WASHINGTON — Former Trump White House adviser Peter Navarro will be sentenced Thursday for criminal contempt of Congress, with federal prosecutors saying he “thumbed his nose” at the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
The charge carries a mandatory minimum sentence of a month in prison.
Navarro was convicted in September on two counts for refusing to testify and provide documents to the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol, which issued its report and dissolved in late 2022 after Republicans won control of the House.
Federal prosecutors are seeking six months in federal prison for Navarro, saying he, “like the rioters at the Capitol, put politics, not country, first, and stonewalled Congress’s investigation.” Navarro, prosecutors said, “chose allegiance to former President Donald Trump over the rule of law.”
Navarro helped spread misinformation about the 2020 election after Trump’s loss and issued a report that Trump falsely said proved that it was statistically “impossible” for him to have lost the election. Trump referred to the report in his infamous “will be wild” tweet on Dec. 19, 2020, encouraging supporters to travel to Washington for a “Big protest” on Jan. 6. That tweet, many Jan. 6 defendants have said, is what drew them to Washington.
Navarro’s lawyer asked that any sentence imposed Thursday be immediately stayed due to “novel issues” presented in the case, including Navarro’s purported belief that Trump had invoked executive privilege. Right-wing podcaster and former White House official Steve Bannon was sentenced to four months in prison on a similar contempt conviction in October 2022 but is seeking to overturn his conviction and has not yet served any time.
“Like Stephen Bannon before him, throughout the pendency of this case, the Defendant has exploited his notoriety — through courthouse press conferences, his books, and through podcasts — to display to the public the reason for his failure to comply with the Committee’s subpoena: a disregard for government processes and the law, and in particular, the work of the Committee,” federal prosecutors wrote in a sentencing memo. “The Defendant wrote a book on the very topic that was the subject of the Committee’s subpoena. He was happy to tell the world what he knew — but not Congress.”
U.S. District Judge Amit P. Mehta will sentence Navarro at the hearing, which gets underway at 10 a.m. ET.
