Ex-Trump White House official begins prison sentence and..
Miami: On Tuesday, Peter Navarro, a former employee of the Trump White House, reported to prison to start serving his term for declining to assist a congressional inquiry into the attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Speaking to reporters prior to his arrival at a federal detention facility in Miami, where he would spend a four-month sentence after being convicted guilty of charges of contempt of Congress, Navarro was belligerent.
Defying a subpoena for records and a deposition from the US House January 6 committee that looked into the 2021 capitol attack, Navarro was found guilty in September.
After working for then-President Donald Trump as a trade adviser in the White House, he then supported the Republican’s ludicrous allegations of widespread voting fraud in the 2020 election, which the incumbent president lost to Democrat Joe Biden.
Navarro has insisted that Trump’s invocation of executive privilege prevented him from working with the committee. Courts have rejected that argument, concluding that Navarro was unable to establish that Trump had in fact invoked it.
Navarro told reporters on Tuesday across the street from the prison, “When I walk in that prison today, the justice system — such as it is — will have done a crippling blow to the constitutional separation of powers and executive privilege.”
Following that, Navarro and his attorney got into a car and drove to the jail. Later on Tuesday, the federal Bureau of Prisons verified that Navarro was being held.
In order to give the judges more time to evaluate his argument, Navarro had requested to remain free while he appealed his conviction. However, the federal appeals court in Washington rejected his request to delay his sentencing, concluding that his appeal was unlikely to overturn his conviction.
Chief Justice John Roberts of the Supreme Court declined to intervene on Monday as well, stating in a written order that he had “no basis to disagree” with the appeals court. Roberts stated that his conclusion has no bearing on how Navarro’s appeal is ultimately resolved.
The second Trump assistant found guilty of contempt of Congress was Navarro. Steve Bannon, a former strategist to the White House, was originally given a four-month sentence, but an appeals court allowed him to remain free.
The House committee interviewed over a thousand witnesses, held ten hearings, and obtained over a million pages of records during its eighteen-month investigation into the uprising. The panel’s final report came to the conclusion that Trump had engaged in a criminal conspiracy, or “multi-part conspiracy,” to rig the election results and had done nothing to prevent his followers from storming the Capitol.