Top Trump official goes to prison for contempt
The ideological force behind the US-China trade war loses bid to stave off jail time
The ideological force behind former US president Donald Trump’s trade war against China turned himself in at a federal prison in Miami on Tuesday after losing a bid to stave off jail time related to contempt-of-Congress charges against him.
Peter Navarro, Trump’s top trade adviser and one of the administration’s most strident anti-China voices, reported to the facility after a court in Washington found that his appeal would not likely reverse his conviction.
Jurors last September found Navarro guilty of two misdemeanour counts of contempt of Congress for refusing to cooperate with a congressional investigation into the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol. He was sentenced in January to four months behind bars by Judge Amit Mehta of the US District Court for the District of Columbia.
On Monday night, the US Supreme Court denied a request by Navarro to avoid prison while he appeals his conviction.
Navarro, who for decades was an academic in the University of California system, established himself as a China critic years before US-China relations took a more fractious turn under the Trump administration.
His 2011 book Death by China: Confronting the Dragon – A Global Call to Action accuses China of currency manipulation, deliberately harming Americans with dangerous consumer goods and a laundry list of other allegations.
Trump, who won the White House in 2016, said China used unfair practices to hollow out America’s manufacturing base.
Speaking to reporters across the street from the prison before turning himself in, Navarro reiterated his claim that his decision to ignore the congressional subpoena was protected by executive privilege connected to his White House tenure. Mehta ruled earlier that no evidence was presented to prove the privilege was invoked.
“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,” he said, pledging to appeal his conviction up to the Supreme Court.
He made a passing reference to China in his remarks, alleging that “war clouds growing in the Taiwan Strait, in Gaza, in Ukraine” were because of US President Joe Biden’s policies, but otherwise stuck to allegations that the charges against him were politically motivated.