters.
“They were going to silence me and break me,” Mr. Bannon said in an interview as he rode in a chauffeured vehicle to Manhattan, where he planned to jump right back into presidential politics with the first episode of his popular podcast, “War Room,” since being released.
Looking more tanned and a few pounds lighter than when he reported to prison in July, he insisted, “I’m not broken; I’m empowered.”
Mr. Bannon said he planned to speak by phone with Mr. Trump immediately about the election, which he followed in prison by watching cable news and reading articles that his friends copied and pasted into emails for him because he was not allowed to browse the internet. The Trump campaign did not immediately respond for comment.
Mr. Bannon, 70, had been serving a four-month sentence on contempt charges for refusing to comply with a Congressional subpoena seeking information about the events of Jan. 6, 2021.
A self-taught authority on the history of populist political movements, Mr. Bannon predicted that the days and weeks after Election Day this year would be especially volatile — perhaps even more so than four years ago.
Mr. Bannon was one of the first advisers to suggest in the autumn of 2020 that Mr. Trump should claim victory on the night of the election regardless of what the vote tallies showed. He said on Tuesday that he believes the Trump campaign and its allies are prepared for a legal battle after Election Day this time, to an extent that they were not the last time.
If Mr. Trump’s vote totals on Election Day look as they did in 2020, Mr. Bannon said, he would encouraged Mr. Trump to once again declare himself the winner.
“He should stand up and say: ‘Hey, I’ve won this. And we have teams right now that are going to make sure that this thing is not going to be stolen.’”
He brushed off the uproar about Mr. Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden on Sunday night, where one speaker dismissed Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage,” and another likened Vice President Kamala Harris to a prostitute with “pimp handlers.”
“Once again, it’s a mountain out of a molehill,” Mr. Bannon said.
He said he was surprised that Ms. Harris and her allies had grown bolder in their attacks on Mr. Trump as a singularly dangerous figure in American history.
Ms. Harris has quoted Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Mr. Trump, who described his former boss as “fascist to the core.”
“America,” she said, “must heed this warning.”
Mr. Bannon appeared to take their words as permission for Trump followers to raise the temperature in the event of a drawn-out fight to certify the winner.
“This is worse than ‘deplorables,’” he said, referring to the term Hillary Clinton used to describe some of Mr. Trump’s supporters in 2016.
Mr. Bannon added that he did not believe the fascist charge would stick. “You’re not going to win that argument with the American people — it looks shrill. It looks like you’re afraid,” he said.
“If people think American politics has been divisive before, you haven’t seen anything,” he added.
Other Trump allies who have been prosecuted by the Justice Department, including retired Gen. Michael T. Flynn, are vowing retribution if Mr. Trump wins, but Mr. Bannon declined to go that far. Time and resources would be better spent, he said, following through with plans to deport millions of immigrants who are in the country illegally, starting with those who have criminal records.
“You have to start the mass deportations of the criminals,” he said. “Then you have to figure out how I’m going to mass-deport 10 or 11 million people — and quite frankly, have that fight that you’re going to have with Wall Street,” he added, referring to concerns in corporate America that deportations on a large scale would create a labor shortage.
“Given where the country is, we don’t have time now to turn the entire thing over to investigations,” Mr. Bannon said, citing other pressing issues like the expiration of the Trump tax cuts at the end of 2025 and the rapidly approaching limit on the amount of debt the federal government can amass.
He said he expected a Republican-controlled House to look into whether abuses occurred with the prosecutions and investigations related to the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. A Congressional investigation is what swept him up after he ignored a subpoena.
Mr. Bannon’s reach through his podcast leaves him with few peers in right-wing media — and fewer still who understand how to tap into and inflame the fears and suspicions of Trump supporters. Before Mr. Bannon’s imprisonment, the Podcharts ranking service routinely listed his daily podcast “War Room” among the country’s top 10 political podcasts.
Mr. Bannon has encouraged Mr. Trump’s uncompromising and bellicose style. He has helped shape the way the former president views policy and politics — even how he speaks. He has counseled Mr. Trump to treat his political opponents as enemies and to pursue an unforgiving approach to issues that are especially potent with his supporters, like immigration.
Asked on Tuesday whether he thought it had been worth a prison sentence to not testify before Congress, Mr. Bannon said: “1,000 percent.”
He added: “I am as proud of what I just went through as I was in my 20s. I served my country on a Navy destroyer. And in my 70s, I served in a federal prison.”
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