Peter Navarro Ordered To Prison On March 19

Former Trump White House aide Peter Navarro has been ordered to report to a Miami prison on March 19 to begin serving a four month sentence for defying a subpoena from the Jan. 6 select committee.

Navarro, who is urging a federal appeals court to stay the sentence while he attempts to overturn his conviction, faces the prospect of becoming the first top adviser to Donald Trump to serve jail time for an offense related to the effort to subvert the 2020 election.

Navarro, 74, was convicted last year on two counts of contempt of Congress for refusing to provide documents and testimony to congressional investigators probing the root causes of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. The committee subpoenaed Navarro in February 2022, and he quickly indicated he would refuse to comply, citing executive privilege. The House held Navarro in contempt two months later, and the Justice Department soon followed suit with criminal charges.

Navarro, an economist who advised Trump on trade issues, was the second former Trump aide convicted for refusing to cooperate with the Jan. 6 panel. Steve Bannon was convicted by a jury in July 2022 for similarly blowing off a subpoena from the committee.

However, the judge in Bannon’s case, U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols, agreed not to enforce Bannon’s four-month sentence while he appeals his conviction to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. Navarro’s judge, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta, rejected Navarro’s attempt for a similar stay, and Navarro is now asking a three-judge appeals court panel to stave off imminent jail time.

“Dr. Navarro has now been ordered to report to the custody of the Bureau of Prisons, FCI Miami, on or before 2:00PM EDT on March 19, 2024,” his attorney revealed in court papers late Sunday. “Accordingly, Dr. Navarro respectfully reiterates his request for an administrative stay … Should this Court deny Dr. Navarro’s motion, he respectfully requests an administrative stay so as to permit the Supreme Court review of this Court’s denial.”

The Jan. 6 committee subpoenaed Navarro for testimony primarily about his efforts to work with Bannon on a strategy aimed at forcing delays in the Jan. 6, 2021 session of Congress where lawmakers were tasked with certifying Joe Biden’s victory in the election. Navarro also compiled a series of three election-related reports touting largely discredited claims of fraud, one of which Trump cited in a now infamous tweet calling his supporters to Washington for a “wild” protest.

Courts rarely permit convicted defendants to remain free while they appeal. However, Navarro contends that, like Bannon, his case presents unusual circumstances because of the complex intersection of his refusal to testify with executive privilege and immunity principles that have rarely been tested in court.

Navarro has claimed that Trump ordered him not to testify and instead to invoke executive privilege, but Mehta rejected this claim as well, noting that Navarro had offered no evidence that Trump in fact gave such an order. Trump had been far more explicit in ordering other former aides to assert the privilege.

Navarro is also fighting a civil lawsuit brought by the Justice Department demanding he return hundreds of records the government claims he improperly declined to deliver to the National Archives after leaving office. Some of those records pertain to the 2020 election.