Peter Navarro, a former economic adviser to Donald Trump in the White House and a close associate of the former president, appeared at a prison in Miami, in the southeast of the United States, on Tuesday to serve a four-month sentence, AFP reports. .

Peter NavarroPhoto: Adriana Gomez Licon/AP/Profimedia

Peter Navarro, 74, was sentenced to that term in January for obstructing a congressional investigation. In February 2022, he refused to attend a meeting of the House of Representatives’ committee investigating the events of January 6, 2021 and to provide documents to it.

That day, hundreds of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol, the seat of the US Congress, in an attempt to prevent the confirmation of the victory of his Democratic rival Joe Biden in the 2020 election.

Another former adviser to Donald Trump, right-wing populist theorist Steve Bannon, was already sentenced to four months in prison for the same crimes in 2022, but was released pending an appeal.

A similar request by Peter Navarro was rejected by the conservative Supreme Court on Monday, making his imprisonment inevitable.

Before heading to prison, he denounced the “partisan instrumentalization of the judicial system,” blaming his fate in a statement to the press on “damn Democrats and people who hate Trump.”

“I will be proud to go to prison and serve my sentence,” he said, taking comfort in the fact that Donald Trump will be the candidate of the Republican Party for the presidency of the United States in November.

Peter Navarro confirmed his intention to challenge his sentence “on appeal and then in the Supreme Court.”

Donald Trump was not directly prosecuted for the storming of the Capitol, although a parliamentary committee investigating the events of January 6, 2021 recommended in December 2022 that he be prosecuted, including inciting rebellion and conspiracy against American institutions.

However, in August 2023, he was indicted by a federal court in Washington, D.C., and then by courts in the state of Georgia (southeast) for his alleged illegal attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.