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Former Trump White House official Peter Navarro gave his last stand in a Miami strip mall parking lot before reporting to federal prison on Tuesday.
"The little story here is that Navarro is going to prison today," he said.
Navarro's fate was already sealed. On Monday night, Chief Justice John Roberts rejected his last-minute move to stave off a four-month sentence. Navarro spent some of his final minutes as a free man rattling off a defense containing anger, bravado, and love for former President Donald Trump. And in true Trumpian fashion, Navarro took the opportunity to hawk his forthcoming book. (Navarro is still appealing his conviction.)
"We got to stop meeting like this," Navarro quipped initially. "No sense of humor here, what?"
Once one of the main faces of Trump's trade policies, Navarro had little choice of venue for his final press conference. He used a parking lot across the street from what CNN described as a minimum-security federal Bureau of Prisons satellite camp in Miami. Most notably, inmates can hear roaring lions as there is a zoo right next to the prison.
Amid a rogues' gallery of Trump aides, Navarro will become the first former Trump White House official to report to prison after being found guilty of refusing to comply with a subpoena from the House January 6 committee. His sentence is also historic as he's the first-ever former White House official sentenced for contempt of Congress.
Navarro has repeatedly claimed that he did not have to cooperate with the January 6 probe due to executive privilege. A judge prohibited Navarro from mounting that defense during the trial, a move that he continues to question. (The Justice Department also rejected that defense.) It was why in this odd setting he recounted President George Washington's refusal to provide the House with any information about the Jay Treaty that tried to soothe tensions between the US and Great Britain that lingered after the Revolutionary War.
"Look, they can put me in prison, they can put you in prison," Navarro concluded.
At the same time, cars pulled in and out of the space behind him.
