Former Jan. 6 committee chair applauds Navarro’s prison sentence

The former chair of the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol praised the prison sentence of a onetime adviser to former President Trump.

“Peter Navarro abandoned his oath to the Constitution and abused the public trust while he worked as a trade adviser to former President Trump when, in the days leading up to January 6th, he worked to keep a defeated incumbent in the White House,” Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) said in a press release posted Thursday to his account on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.

“He abused it again when he willfully defied a lawful subpoena from the January 6th Select Committee to answer questions about the lead-up to that deadly day,” Thompson continued. “Last summer’s guilty verdict and today’s sentence are the consequence of Mr. Navarro’s stubborn insistence that his short stint in the Executive Branch somehow put him above the law. I applaud the US Attorneys for their hard work in bringing this case to a successful conclusion.”

Navarro was sentenced to four months in prison Thursday because he did not comply with an investigation into the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. In September, he was convicted on two counts of contempt of Congress for failing to produce documents in relation to the probe and for skipping a deposition.

Prosecutors had asked the judge to impose a six-month prison term on Navarro and said he displayed “utter disregard” for the committee’s investigation and “utter contempt for the rule of law.” 

“The committee was investigating an attack on the very foundation of our democracy,” Assistant U.S. Attorney John Crabb said. “There could be no more serious investigation undertaken by Congress.”