MILWAUKEE – Former Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro took the stage at the Republican National Convention to enthusiastic cheers hours after being released from prison and pushed talk of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack at the U.S. Capitol to the center of an event that has largely avoided mentioning the riot.
Navarro left a Miami prison in the morning, completing a four-month sentence for refusing to cooperate with a congressional investigation into the attack by a mob of former President Donald Trump's supporters trying to stop the certification of his loss to Democrat Joe Biden. He then took a flight to Milwaukee.
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Immediately, Navarro attacked the committee that led the investigation and cast his time in prison as a sign of loyalty to Trump.
“The J6 committee demanded that I betray Donald John Trump to save my own skin," he said. “I refused.”
His remarks were the first extended mention of the Capitol riot during the first three days of the RNC after programming that has been heavily focused on the economy, national security and immigration. But Trump often mentions the riot in his rallies and speeches — and many in his GOP base argue that the hundreds of people jailed on charges related to the riot have been wrongly prosecuted.
“I went to prison so you won't have to,” Navarro told the raucous crowd. "I am your wakeup call."
Navarro received some of the most thunderous applause of convention speakers to date, with one woman yelling out, “I love you, Peter!”
Navarro spoke for more than 10 minutes – one of the longest speeches yet -- about what he called the “lawfare jackals” he blamed for locking him up. He embraced his fiancée onstage to wild cheers.
The scene was the sort of spectacle common at Trump rallies, where the presidential nominee routinely calls those convicted of crimes on Jan. 6 "hostages.” But there hasn’t been a similar moment at the convention, which has so far largely avoided talk about Trump’s push to overturn his 2020 loss.
In an interview before his speech, Navarro told The Associated Press 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 a small part of the bigger issue,” Navarro said, referring to the oft-repeated claim by conservatives that, during President Joe Biden's administration, the justice system has been used to hobble Trump and those close to him. “If we don’t control the government, the government will control us,” Navarro said.
The telephone interview took place as Navarro was awaiting takeoff from a Florida airport for the trip to Milwaukee.
Despite his echo of a common GOP refrain that the Biden administration has “weaponized” the judicial system to punish Trump and his allies, Navarro said he planned to offer a message of unity, a common theme among Republicans in light of the assassination attempt on the former president Saturday.
“To win the election, we have to unite not just the Republican party but the entire country,” Navarro said. “I’m going to reach out to Democrats disenchanted with the radical left.”
Many “mainstream Democrats" are "disenfranchised, disengaged and disgusted with the radical left,” Navarro said. “In Trump’s America, people don’t have to worry about food on the table, medicine in the cabinet and a roof over their head.”
“Unity is my message,” he added.
Trump has accused the Justice Department of targeting him politically with indictments in two criminal cases even as the department also brought tax and gun charges against Biden’s son, Hunter. Hunter Biden was convicted on three felony charges last month.
A federal judge in Florida this week dismissed one of Trump’s federal cases, which accused 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 has described as unprecedented attacks by Republicans.
“The idea that politics infects our prosecutions, nothing could be further from the truth. We have one rule. We follow the facts, and we follow the law and we make the appropriate decisions,” Garland told reporters last month.
Still, Navarro said Democrats are a potentially fertile voting bloc for Trump that he plans to try to reach in his convention speech.
Trump won in 2016 in large part by carrying once-Democratic swaths of states carried by former President Barack Obama in 2012, including Iowa, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
“Just like Donald Trump, I am fighting for important principles,” Navarro said
Navarro was the first senior Trump administration official to be locked up for a crime related to the Jan. 6 attack when he reported to a federal prison in Miami in March. He has called his conviction the “partisan weaponization of the judicial system.”
He was subpoenaed by the committee over his promotion of false claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election in the run-up to the Capitol insurrection. He has maintained that he couldn’t cooperate with the committee because Trump had invoked executive privilege. Courts have rejected that argument, finding that Navarro couldn’t prove Trump had actually invoked privilege.
Longtime Trump ally Steve Bannon reported to prison earlier this month to begin serving his four-month sentence on contempt of Congress charges for defying a subpoena in the congressional Jan. 6 investigation.
The House committee spent 18 months investigating the deadly insurrection, interviewing more than 1,000 witnesses, holding 10 hearings and obtaining more than 1 million pages of documents. In its final report, the panel ultimately concluded that Trump criminally engaged in a “multi-part conspiracy” to overturn his election loss to Biden and failed to act to stop his supporters from storming the Capitol. Trump insists he did nothing wrong.
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Associated Press reporters Nicholas Riccardi in Milwaukee and Alanna Durkin Richer contributed from Washington.
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Follow the AP's coverage of the 2024 election at https://apnews.com/hub/election-2024.