Former Trump adviser Peter Navarro released from prison after serving 4 months for contempt of Congress

By CNN Newsource

Published July 17, 2024 5:43 AM

By Tierney Sneed, Katelyn Polantz and Denise Royal, CNN

(CNN) — Former Donald Trump White House adviser Peter Navarro was released from a Miami federal prison Wednesday after completing his four-month sentence for defying a subpoena from the January 6 congressional committee.

Navarro is expected to quickly travel to Milwaukee so he can appear at the Republican National Convention, where his former boss has been formally nominated as the GOP’s 2024 presidential nominee.

He is one of two members of Trump’s circle who were convicted for failing to comply with subpoenas from the now-defunct House Select Committee that investigated the January 6, 2021, insurrection. Trump adviser Steve Bannon started serving his four-month sentence earlier this month at a federal prison in Connecticut.

Navarro, who is in his 70s, worked as a law library clerk during his time in the prison camp, his prison consultant Sam Mangel told CNN.

“Everybody has to work,” Mangel said. “It gave him a chance to write.”

Mangel said Navarro was liked and respected by his fellow inmates while in the prison.

“When I went to visit him, guys were coming up to him, high-fiving him,” Mangel said.

When lawmakers demanded Navarro’s participation in their probe into Trump’s election subversion schemes, they pointed to reports that he was involved in efforts to delay Congress’ certification of the 2020 presidential results, as well as to his own account in his memoir describing the election-related plots.

After just a few hours of deliberations, a federal jury found Navarro guilty last summer on two counts of contempt: for his failure to produce documents and for not showing up for an interview that the committee had demanded.

Before the trial, Navarro had sought to argue to the jury that he was acting at the direction of Trump, who had invoked executive privilege, when he refused to comply with the subpoena. The judge, however, barred him from putting forward that defense, having concluded that the former White House aide had not present sufficient evidence that Trump had formally asserted the privilege.

While Navarro was unsuccessful in an emergency appeal to delay his prison sentence, he is now appealing his conviction on the merits.

The federal correctional facility where Navarro has lived since March is one of the oldest prison camps in the country, housing fewer than 200 inmates in its aging infrastructure, with a large Puerto Rican population.