Courts, Government

Navarro Played Lawyer With Jan 6 Committee. But His Sentence Is Very Real.

Stupid games, stupid prizes.

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Former Trump Advisor Peter Navarro Indicted For Contempt Of Congress

(Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Trump econ crank Peter Navarro reached the find out this morning in Judge Amit Mehta’s courtroom where he was sentenced to four months for contempt of Congress.

Back in 2021, Navarro blew off congressional subpoenas relating to his work on coronavirus, which saddled the government with tens of millions of doses of hydroxychloroquine, citing a public exhortation by his former boss to “protect executive privilege and not let these unhinged Democrats discredit our great accomplishments.”

In 2022, the January 6 Committee subpoenaed him, about his efforts to block congressional certification of President Biden’s electoral college win. Navarro had publicly bragged about a scheme cooked up with Steve Bannon to disrupt Congress, and even wrote about it in a book where he dubbed the plot “The Greenbay Sweep.” Nonetheless, he told the Committee to pound sand, in a hilariously snotty letter penned without the assistance of counsel.

“Please be advised that President Trump has invoked Executive Privilege in this matter; and it is neither my privilege to waive or Joseph Biden’s privilege to waive,” he wrote on March 1, 2022. “Accordingly, my hands are tied. Your best course of action is to directly negotiate with President Trump and his attorneys regarding any and all things related to this matter.”

Even after he was indicted, Navarro vowed to continue representing himself, but eventually the Trump PAC took pity and fixed him up with MAGAworld lawyer Stan Woodward. And indeed, even today Navarro defended his decision to take on Congress pro se.

“I’m a Harvard-educated gentleman, but the learning curve when they come at you with the biggest law firm in the world is very, very steep,” he complained to the court.

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In the event, Navarro never produced evidence of any such invocation of executive privilege — to the extent that Trump could even assert privilege over Navarro’s extracurricular cahootsing with Bannon, who has been out of government since 2017. And anyway, the appropriate way to assert executive privilege was to show up and assert it like virtually every other White House employee did. Moreover, as Judge Mehta noted this morning, Navarro’s subpoena arrived three months after Bannon got indicted for refusing to comply with his own summons. So Navarro had ample notice that giving Congress the finger could be bad for your health.

The court also had harsh words for Navarro’s legal team, who claimed a downward departure in the sentencing guidelines on the theory that their client had accepted responsibility by … forcing the government to take him to trial and then claiming in his sentencing memo that he deserved a light sentence because of undue political influence on his case.

Last week, Woodward also moved to unseal documents in the replevin action the government to file after Navarro refused to return official documents located on his encrypted Proton Mail account. In this column, I speculated that Woodward was seeking to show Judge Mehta that his client was so brave and honest for turning over those documents (after being threatened with contempt). But, as independent journalist Marcie Wheeler pointed out, Woodward was actally after a cherrypicked quote suggesting that perhaps some of the documents at issue were covered by privilege and so … underpants gnomes?

Here’s his supposed smoking gun from the government’s filings in the replevin action:

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However, the United States has not taken the position that every action that Defendant took in connection with the 2020 Presidential Election was done in his personal, and not official, capacity; nor has the United States taken the position that any communications related to the 2020 Presidential Election are not Presidential records.

From this, he infers the government’s “true motive – the prosecution of a senior presidential advisor of a chief political opponent.”

He needn’t have bothered. In fact, the court was appalled by Navarro’s public statements, echoed by his lawyers in their pleadings, suggesting that the prosecution was being led by Biden and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. And so, after all this rigamarole, Navarro wound up exactly where Bannon is — sentenced to four months incarceration and hoping that he can stay out of jail long enough for Trump to get back in the White House and pardon him.

Within minutes, Navarro had noticed his appeal to the DC Circuit. Delay, delay, delay. And if that doesn’t work, maybe he can get that guy Ron Vara to serve his sentence for him.

US v. Navarro [Civil Docket via Court Listener]
US v. Navarro [Criminal Docket via Court Listener]

Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes the Law and Chaos Substack.

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