EX-TRUMP AIDE NAVARRO SUBPOENAED IN JAN. 6 INQUIRY
Unclear whether he will comply, appear Thursday to testify
Peter Navarro, who as a White House adviser to President Donald Trump worked to keep Trump in office after his defeat in the 2020 election, disclosed Monday that he has been summoned to testify Thursday to a federal grand jury and to provide prosecutors with any records he has related to the attack on the Capitol last year, including “any communications” with Trump.
The subpoena to Navarro — which he said the FBI served at his house last week — seeks his testimony about materials related to the buildup to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and signals that the Justice Department investigation is progressing to include activities of people in the White House.
Navarro revealed the existence of the subpoena in a draft of a lawsuit he said he is preparing to file against the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack, Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Matthew M. Graves, U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia.
Navarro, who plans to represent himself in the suit, is hoping to persuade a federal judge to block the subpoena, which he calls the “fruit of the poisonous tree.”
The Justice Department and the U.S. Attorney’s Office declined to comment.
The grand jury’s subpoena, Navarro said, builds on a separate subpoena issued to him in February by the committee. That subpoena sought documents and testimony about an effort to overturn the election nicknamed the “Green Bay Sweep,” and a Jan. 2, 2021, call that Navarro participated in with Trump and his lawyers in which they attempted to persuade hundreds of state lawmakers to join the effort.
Navarro has refused to cooperate with the committee. He was found in contempt of Congress, and the House referred the contempt case to the Justice Department for possible criminal prosecution. In his draft lawsuit, he called the committee’s subpoena “illegal
and unenforceable.”
Navarro said the grand jury subpoena was directly related to the contempt of Congress referral. Asked if he planned to comply and appear Thursday to testify, Navarro responded, “TBD.”
The subpoena is the latest sign the Justice Department’s investigation into the attack has moved beyond the pro-Trump rioters who stormed the Capitol. Federal prosecutors have charged more than 800 people in connection with the attack.
The subpoena sent last week to Navarro is the first known to have been issued in connection to the Jan. 6 investigation to someone who worked in the Trump White House. But it follows others issued to people connected to various strands of the sprawling investigation of the Capitol attack and its prelude.
In April, Ali Alexander, a prominent “Stop the Steal” organizer, revealed that he had been served with his own grand jury subpoena, asking for records about people who organized, spoke at or provided security for pro-Trump rallies in Washington after the election, including Trump’s incendiary event near the White House on Jan. 6.
Alexander’s subpoena also sought records about members of the executive or legislative branches who may have helped to plan or execute the rallies, or who tried to “obstruct, influence, impede or delay” the certification of the 2020 presidential election.
Last week, word emerged that the same grand jury, sitting in Washington, had more recently issued a different set of subpoenas requesting information about the role that a group of lawyers close to Trump may have played in a plan to create alternate slates of pro-Trump electors in key swing states that were won by Joe Biden.
The lawyers named in the subpoena included Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani; Jenna Ellis, who worked with Giuliani; John Eastman, one of the former president’s chief legal advisers during the postelection period; and Kenneth Chesebro, who wrote a pair of memos laying out the details of the plan.
Those subpoenas also requested information about any members of the Trump campaign who may have been involved with the alternate elector scheme and about several Republican officials in Georgia who took part in it, including David Shafer, chairman of the Georgia Republican Party.
Navarro’s subpoena, by his own account, was issued by a different grand jury.
In the draft of the suit he said he intends to file, he argues that only Trump can authorize him to testify. He asks a judge to instruct Graves, the U.S. attorney in Washington, to negotiate his appearance with Trump. Navarro cites Trump’s invocation of executive privilege over materials related to the attack on the Capitol.
An effort by Trump to block release of White House materials related to the Jan. 6 attack on the grounds of executive privilege was rejected by a federal appeals court in January, and the Supreme Court denied Trump’s request for a stay of the decision.