Ex-Trump aide Peter Navarro sentenced to four months in jail for contempt of Congress

A federal judge in Washington DC has sentenced former Trump White House aide Peter Navarro to four months in jail and fined $9,500 for wilfully defying a subpoena issued by the House January 6 select committee in 2021.

Navarro is the second ex-Trump administration aide to receive a custodial sentence after being convicted of contempt of Congress. Former president Donald Trump’s onetime chief White House strategist, Steve Bannon, was sentenced to four months in jail last year but is appealing his sentence.

Navarro, who a jury convicted on two counts of contempt of Congress in September, is expected to appeal his own sentence as well, though if Mr Trump returns to the White House after this year’s presidential election he is expected to pardon both of his former aides.

If Mr Trump does not become president and pardon them, and if their respective appeals are lost, either could become the first federal defendant to enter a correctional facility for contempt of Congress in more than fifty years, though the sentences both have received are far lighter than the year behind bars which is the maximum sentence possible for contempt convictions.

Federal prosecutors had asked for a six-month sentence for Navarro, the same amount of time that had been requested for Bannon, with whom the ex-Trump aide worked on a plan to overturn Mr Trump’s 2020 election loss to Joe Biden in the weeks before a riotous mob of Mr Trump’s supporters attacked the Capitol in hopes of preventing certification of the election results by Congress.

During the sentencing hearing, prosecutors had urged Judge Amit Mehta to impose the custodial sentence, citing the seriousness of the congressional inquiry.

“The committee was investigating an attack on the