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Donald Trump has nominated Peter Navarro, a former aide who was imprisoned for contempt of Congress over the January 6 storming of the Capitol, to be a senior White House economic adviser.
On his social media platform Truth Social, the President-elect announced that he would make Navarro his senior counsellor for trade and manufacturing to help “truly Make American Manufacturing Great Again”.
Navarro, a prominent China hawk, was a key White House adviser in Washington’s trade confrontations with Beijing during Trump’s first presidency.
Over that period the US moved away from striking new trade deals to expand business abroad and instead focused on measures designed to reshore manufacturing and protect American workers.
“During my First Term, few were more effective or tenacious than Peter in enforcing my two sacred rules, Buy American, Hire American,” Trump wrote on Wednesday.
“He helped me renegotiate unfair Trade Deals like Nafta and the Korea-US Free Trade Agreement (KORUS), and moved every one of my Tariff and Trade actions FAST….”
Trump said that Navarro’s mission in his new post “will be to help successfully advance and communicate the Trump Manufacturing, Tariff, and Trade Agendas”.
Navarro spent four months in a federal prison in Miami after being convicted for refusing to comply with a subpoena from a congressional committee probing the January 6 2021 attack on the US Capitol.
During the 2023 trial, prosecutors said Navarro “chose allegiance” to Trump over complying with the subpoena from lawmakers. Navarro’s attorneys argued the state had not proven the trade adviser “wilfully” ignored the subpoena.
Even after Biden won in the 2020 presidential election, Navarro remained a loyal public defender of Trump as he continued to claim that the results of the vote had been rigged and victory stolen from him.
On Wednesday, Trump wrote that Navarro had been “horribly treated by the Deep State, or whatever else you would like to call it”.
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