Yesterday the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis issued an official invitation to former White House adviser Peter Navarro to come in for a chat with paperwork in tow. The famed hydroxychloroquine aficionado declined an earlier request for the favor of his company, so now the Committee has issued a subpoena for documents and testimony next month.
Navarro was always an odd choice to be in charge of pandemic supply chains — or anything else, frankly speaking. He was reportedly plucked from obscurity by Jared Kushner, who was clicking around Amazon trying to find someone with a modicum of gravitas and harebrained ideas about China that lined up with Trump’s own. But the similarities didn’t end there. Where the former president was known to speak to publicists as his alter ego “John Baron,” Navarro quoted his own alter ego “Ron Vara” (get it?) in six of his books about China.
Even the conservative National Review referred to him as “Trump’s Nuttiest Professor,” a moniker he strove to live up to each and every day in Trump’s White House where he aggressively promoted the former president’s theory that “trade wars are good and easy to win” and then set up a system whereby states would bid against each other for desperately needed ventilators and PPE.
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When coronavirus reached American soil in early 2020, Navarro seems to have grasped that it could became a pandemic triggering hundreds of thousands of deaths. Navarro submitted multiple memos to Trump warning him of the danger to come, even as the president was publicly advising the public to “just stay calm, it will go away.”
“These exchanges add to the growing body of evidence that the Trump Administration knew the significant risk posed by the coronavirus but failed to execute an effective strategy to reduce the loss of American lives,” wrote Committee Chair James Clyburn on September 14.
Chair Clyburn notes that Navarro and other White House officials coordinated the White House response using Proton Mail accounts, “rais[ing] troubling questions about whether you and other Trump Administration officials used personal accounts—including the encrypted email service ProtonMail—to intentionally shield your official communications from public view.”
If so, it appears not to have worked, since the Committee got their hands on at least 80 such messages and quotes freely from them to suggest that the White House doubled and tripled down on the unproven malaria drug hydroxychloroquine at Navarro’s direction.
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It’s unclear whether Navarro will comply with the subpoena. In July 2020, he took to the pages of USA Today to criticize his own colleague in an opinion piece entitled “Anthony Fauci Has Been Wrong About Everything I Have Interacted With Him On,” and just last month he went on rightwing talk radio to blame Dr. Anthony Fauci for starting the pandemic.
“He killed Americans. He needs to be fired, stuck in a chair in Congress, strapped in, confess his sins, and be put in an orange jumpsuit,” Navarro said, in a possible preview of his probity should he show up to testify.
But there is one document he is willing to supply to the Committee without recourse to legal process.
“I will be delivering a case of my new book ‘In Trump Time’ to members of the committee which explains why this is indeed a witch hunt,” Navarro told Politico.
Always be trolling, right?
Clyburn Issues Subpoena To Trump White House Adviser Peter Navarro On Pandemic Response [Select Committee Press Release, with links to documents]
Liz Dye (@5DollarFeminist) lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.