Peter Navarro, top Trump adviser who pushed US-China trade war, enters prison for defying Congress

Chief advocate for tariffs that remain in place loses bid to stave off jail time over refusal to cooperate with congressional January 6 investigation
Navarro slams US justice system for dealing ‘crippling blow to the constitutional separation of powers and executive privilege’

US-China relations

Robert Delaneyin Washington

Published: 2:20am, 20 Mar 2024

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The ideological force behind former US president Donald Trump’s trade war against China turned himself in at a federal prison in Miami on Tuesday after losing a bid to stave off jail time related to contempt-of-Congress charges against him.

Peter Navarro, Trump’s top trade adviser and one of the administration’s most strident anti-China voices, reported to the facility after a court in Washington found that his appeal would not likely reverse his conviction.

Jurors last September found Navarro guilty of two misdemeanour counts of contempt of Congress for refusing to cooperate with a congressional investigation into the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol.

He was sentenced in January to four months behind bars by Judge Amit Mehta of the US District Court for the District of Columbia.

Navarro faces reporters in Washington in September after he was convicted of contempt of Congress for refusing to cooperate with the House committee investigating the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol. Photo: AFP

On Monday night, the US Supreme Court denied a request by Navarro to avoid prison while he appeals his conviction.

Navarro, who for decades worked as an academic in the University of California system, established himself as a China critic years before US-China relations took a more fractious turn under the Trump administration.

His 2011 book Death by China: Confronting the Dragon – A Global Call to Action accuses China of currency manipulation, deliberately harming Americans with dangerous consumer goods and a laundry list of other allegations.

Trump, who won the White House in 2016, charged that China used unfair practices to hollow out America’s manufacturing base and pledged to bring those jobs back.

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Once in office, he authorised the punitive tariffs on Chinese imports that first went into effect in July 2018 after a months-long investigation by the Office of the US Trade Representative.

As the trade war escalated, the Trump administration imposed tariffs of up to 25 per cent on more than US$300 billion worth of Chinese imports, most of which remain in place nearly six years later.

Speaking to reporters across the street from the prison before turning himself in, Navarro reiterated his claim that his decision to ignore the congressional subpoena was protected by executive privilege connected to his White House tenure.

Mehta had ruled earlier that no evidence was presented to prove that the privilege was actually invoked.

“When I walk in that prison today, the justice system such as it is will have done a crippling blow to the constitutional separation of powers and executive privilege,” he said, pledging to appeal his conviction up to the Supreme Court.

He made a passing reference to China in his remarks, alleging that “war clouds growing in the Taiwan Strait, in Gaza, in Ukraine” were because of US President Joe Biden’s policies, but otherwise stuck to allegations that the charges against him were politically motivated.

Navarro and his advocacy for a hard line against Beijing on trade were at times sidelined whenever Trump sought to negotiate directly with his counterpart Xi Jinping.

He was excluded from the guest list when Trump met Xi in Buenos Aires in late 2018, on the sidelines of a Group of 20 summit, just weeks after Navarro castigated Wall Street executives attempting to broker a truce in the trade war by calling them “unregistered foreign agents”.

More US tariffs on Chinese goods followed that meeting after subsequent negotiations broke down, but the Trump administration eventually signed a partial trade agreement in January 2020 that paused further escalation, even if it did not lead to a broad repeal of the punitive measures.

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Biden has resisted calls from some in the business community to scale down the tariffs, and has instead pledged to double down with a strategy of realignment on trade with China.

Last month US Trade Representative Katherine Tai said the tariffs complemented other Biden administration efforts to add manufacturing jobs.

In light of the developments in recent years, many manufacturers in China, local firms included, have established production bases outside the country.

The trend has gained traction under Biden, who has worked with the European Union and other allies to push “friendshoring” as a way to reduce manufacturing dependence on China.

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The Tax Foundation, a non-partisan Washington-based think tank, estimated in a report last year that the tariffs account for about US$71 billion in annual federal tax revenues – the lion’s share of the US$74 billion in annual revenues raised by tariffs enacted during the Trump administration.

While the Biden administration claims that the tariffs, together with new laws it champions like the Chips and Science Act, have brought manufacturing jobs back to the US, Jay Timmons, president of the National Association of Manufacturers, has seen things differently.

“Before any elected official or appointed officials starts talking about how good tariffs are, they need to look at the results of how these tariffs have been applied to some manufacturers here in America and how that’s actually cost jobs for American manufacturing workers,” Timmons said last month.

Data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that despite punitive tariffs on Chinese imports and billions of dollars in subsidies and tax breaks, manufacturers added only 12,000 jobs to the US economy in 2023.

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The data also indicated 23,000 new manufacturing jobs were created in January.

Regardless of whether the tariffs are deemed helpful in adding American jobs in the long term, some of Navarro’s work has been called into question.

Death by China’s publisher issued a warning about the volume after it was discovered in 2019 to rely on a fake source quoted frequently by Navarro.

All reprints of the book now “alert” readers that the Harvard-educated economist Ron Vara quoted within its pages is fictional.

The fictional source controversy has spawned a Ron Vara account on X (formerly Twitter) bearing a profile photo of Navarro and a quote from Death by China attributed to Vara: “Only the Chinese can turn a leather sofa into an acid bath.”