WASHINGTON – The last time Steve Bannon was a free man, Joe Biden was the presumptive Democratic nominee for president.

Bannon, the right-wing podcast host and former Donald Trump campaign official, was released from the custody of the federal Bureau of Prisons on Tuesday, with exactly a week to go before voters choose between his former boss and Vice President Kamala Harris on Election Day .

Randilee Giamusso, spokesperson for the Bureau of Prisons, confirmed that Bannon has been released.

Bannon was sentenced to four months in prison in 2022 for defying subpoenas from the House of Representatives committee on January 6, but he managed to delay the imposition of the sentence for almost two full years when he appealed. U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols — himself a Trump appointee — ordered Bannon in June to report to prison by July 1.

Bannon was convicted in July 2022 of two counts of contempt of Congress for refusing to comply with subpoenas from the House committee investigating the deadly attack on the Capitol, spurred by Trump’s lies about the 2020 election.

“The defendant chose loyalty to Donald Trump over compliance with the law,” a Justice Department prosecutor told jurors at trial, adding that Bannon had “contempt for Congress,” which was trying to find out “why 6 took place in January and how to prevent it’. sure it will never happen again.”

Bannon hosts a podcast called “Bannon’s War Room,” which has a large following on the right and regularly features guests who downplay the Jan. 6 attack. He said before he began serving his sentence that he was “proud” to go to prison, and he falsely told NBC News that there was “no chance” the Democrats could win the coming election unless “they who steal’.

Trump himself faces four criminal charges related to his efforts to overturn the outcome of the 2020 election: conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, obstruction of and attempted obstruction of an official proceeding and conspiracy against rights. He has pleaded not guilty. A federal grand jury indictment alleges that Trump knowingly used a campaign of “unsupported, objectively unreasonable and ever-evolving” false claims about voter fraud to try to change the outcome of the election after he lost.

Bannon, a 70-year-old white man whose inmate number was 05635-509, was serving his time at FCI Danbury, a low-security federal penitentiary in Connecticut.

Just days after Bannon reported to jail, Biden announced his decision to drop out of the race, and Harris became the Democratic nominee.

Bannon had not served in the White House for years when he was subpoenaed by the Jan. 6 committee, but he still tried to claim executive privilege to avoid it. At the eleventh hour before his contempt of court hearing by Congress, Bannon said he would agree to testify before the committee, a move the Justice Department said was a “last-ditch effort to avoid accountability.” A jury ultimately convicted him, and the convictions were upheld on appeal.

Peter Navarro, a former White House official, was also convicted of contempt of Congress and also served a four-month prison sentence. He was released in the middle of the Republican National Convention in August and received a hero’s welcome at the RNC.