The former Trump administration official completed a four-month sentence for contempt of Congress and will speak at the Republican National Convention on Wednesday.
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Peter Navarro, former director of the White House National Trade Council, speaking at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) meeting on in National Harbor, Md., in February.
Peter Navarro, who led the U.S. Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy under President Donald J. Trump, was released from prison on Wednesday — in time to fly to Milwaukee to speak at the Republican National Convention.
Mr. Navarro was released after completing a four-month sentence for contempt of Congress after defying a subpoena from the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. (Another close Trump adviser, Stephen K. Bannon, recently began serving a four-month sentence for the same offense.)
He is listed on the schedule of convention speakers for Wednesday night, between 6 p.m. and 7 p.m. Central time, according to a person briefed on the planning.
Mr. Navarro was closely involved with Mr. Trump’s attempts to overturn the election results and remain in power, working with Mr. Bannon and others to try to delay Congress’s certification of the results on Jan. 6. In interviews and in a book he published in 2021, he has openly discussed those efforts, which included pressuring Vice President Mike Pence to reject the electors of states that had voted for Joseph R. Biden Jr.
The plan, he wrote in his book, was to “put certification of the election on ice for at least another several weeks while Congress and the various state legislatures involved investigate all of the fraud and election irregularities.”
Before the election, Mr. Navarro was best known for helping to develop Mr. Trump’s protectionist trade policies, including his tariffs. An economist who taught at the University of California, Irvine, he is a fierce critic of China and at times wanted to take anti-China policies even further than Mr. Trump did.
When the coronavirus pandemic began, Mr. Trump put him in charge of managing supply chains to secure personal protective equipment and other essential supplies, a role in which he used aggressive tactics with multinational corporations.
Maggie Astor covers politics for The New York Times, focusing on breaking news, policies, campaigns and how underrepresented or marginalized groups are affected by political systems. More about Maggie Astor
See more on: 2024 Elections, U.S. Politics, Donald Trump
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Source: nytimes.com
