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The U.S. Supreme Court has denied the request of Peter Navarro, the former White House chief trade advisor to President Donald Trump, to be released from prison while he challenges his conviction for contempt of Congress.
After Chief Justice John Roberts rejected Navarro’s desperate attempt to stay free while he filed an appeal, Navarro reported to a federal prison in Miami in mid-March to start serving a four-month sentence for ignoring a congressional subpoena.
Fifteen days into his sentence, in early April, Navarro made a new request to the Supreme Court to halt his surrender to Justice Neil Gorsuch. The entire court considered his request for emergency relief and rejected it. Notable dissents were absent. Navarro’s lawyers chose not to respond.
At the Federal Correctional Institute in Miami, Navarro, 74, is serving his sentence in an 80-person dormitory designated for senior prisoners.
Navarro defied a subpoena issued by the House Select Committee looking into the attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, and was charged with and convicted of two counts of criminal contempt of Congress last year.
The committee sought testimony and documents from Navarro regarding his actions following the 2020 presidential election and his attempts to postpone the certification of state Electoral College votes. The committee disbanded at the end of 2022.
A federal district judge in Washington fined Navarro $9,500 and sentenced him to four months in prison. However, during the appeals process, the former official in the White House challenged both his conviction and the judge’s decision to uphold his sentence.
According to CBS News, Navarro has maintained that he disregarded the subpoena because he believed executive privilege would protect him.
However, the judge supervising the case discovered no proof that the privilege had ever been used. Navarro attempted to get his sentence delayed, but a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit rejected his motion, concluding that he had little chance of winning a new trial or overturning his conviction.
After Navarro has completed his entire sentence, his final filing in his appeal to the D.C. Circuit is due on July 18.
Navarro’s attorney claimed in his first motion to stay out of federal prison that his prosecution had broken the separation of powers doctrine and that there had never been a satisfactory response to the queries he intended to bring up in his appeal.
Although Navarro is the first former member of the White House administration to be sentenced to prison for contempt of Congress, he is not the only member of the Trump team to receive a prison sentence for the same offense.
The former chief strategist of the White House, Steve Bannon, was found guilty of two counts of contempt of Congress and given a four-month prison sentence. But the judge presiding over that case decided to postpone his prison sentence while Bannon filed an appeal.