Released from prison just hours earlier, former White House adviser to Donald Trump, Peter Navarro, condemned the Biden administration for what he called the “militarization” of the justice system, while pledging to deliver a message of national unity when he addresses the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.
In his first interview since being released from a Florida prison on contempt of Congress charges, Navarro told The Associated Press that he was just one example of what many on the right say is the Biden administration’s use of the judiciary to punish its political enemies.
“I’m just a small part of the bigger problem,” Navarro said, referring to the oft-repeated conservative claim that under President Joe Biden’s administration, the justice system was used to harm former President Donald Trump and his associates. “If we don’t control the government, the government will control us,” the former inmate warned.
Navarro, who served as a White House trade adviser during the Trump administration, was released after serving four months in prison for refusing to cooperate with a congressional investigation into the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
The telephone conversation took place as Mr. Navarro was waiting to take off from a Florida airport for his flight to Milwaukee, where he was scheduled to speak on the third night of the Republican National Convention.
Call for unity
Despite echoing the Republican Party’s common refrain that the Biden administration has “weaponized” the justice system to punish Trump and his allies, Navarro planned to offer a message of unity, a common theme among Republicans in light of the attempted assassination of the former president on Saturday.
“To win elections, we must unite not only the Republican Party, but the entire country,” Navarro said. “I will reach out to Democrats who are disenchanted with the radical left.”
Many “mainstream Democrats” are “disenfranchised, disengaged and disgusted by the radical left,” Navarro argued. “In Trump’s America, people don’t have to worry about food on the table, medicine in the cupboard and a roof over their heads.”
“Unity is my message,” he added.
Unprecedented attacks
Mr. Trump has accused the Justice Department of politically targeting him with indictments in two criminal cases, even as the department has also brought tax and gun charges against Joe Biden’s son, Hunter. Hunter Biden was convicted on three counts last month.
A federal judge in Florida this week dismissed one of Mr. Trump’s federal cases accusing him of hoarding classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate. The Justice Department plans to appeal.
Attorney General Merrick Garland has forcefully defended the independence and integrity of the Justice Department against what he described as unprecedented attacks from Republicans.
“The idea that politics infects our prosecutions is nothing further from the truth. We have a policy. We follow the facts, we follow the law and we make appropriate decisions,” Garland told reporters last month.
Still, Mr. Navarro said Democrats were a potentially fertile voting bloc for Mr. Trump, which he plans to try to reach out to in his convention speech.
Donald Trump won in 2016 largely on the strength of swathes of formerly Democratic states carried by former President Barack Obama in 2012, including Iowa, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
“Like Donald Trump, I fight for important principles,” Peter Navarro said.
He is scheduled to speak at 6 p.m. Central time, according to a person familiar with the program who spoke on condition of anonymity before the program was officially released. The Associated Press first reported that Navarro would address the RNC.
Peter Navarro was the first senior Trump administration official to be incarcerated for a crime related to the Jan. 6 attack, when he reported to a federal prison in Miami in March. He called his conviction “the partisan weaponization of the justice system.”
He was subpoenaed by the committee for promoting false claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election, in the run-up to the Capitol insurrection. He argued that he could not cooperate with the committee because Mr. Trump had invoked executive privilege. The courts rejected that argument, finding that Mr. Navarro could not prove that Donald Trump had actually invoked that privilege.
Longtime Trump ally Steve Bannon reported to prison earlier this month to begin serving his four-month sentence for contempt of Congress for defying a subpoena as part of the congressional investigation into Jan. 6.
The House committee spent 18 months investigating the deadly insurrection, interviewing more than 1,000 witnesses, holding 10 hearings and obtaining more than a million pages of documents. In its final report, the panel concluded that Mr. Trump criminally engaged in a “multipart conspiracy” to overturn his election loss to Joe Biden and failed to act to stop his supporters from storming the Capitol. Mr. Trump insists he did nothing wrong.