Second Trump aide sentenced in Jan. 6 investigation
Navarro gets 4 months for ignoring House
Peter Navarro, a White House aide to then-president Donald Trump who claimed credit for devising a plan to overturn the 2020 election, was sentenced to four months behind bars Thursday morning for ignoring a subpoena from the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack.
“Let’s make clear, Dr. Navarro, you are not a victim. You are not the object of a political prosecution. … These are circumstances of your own making,” US District Judge Amit P. Mehta said. The judge said that while Navarro received every due process that he and any American is entitled to, “regrettably, when you were called up to go to testify, you didn’t show a co-equal branch of government the same degree of respect.”
Federal prosecutors had sought for Navarro the same “severe” penalty of six months incarceration that they requested for Stephen K. Bannon, a former Trump political adviser, with whom Navarro said he worked on a plan to delay and ultimately change the outcome of Congress’s formal count of the 2020 presidential election results.
Navarro was the second Trump aide sentenced for stonewalling Congress’s Jan. 6 investigation, after Bannon received four months behind bars, a punishment that has been put on hold pending appeal. Navarro is also expected to appeal his conviction. Either Bannon or Navarro could become the first person incarcerated for defying a congressional subpoena in more than half a century. The offense is punishable by up to a year behind bars but is rarely prosecuted.
“I was torn. … Nobody in my position should be put in conflict between the legislative branch and the executive branch,” Navarro told the court in a brief statement after his lawyers initially said he would not speak on advice of counsel. “I did not know what to do” when subpoenaed by Congress, Navarro insisted. “Is that the entire lesson from this process? … Get a lawyer? I think in a way it is.”
Navarro, 74, was found guilty in September of two counts of criminal contempt of Congress for refusing to produce documents or testify after receiving a House subpoena in February 2022. Lawmakers had asked Navarro, a former trade and pandemic adviser who served throughout Trump’s term in office, about his claim of working with Bannon on an operation called “the Green Bay Sweep.” The plan aimed to get Trump loyalists in Congress to contest ballots from six swing states that Biden won and throw the election to the House, though claims of voter fraud were repudiated by state officials and the courts.
Prosecutors accused Navarro of pursuing a bad-faith strategy of “utter contempt” and “utter disregard” for Congress, putting allegiance to Trump and partisan politics over country and the rule of law in refusing to cooperate with House investigators probing the Jan. 6 attack that came after Trump urged his supporters to march to the Capitol. Five people died in or shortly after the rioting, which led to assaults on at least 140 police officers, caused $3 million in damage, and forced the evacuation of lawmakers.
“The committee was investigating an attack on the very foundations of our democracy. There could be no more serious investigation undertaken by Congress,” Assistant US Attorney John Crabb Jr. told the judge, urging him to make clear that no one, no matter their position, be permitted to ignore Congress or their legal obligations. “The defendant believes he is above the law. But no one is above the law; we are a nation of laws. And the rule of law is essential to a functioning democracy.”
Navarro’s attorneys asked for probation, saying the judge at one point seemed to acknowledge that Navarro genuinely thought Trump had invoked executive privilege, a provision under the Constitution’s separation-of-powers principle to preserve the confidentiality of White House discussions from Congress.
Mehta ultimately rejected Navarro’s claim, finding after an evidentiary hearing that whatever Navarro thought, he failed to prove the existence of a conversation or a formal invocation of privilege by Trump that directed Navarro not to cooperate.