Peter Navarro begins a four-month prison sentence for contempt of Congress

Peter Navarro, a trade adviser to former President Donald J. Trump, reported to federal prison in Miami on Tuesday, becoming the first senior Trump administration official to serve time for his role in the effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election to undermine.

The 74-year-old Navarro, who helped develop Trump’s plans to stay in power after his November 2020 election defeat, was sentenced in January to four months in prison for contempt of Congress after serving a subpoena from the commission of the House of Representatives investigating the January 2020 presidential elections. 6 riot.

At a hastily arranged news conference shortly before he was to report to the Federal Correctional Institution in Miami, a low-security prison next to the Miami-Dade Zoo, Mr. Navarro repeated familiar charges from the Justice Department and the Biden administration.

Speaking in the parking lot of a commercial plaza flanked by a pizzeria and a pawn shop, he cast blame on the federal judge in his case, as well as on Mr. Biden and a long list of politicians he said were motivated by hostility toward Mr. Trump .

He added that the “tragedy” of his situation was that he would likely serve his sentence while he continues to appeal his conviction.

“I’m only afraid of one thing,” he told reporters. “I fear for my country because this – what they are doing – will have a chilling effect on every American, regardless of party.”

Sam Mangel, a federal prison counselor who helped Mr. Navarro prepare for his surrender, said he was working to get Mr. Navarro into a unit designed for inmates over 60 in a minimum-security satellite camp at the prison.

The inmates there share bunk beds in an open-plan dormitory with 80 beds and minimal privacy, Mr. Mangel, adding that Mr. Navarro, given his age, hoped to meet his prison work requirements through a job as a law library clerk or another low-paying job. intensity position.

The rambling speech, delivered outside a strip mall, was a typically idiosyncratic finale for Mr. Navarro, whose bravado and idiosyncrasies have been hallmarks of his career.

Mr. Navarro, a Harvard-educated economist, was a fierce critic of China and helped lay out Mr. Trump’s protectionist trade policies.

Before joining the Trump administration, Mr. Navarro drifted in and out of political parties, seeking office as a Democrat in California, but repeatedly fail.

In 1992, Mr. Navarro, running on an environmental platform, nearly won San Diego’s mayoral election, using stunts such as swimming a mile to a campaign event where he addressed a crowd in a Speedo. He was a speaker at the 1996 Democratic National Convention, where he endorsed President Bill Clinton.

Mr. Navarro also turned to academia, spending more than twenty years there a professor at the University of California, Irvine. While on the faculty, he cited a fictional alter ego, often called the Dark Prince of Disaster, in his books to provide scathing descriptions of China.

The start of Mr. Navarro’s prison term ended a lengthy legal challenge that ended at the Supreme Court on Monday as he sought to remain free while he appeals his conviction.

Mr. Navarro had argued that as a former adviser working on behalf of the president, his case raised new legal questions about the separation of powers and the scope of executive privilege.

But the judges were not swayed.

The outcome was in stark contrast to that of another former Trump aide, Stephen K. Bannon, who was sentenced to an identical prison term on parallel charges but was allowed to remain free by the federal judge presiding over his case.

The House committee sought to interview Mr. Navarro in part because he, along with Mr. Bannon, devised a strategy to mobilize Republican allies in Congress to delay certification of the election by repeatedly reducing electoral votes in battleground states to challenge. Mr. Navarro discussed the plan, nicknamed the Green Bay Sweep, openly in his memoirs and in interviews.

But when the committee asked for his testimony and documents from that period, Mr. Navarro declined to participate.

During his trial, Mr. Navarro’s lawyers argued that he had acted under the belief that Mr. Trump had asserted executive privilege and expected him not to cooperate.

But Mr. Navarro’s lawyers were able to point to little evidence that Mr. Trump had actually given instructions to that effect.

A lawyer for Mr. Navarro declined to comment on the appeal.

According to the Congressional Research Service, there is criminal enforcement of a congressional subpoena extremely rare. And as in Mr. Navarro’s case, prosecutions still often fail to provide Congress with access to the information sought, especially in cases involving the executive branch.

A special one civil lawsuit The case brought by the Justice Department is ongoing, in which prosecutors have been trying to recover hundreds of pages of presidential records that Mr. Navarro refused to provide to the National Archives and Records Administration after he left office.

The detention of Mr. Navarro, as the first aide to Mr. Trump jailed in connection with efforts to overturn the 2020 election, was separate from the experience of other allies of the former president who face legal challenges were met, but ultimately had little consequence.

Mr. Trump’s longtime friend and adviser, Roger J. Stone Jr., was sentenced to 40 months in prison after being convicted of obstructing a congressional investigation into Mr. Trump’s campaign in 2016, after which Mr. Trump paid a commutation delivered at eleven o’clock.

Michael Flynn, his first national security adviser, pleaded guilty twice to lying to the FBI during the Russia investigation, but the Justice Department, after an extraordinary public campaign by Mr. Trump, moved abruptly to drop the criminal case against him traps. In the final months of his presidency, Trump issued a pardon.