MILWAUKEE (AP) — President Donald Trump’s former trade adviser Peter Navarro took to the stage at the Republican National Convention amid rapturous cheers just hours after being released from prison, propelling the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol into the center of an event that had previously made little mention of the riot.
Navarro left the Miami prison that morning, serving four months of his sentence. Refusing to cooperate with congressional investigations Trump boarded a flight to Milwaukee after being caught up in an attack by a mob of supporters of former President Donald Trump who were trying to stop the certification of his defeat to Democratic candidate Joe Biden.
Navarro immediately attacked the committee that led the investigation and portrayed his time in prison as proof of loyalty to Trump.
“The J6 Committee demanded that I betray Donald John Trump to protect myself,” he said. “I refused.”
The remarks marked the first time that Trump has addressed the Capitol storming at length at the Republican National Convention, whose first three days have focused on the economy, national security and immigration. But he has frequently mentioned the riots at rallies and speeches, and many Republicans say the hundreds of people jailed on riot-related charges were wrongfully charged.
“I went to prison so you wouldn’t have to go to prison,” Navarro told the raucous crowd. “I’m a wake-up call for you.”
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Navarro received the loudest applause of any convention speaker to date, with one woman shouting, “Peter, we love you!”
Navarro spoke for more than 10 minutes in one of his longest speeches to date about what he called “legal jackals” responsible for imprisoning him, as he embraced his fiancee onstage and was greeted with huge cheers.
The scene is a common one at Trump rallies, where the presidential candidate routinely refers to those convicted on Jan. 6 as “hostages.” But there has been no similar moment at the party’s convention, which has so far largely avoided talk of Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 defeat.
In an interview before his speech, Navarro told The Associated Press that he was just one example of a right-wing argument that the Biden administration is using the judiciary to punish political opponents.
“I’m just part of a bigger problem,” Navarro said, referring to repeated claims by conservatives that the justice system has been used under President Joe Biden’s administration to thwart Trump and his aides. “If we don’t control our government, the government will control us,” Navarro said.
The phone interview was conducted while Navarro was waiting to take off from a Florida airport to catch a flight to Milwaukee.
While Navarro repeated the usual Republican line that the Biden administration is “weaponizing” the justice system to punish Trump and his allies, he said he would send a message of unity, a common theme among Republicans in the wake of Saturday’s assassination attempt on the former president.
“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 who have become disillusioned with the far left.”
Many “mainstream Democrats” feel “disenfranchised, disengaged and disgusted by the radical left,” Navarro said. “In Trump’s America, people don’t have to worry about food on the table, medicines in his cabinet or a roof over their heads.”
“Unity is my message,” he added.
Trump has accused the Justice Department of trying to target him politically by bringing two criminal charges against him, even though it has also charged Biden’s son, Hunter, on tax and firearms charges. Hunter Biden was convicted of three felony counts last month.
A federal judge in Florida this week dismissed one of the federal lawsuits that accused Trump of hiding classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate. The Justice Department plans to appeal.
Attorney General Merrick Garland forcefully defended the Justice Department’s independence and integrity against what he called an unprecedented attack by Republicans.
“The idea that politics influences our prosecutions couldn’t be further from the truth. We have one rule: We follow the facts, we follow the law and we make the appropriate decision,” Garland told reporters last month.
Still, Navarro said Democrats were a potential base of voters for Trump and he hoped to win their support in his convention speech.
Trump won the 2016 presidential election by carrying most of the once Democratic-held states that former President Barack Obama carried in 2012, including Iowa, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
“Like Donald Trump, I fight for important principles,” Navarro said.
Navarro reported to a federal prison in Miami in March and was the first senior Trump administration official to be jailed on charges related to the Jan. 6 attack. He has called his conviction a “partisan weaponization of the justice system.”
He received a subpoena from the committee for spreading false claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election shortly before the attack on the Capitol, and he claims he failed to cooperate with the committee. Committee The court rejected this argument, finding that Navarro had failed to prove that Trump had in fact invoked executive privilege.
Steve Bannon, a longtime ally of President Trump Report to the prison Earlier this month, he began serving a four-month sentence for contempt of Congress for failing to comply with a subpoena in a congressional investigation on January 6.
The House committee spent 18 months investigating the deadly riot, interviewing more than 1,000 witnesses, holding 10 hearings and obtaining more than 1 million pages of documents. Final ReportThe committee ultimately concluded that Trump criminally engaged in a “multifaceted conspiracy” to overturn his election loss to Biden and failed to act to stop his supporters from storming the Capitol. Trump has denied doing anything wrong.
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Associated Press writers Nicholas Riccardi in Milwaukee and Alanna Durkin Richer in Washington contributed.
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