MILWAUKEE — Former Trump White House official Peter Navarro was released from prison on Wednesday after completing his sentence. his sentence for a contempt of Congress conviction and is expected to speak hours later at the Republican National Convention.
Navarro, who served as White House trade adviser under President Donald Trump, was released after serving four months in prison. refusing to cooperate with a congressional investigation until the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by a mob of supporters of the Republican president, the federal Bureau of Prisons said.
Navarro is headed straight to Milwaukee to speak on the third night of the Republican National Convention. He will speak at 6 p.m. Central Time, according to a person familiar with the schedule who spoke on condition of anonymity before the schedule was officially released.
The Associated Press first reported that Navarro would address the RNC.
Navarro was the first senior Trump administration official to be imprisoned for a crime related to the Jan. 6 attack when he reported to a federal prison in Miami in March. He called his conviction a “partisan weaponization of the justice system.”
He was subpoenaed by the committee for promoting false claims about voter fraud in the 2020 election in the run-up to the Capitol riot. He has maintained that he could not cooperate with the committee because Trump had invoked executive privilege. But courts rejected that argument, finding that Navarro could not prove that Trump had actually invoked it.
Longtime Trump ally Steve Bannon reported to prison earlier this month to begin serving a four-month sentence for contempt of Congress for ignoring a subpoena in the Jan. 6 congressional investigation.
The House committee spent 18 months investigating the deadly uprising, interviewing more than 1,000 witnesses, holding 10 hearings and obtaining more than 1 million pages of documents. In its final reportThe panel ultimately concluded that Trump was criminally involved in a “multi-part conspiracy” to overturn his election loss to Democrat Joe Biden and that he failed to take action to stop his supporters from storming the Capitol. Trump maintains he did nothing wrong.
___
Associated Press reporter Alanna Durkin Richer contributed from Washington.
___
Follow AP’s coverage of the 2024 election at https://apnews.com/hub/election-2024.