No, Steve Bannon didn’t say Trump is going to jail

The recent search of former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate by federal agents has drawn the intense ire of some supporters, including his onetime adviser, Steve Bannon, who compared the FBI to the Gestapo, the Nazi secret police. 

But he hasn’t conceded defeat, as a recent Facebook post suggests. 

"‘Trump is going to jail’ Bannon cries like kid after FBI search of Mar-a-Lago a description of a video shared on the social media platform says. 

This post flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Facebook.)

Anyone who watched the video awaiting Bannon’s breakdown, or even just the words "Trump is going to jail," did so in vain. He makes no such remarks, much less cries. 

Featured Fact-check

X posts

stated on December 1, 2024 in a post

Kash Patel posted on X that “the FBI is gay.”

"Why are they rifling through his desk?" Bannon says in the video recording of his podcast, "Bannon’s War Room." "Why? Because they want to indict him. Because they understand that he’s the leader of the most powerful political movement in modern American history — I actually think in all of American history." 

Searching more broadly online, and in the Nexis archive of news stories, we found nothing to corroborate the statement attributed to Bannon in the post. Rather, Bannon recently said Republicans will "incarcerate" the officials behind the FBI search. 

"Starting in January, we’re going to investigate, we’re going to litigate and, wait for it, we’re going to incarcerate," he said. 

This claim that Bannon cried and said Trump is going to jail is unsupported by fact. We rate it False.