Federal prosecutors seek jail for Trump adviser Navarro in Jan. 6 contempt case

Federal prosecutors asked a judge Thursday to sentence former White House trade adviser Peter Navarro to six months behind bars for contempt of Congress, saying he put allegiance to former president Donald Trump over the rule of law in refusing to cooperate with a House committee probing the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol attack.

Navarro, 74, was found guilty in September of two contempt charges for refusing to produce documents or testify after receiving a House subpoena in February 2022. A former trade and pandemic adviser who served throughout Trump’s term in office, Navarro claimed credit for hatching a scheme with longtime Trump political adviser Stephen K. Bannon to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential race.

In a 20-page sentencing request, prosecutors said Navarro’s “bad-faith strategy of defiance and contempt” deserved severe punishment. Like the rioters, Navarro “put politics, not country, first, and stonewalled Congress’s investigation” even after learning that his claim of executive privilege would not excuse his actions, the prosecutors said.

“The rioters who overran the Capitol on January 6, 2021, did not just attack a building - they assaulted the rule of law upon which this country was built and through which it endures,” assistant U.S. attorneys Elizabeth Aloi and John Crabb Jr. wrote. “By flouting the Committee’s subpoena and its authority to investigate that assault, the Defendant exacerbated that assault, following the attack on Congress with his rejection of its authority.”

Prosecutors also earlier requested a six-month sentence for Bannon, a right-wing podcaster and provocateur who was convicted and ultimately sentenced in October 2022 to four months in prison, a penalty that remains suspended pending appeal. Either Bannon or Navarro could become the first person incarcerated for defying a congressional subpoena in more than half a century under a statute that is rarely prosecuted and that is punishable by up to a year behind bars.

U.S. District Judge Amit P. Mehta set sentencing for next Thursday.

Navarro’s attorneys asked for probation, saying the judge has recognized that Navarro genuinely thought Trump had invoked executive privilege. They said he should not have to face the “untenable position” of risking jail because of “antiquated, questionable precedent” in Washington for actions that matched those of past presidential advisers who avoided incarceration.

“Dr. Navarro’s trial and conviction involves a series of firsts: the first time an incumbent President waived the executive privilege of a former President; the first time a senior presidential advisor was charged with contempt of congress by the Justice Department, let alone the Justice Department of a political rival,” attorneys John S. Irving, John P. Rowley III and Stanley E. Woodward III wrote. “History is replete” with refusals to comply with congressional subpoenas, they said, “and Dr. Navarro’s sentence should not be disproportionate from those similarly situated individuals.”

Navarro’s federal trial in Washington included just one day of testimony from three prosecution witnesses, and no witnesses for Navarro. Mehta rejected his defense’s plans to claim that Trump, after leaving office, invoked executive privilege and directed his former aide not to cooperate with lawmakers. After holding an evidentiary hearing, Mehta said Navarro had failed to establish that such a conversation or a formal claim of privilege took place.

Prosecutors argued that Navarro, acting without an attorney, rebuffed the committee’s request and erroneously relied on a press statement issued by the former president in November 2021 that said Navarro did not have to cooperate with a different committee investigating the pandemic response.

Navarro attorney Rowley has said his client will also appeal his conviction, arguing that his case raised important questions about the separation of powers between the legislative and executive branches of government. Rowley said Navarro was the first senior aide who served four years for a president to be put on trial for contempt of Congress, notwithstanding the privilege that typically shields from Congress discussions between presidents and top aides.

Although Navarro was the second high-ranking Trump official to be convicted in a criminal case related to efforts to undo Joe Biden’s victory at the polls, he, unlike Bannon, was still working in the White House at the time, while Bannon had stepped down as Trump’s chief White House strategist in August 2017.

Bannon has based his appeal on his claim that he relied in good faith on legal advice in his dealings with the House panel, a defense that his trial judge, U.S. District Judge Carl J. Nichols, denied based on legal precedent that he suggested Bannon’s defense should challenge.

In interviews with the Daily Beast and other media outlets before he was indicted last year, and in a 2021 memoir, Navarro said his and Bannon’s strategy involved getting Trump loyalists in the House and Senate to contest ballots from six swing states that Biden won, dragging out the process of tallying electoral votes on Jan. 6, 2021, in a televised 24-hour spectacle to build support for throwing the election to the Trump-friendly House.

According to Navarro, his job was to supply Trump-friendly lawmakers with volumes of “evidence” regarding voter fraud, to justify the challenges, while Bannon’s role was to whip support for the plan among Republicans in Congress. The two called their strategy “the Green Bay Sweep,” a football reference to an end-run play made famous in the 1960s by coach Vince Lombardi’s Green Bay Packers.

Before charging Navarro, the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington opted not to take legal action against two other Trump officials who were referred by the House Jan. 6 committee for contempt prosecutions - former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and communications chief Dan Scavino. Both had received letters from a lawyer for the former president directing them not to respond to subpoenas from the committee, citing executive privilege.

“Had the President issued a similar letter to Defendant, the record here would look very different,” Mehta noted in Navarro’s case. The judge noted that the Biden administration also had made clear it was not asserting the privilege in his case, saying it was not in the national interest.