Photograph: Bonnie Cash/UPI/Shutterstock
The former Trump adviser Peter Navarro faces sentencing on Thursday on two counts of contempt of Congress, arising from his refusal to comply with a subpoena from the House committee that investigated the January 6 attack on Congress.
The mandatory minimum sentence is two months in prison, one for each count. Prosecutors in the case, which saw Navarro convicted in federal court in Washington in September, asked for 12 months prison time and a $200,000 fine.
Navarro denies wrongdoing, saying Donald Trump invoked executive privilege to stop him complying with the subpoena. His lawyers asked for no more than six months probation and $100 fines on each count, and for sentence to be paused as an appeal proceeds.
In court papers, attorneys wrote: “The appeal … will definitely answer what is required of a former president to invoke executive privilege as to their senior advisers and no future adviser will be in the same position of not knowing that the president they served had not properly invoked the privilege.”
An academic and China hawk with a controversial past including quoting himself under an anagram of his own name – Ron Vara – Navarro was a trade adviser to Trump also closely involved in the response to the Covid pandemic.
He became involved in Trump’s attempt to overturn his defeat by Joe Biden in the 2020 election, based on the lie that the Democrat won through electoral fraud. Navarro publicly discussed a battle plan he called the “Green Bay sweep”.
Trump’s election subversion culminated in the attack on Congress of 6 January 2021, a riot now linked to nine deaths, more than 1,200 arrests and hundreds of convictions.
The former president faces 17 criminal charges related to election subversion, as well as 40 related to the retention of classified information, 34 concerning hush money payments, attempts to keep him off the ballot for inciting an insurrection and civil suits over his business affairs and a defamation claim arising from a rape allegation a judge called “substantially true”.
Nonetheless, Trump dominates the Republican presidential primary, winning in Iowa and New Hampshire and pressing his last rival, Nikki Haley, to drop out.
Navarro is the second Trump aide indicted for defying a January 6 subpoena. Steve Bannon, the far-right activist who was Trump’s campaign chair and White House strategist, and who remains close to Trump, was convicted in 2022. Sentenced to four months in prison and fined $6,500, he remains free on appeal.
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