Trump ally Peter Navarro to begin prison term after contempt conviction
Peter Navarro, a former trade adviser to Donald Trump, was on Tuesday set to become the first former White House official ever jailed for contempt of Congress.
Sentenced to four months in prison for refusing to cooperate with the House January 6 committee, the 74-year-old economist appealed all the way to the US supreme court, claiming he could not testify as his work with Trump on attempts to overturn the 2020 election was covered by executive privilege.
His appeals unsuccessful, he was due to report to a minimum-security federal facility in Miami.
On Monday, Sam Mangel, a prison consultant working with Navarro, told CNN the federal satellite camp was next to a zoo.
“Not only can you hear the lions,” Mangel said, “you can hear the lions roar every morning.”
The New York Times has described prison consultants as a “fixers … teaching convicts how to reduce their sentence, get placed in a better facility – and make the most of their months behind bars”.
Navarro was “nervous”, Mangel said, adding: “Anybody, regardless of the length of their sentence, is going into an unknown world.”
Navarro is not the only former Trump adviser convicted in relation to investigations of attempted election subversion.
Steve Bannon, formerly Trump’s chief White House strategist, is appealing a four-month sentence of his own for defying the House committee.
Trump himself faces 88 criminal charges, 14 related to election subversion, while struggling to pay multimillion-dollar civil penalties. The presumptive Republican presidential nominee, he is pursuing delaying tactics including claiming total immunity for acts committed in office.
In a Trump White House riddled by infighting, Navarro was a particularly controversial presence, particularly during the Covid pandemic.
After Trump lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden, Navarro boasted of his involvement in attempts to overturn that result, in part via a plan he called the “Green Bay Sweep”.
That drew the attention of the January 6 committee, which investigated the attack on Congress by Trump’s supporters.
But Navarro defied them and at sentencing in January, a judge told him: “You are not a victim, you are not the object of a political prosecution. These are circumstances of your own making.”
Also of Navarro’s own making, memorably, were quotes in his academic work attributed to an economics expert called Ron Vara – an anagram of Navarro.
Still, by reporting to prison on Tuesday, Navarro was at least set to lay claim to a place in US political history.
One of his lawyers, Stanley Brand, told CNN Navarro’s jailing was a “historic” moment that should stand as a warning to “future White House aides who get subpoenaed by Congress”.