Steve Bannon, an ex-advisor to former President Donald Trump and host of the popular War Room Pandemic podcast, says turning himself in to face money laundering and conspiracy charges, was “one of the most powerful days of my life” despite the national spectacle of being led in handcuffs to his arraignment on Sept. 8.
“I don’t care about any of this stuff,” Bannon told The Epoch Times in a backstage interview at a fundraiser in Orange County, Calif., on Sept. 18. “They’re trying to shut down War Room, and they’re trying to shut me up, and that will never happen. The show gets bigger, I get a bigger platform, and I’ll never back down. They’ll have to kill me first.”
Despite memes on social media depicting him surrounded by prison walls, and pundits who either neglectfully or skillfully omit the word “alleged” in their commentaries about the case, Bannon is undaunted. He scoffed at the indictment, calling it “a joke.”
Quoting Revolutionary War-era U.S. naval commander John Paul Jones at his arraignment, he said: “I have not yet begun to fight.”
Bannon Backstage
At the fundraiser for Republican Mark Finchem, a candidate for secretary of state in Arizona, held in Huntington Beach, Calif., Bannon delivered a fiery speech similar to one he gave at a Turning Point USA event two days earlier.
Backstage, he accused the Biden administration of weaponizing the criminal justice system to target its political foes. Citing the latest midterm election polls, Bannon said Democrats are desperate to build back support by silencing as many Republican voices as they can, especially since other political schemes such as “the show trial” hearings over the events at the Capitol Building on Jan. 6, 2021, and the FBI’s “raid and ransack” of Trump’s home in Mar-a-Lago have “collapsed.”
“Five days after Biden’s speech they put out this indictment. It’s a Xerox copy of the last one, which is a joke,” Bannon said. “They’re after everybody. Now, they have 75 subpoenas and search warrants, have taken phones and are doing raids on people’s homes. They’re just doing shotguns. They understand their power has a limit to it on Nov. 8, and they’re in a mad scramble.”
By Brad Jones
