Steve Bannon
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Stephen Kevin Bannon (born November 27, 1953) is an American media executive, political strategist, pundit and former investment banker. He served as the White House's chief strategist for the first seven months of President Donald Trump's first administration before Trump fired him. He is a former executive chairman of Breitbart News. Since 2019, Bannon has hosted the War Room podcast. Bannon was an officer in the United States Navy between 1977 and 1983, then worked for two years at Goldman Sachs as an investment banker. In 1993, he became acting director of the research project Biosphere 2. He was an executive producer on 18 Hollywood films from 1991 to 2016. In 2007, he co-founded Breitbart News, a website which he described in 2016 as "the platform for the alt-right". In the mid-2010s, Bannon was a vice president of Cambridge Analytica, a firm that collected data on millions of Facebook users, without their informed consent, for use in Trump’s campaign and Brexit, in some cases spreading fake news. Later knowledge of this data breach prompted the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal. In 2016, Bannon became the chief executive officer of Trump's 2016 presidential campaign and was appointed chief strategist and senior counselor to the president following Trump's election. As chief strategist, Bannon urged Trump toward an anti-establishment platform and clashed frequently with other Republicans as well as fellow staff members Reince Priebus and Jared Kushner. He left eight months later and rejoined Breitbart. In 2018, after his criticism of Trump's children was reported in Michael Wolff's book Fire and Fury, he was disavowed by Trump and left Breitbart. After leaving the White House, Bannon opposed the Republican Party establishment and supported insurgent candidates in Republican primary elections. Bannon's reputation as a strategist was questioned when former Alabama Supreme Court chief justice Roy Moore, despite Bannon's support, lost the 2017 United States Senate election in Alabama. Bannon had declared his intention to become "the infrastructure, globally, for the global populist movement". Accordingly, he has supported national populist conservative political movements around the world, including creating a network of far-right groups in Europe. Bannon advised Jeffrey Epstein, the financer and convicted child sex offender, on media relations just prior to his arrest on sex trafficking charges and death in prison in 2019. In 2020, Bannon and others were arrested on federal charges of conspiracy to commit mail fraud and money laundering connected to the We Build the Wall fundraising campaign. According to the indictment, the defendants promised contributions would go to building a U.S.–Mexico border wall, but instead enriched themselves. Bannon pleaded not guilty. Trump pardoned Bannon, sparing him from a federal trial, but did not pardon his codefendants. Federal pardons do not cover state offenses, and in 2022, Bannon was charged in New York state court with fraud, money laundering, and conspiracy in connection with the campaign. In February 2025, Bannon pleaded guilty to fraud and was sentenced to three years of conditional discharge. Bannon refused to comply with a subpoena from the January 6 House select committee, so was indicted by a federal grand jury on criminal charges of contempt of Congress. In July 2022, he was convicted and sentenced to four months in prison and a $6,500 fine. After losing his appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, Bannon surrendered to a federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut, where he was imprisoned from July to October 2024.