Prominent MAGA influencer and former White House official Steve Bannon used a “coded system” to communicate with President Donald Trump and his 2024 election campaign team while serving a four-month sentence in prison, according to a new report from The Atlantic.
Bannon was convicted in 2022 of criminal contempt of Congress after refusing to comply with a subpoena regarding investigations into the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. He was sentenced to four months at the Federal Correctional Institute in Danbury, Connecticut.
Speaking with journalist Jonathan Karl shortly after being released in October of 2024, Bannon revealed that even while behind bars, he managed to maintain regular communications with Trump and his campaign staff using a method that would conceal his conversations from the Bureau of Prisons, which reviews all communications to and from inmates.
The method was to use a “coded system” Bannon had developed himself, Karl wrote — a system that allowed him to send hidden messages via email to Trump’s team, particularly Trump’s aide at the time, Boris Epshteyn, who’s since gone on to become Trump’s personal senior counsel, and who was indicted in April of 2024 for his role in Trump’s fake elector plot scheme.
Those messages would be sent to his daughter Maureen Bannon and Grace Chong, his chief financial officer for his War Room podcast.
“I had just a system to get to Boris, kind of in quasi-code, through [Maureen] into Grace,” Bannon said.
Karl asked Bannon if there was “literally a code word,” to which Bannon said “well, we had –” before “catching himself” and rephasing his response, seemingly wary of exposing what the messages — still likely in the possession of the Bureau of Prisons — contained.
“I don’t — the Bureau of Prisons could go back through it,” Bannon said. “We had a way that they could get to him.”
An official at the prison in Danbury — who Bannon described as “pure MAGA” — cautioned Bannon that his emails were being monitored by the Biden administration, which was the impetus, Karl wrote, for Bannon developing the coded system.
Bannon also said that he had heard of the 2024 assassination attempt on Trump from a fellow inmate, and subsequently discouraged Trump’s team from trying to “reduce tensions” following the incident.
“Trump’s going to be Trump. You’re not going to have that ‘unity,’” Bannon recalled communicating to Trump’s team. “What you’re going to do is blow a huge opportunity to differentiate yourself. And quite frankly, throw down harder that they tried to assassinate him. Put it back on them. Get into the thing about the lax security. Double down, triple down on this. It’s a winner.”
The prison Bannon spent his four months of incarceration at was a “rough place,” he told Karl, bragging that he “wasn’t in a camp like that ... [Michael Cohen],” Trump’s former lawyer who was convicted of tax evasion and other crimes and sentenced to serve his time at a medium-security federal prison.