Ex-Trump adviser Navarro released from prison, headed to RNC

He served four months for refusing to cooperate with a congressional investigation into the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by a mob of the President Trump's supporters.

By Jill Colvin | The Associated Press

Former Trump White House official Peter Navarro was released from prison on Wednesday after completing his sentence for a contempt of Congress conviction and is expected to speak hours later at the Republican National Convention.

Navarro, who served as a White House trade adviser under President Donald Trump, was freed from custody after serving four months for refusing to cooperate with a congressional investigation into the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by a mob of the Republican president’s supporters, according to the federal Bureau of Prisons.

Navarro will head straight to Milwaukee to speak at the third night of the Republican National Convention. He is set to speak in the 6 p.m. hour Central time, according to a person familiar with the schedule who spoke on the condition of anonymity before the schedule’s official release.

Navarro was the first senior Trump administration official to be locked up for a crime related to the Jan. 6 attack when he reported to a federal prison in Miami in March. He has called his conviction the “partisan weaponization of the judicial system.”

He was subpoenaed by the committee over his promotion of false claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election in the run-up to the Capitol insurrection. He has maintained that he couldn’t cooperate with the committee because Trump had invoked executive privilege. But courts have rejected that argument, finding Navarro couldn’t prove Trump had actually invoked it.

Longtime Trump ally Steve Bannon reported to prison earlier this month to begin serving his four-month sentence on contempt of Congress charges for defying a subpoena in the congressional Jan. 6 investigation.

The House committee spent 18 months investigating the deadly insurrection, interviewing more than 1,000 witnesses, holding 10 hearings and obtaining more than 1 million pages of documents. In its final report, the panel ultimately concluded that Trump criminally engaged in a “multi-part conspiracy” to overturn his election loss to Democrat Joe Biden and failed to act to stop his supporters from storming the Capitol. Trump insists he did nothing wrong.

Associated Press reporter Alanna Durkin Richer contributed from Washington.