Navarro is a jackass, but the criminal charges smack of selective prosecution — not to mention the gratuitous manner of his arrest.
Navarro is a jackass, but the criminal charges smack of selective prosecution — not to mention the gratuitous manner of his arrest.
One of the last topics Rich and I covered on the podcast Friday was the January 6 Committee’s plan to take its investigation primetime next week. Suffice it to say the ratings battle has begun.
As our Brittany Bernstein reports, Former Trump White House trade adviser Peter Navarro was arrested by the FBI on Friday based on a two-count indictment alleging contempt of Congress, which the Biden Justice Department obtained from one of the grand juries working on its Capitol Riot investigation.
Make no mistake: This is hardball.
The contempt charges are highly unusual, non-violent, and comparatively minor (one-year maximum sentences). When DOJ indicted Trump adviser Steve Bannon on contempt-of-Congress charges, Bannon was not arrested; he was permitted to surrender through the usual agreement between prosecutors and defense lawyers for an accused who poses no threat of violence or flight. Yet the 72-year-old Navarro was not given that option, even though he says he has been in communication with federal prosecutors and agents — evidently in connection with a lawsuit Navarro is poised to file against the January 6 committee.
Attorney General Merrick Garland’s DOJ had the FBI slap handcuffs and (Navarro says) leg-irons on him, hauling him into custody as he was about to board a flight to Nashville — not to go on the lam, but to do more media appearances ripping the committee and the Biden administration. (Although reports are sketchy on this point, Navarro appears to have been arrested in one of the Washington, D.C., area airports; he was transported to Washington federal court for presentment on the charges a few hours later, and federal rules require an arrested defendant to be presented promptly before the nearest available magistrate.)
Remember, this is a Justice Department that is turning a blind eye to blatant violations of federal criminal law by pro-abortion activists who have demonstrated at the homes of Supreme Court justices. The demonstrators have no defense. But because they are protesting in furtherance of a political cause the Biden administration favors, the Justice Department is pretending that nothing can be done since the demonstrations are non-violent (so far).
In reality, the protests are criminal interference with a judicial proceeding (the Dobbs case), regardless of whether the conduct is forcible. There is no doubt that DOJ well knows this. Besides its cases against the many violent Capitol Riot defendants, DOJ is prosecuting hundreds of non-violent demonstrators in connection with that event, on the rationale that, despite the lack of forcible conduct, those demonstrators criminally interfered with a congressional proceeding. The difference, obviously, is that the Biden administration supports the abortion activists and abhors the Trump activists.
That purely political distinction is not supposed to matter to the Justice Department. But for the Biden Justice Department, it’s what matters most.
The Justice Department virtually never prosecutes claims of non-compliance with congressional subpoenas. I noted in connection with the patently political prosecution of Bannon that DOJ had not brought such a case in 40 years (after bringing a couple in connection with Watergate). Yet it is now all over Navarro.
There isn’t a shred of subtlety here, on either side.
Navarro is a tedious provocateur. As he has recounted in a recent memoir, he was one of the top Trump administration proponents of the stolen-election hoax, authoring a notorious memo that touted many of voting fraud claims even after they had been debunked. He championed a strategy, based on these bogus claims, dubbed the “Green Bay sweep” – an homage to a multi-faceted play designed by legendary Packers coach Vince Lombardi.
The idea was to delay and ultimately defeat Congress’s constitutionally required counting of state-certified electoral votes during the January 6 session at the Capitol. Navarro stresses not only that the strategy was non-violent but that the Capitol Riot undermined it. This is key to the Trump camp defense that the former president and his minions are blameless for the violence.
According to Navarro, the uprising gave Vice President Mike Pence (“Brutus” in Navarro’s telling) and Congress the excuse they needed to cut off the gambit, shamefully supported by over 100 congressional Republicans, to lodge objections (based on groundless fraud allegations) to the counting of electoral votes from Trump-disputed states. This would supposedly have given Republican-controlled legislatures the time and cover they needed to investigate the objections, conveniently discover fraud, and displace the popular vote for Biden with their own vote for Trump, thus reversing Biden’s victory. (While the Packers always had opponents, Navarro seems to think Democrats and Republicans who rejected the bogus fraud claims were going to sit back and just let the “sweep” roll over them.)
Navarro could not have been more public in his extensively detailed description of these machinations. So even a January 6 Committee skeptic — put off by the panel’s undisguised partisanship, norm-busting tactics, and limelight seeking — could sympathize with its frustration over Navarro’s claim that the imperatives of confidentiality prevent him from testifying or surrendering documents, as he has been subpoenaed to do. This is especially so given that Navarro purports to be relying on Donald Trump’s post-presidential attempt to invoke executive privilege, a claim that has already been roundly rejected by the federal courts. (See my columns, here and here, on the Supreme Court’s affirmance of the D.C. Circuit’s decision, which upheld a similarly thorough district court ruling against Trump.)
Congress has its own remedies for dealing with recalcitrant witnesses. The Democratic-controlled House has already held Navarro in contempt. The committee could go to court and seek orders compelling Navarro’s compliance, on pain of a civil-contempt finding.
The committee, however, does not want to do this because it takes time, and the committee is in a hurry — hence the prime-time spectacle it is planning to produce on Thursday. Democrats are likely to get walloped in the midterms and a Republican-controlled House’s first order of business would be to disband the January 6 committee. If, as it intends, the committee is going to issue a report prior to the midterms, based in part on information from Navarro and other resistant witnesses, it needs to get that information now.
That, however, is not the Justice Department’s problem — unless, of course, the DOJ is under the thumb of radical progressives. Federal prosecutors have their own criminal investigation, and they can deal with Navarro as they see fit in that context. But until recently, it has not been normal for the Justice Department to put its awesome law-enforcement powers in the service of an unabashedly partisan and non-objective congressional inquiry, led by the incumbent president’s party.
Navarro baited them, though. In a Thursday appearance on MSNBC, he vowed that, once Republicans take over Congress, the tables would be turned on Democrats. He said he would lead the charge to subpoena Democratic architects of the January 6 committee (e.g., Speaker Nancy Pelosi and committee members Adam Schiff and Jamie Raskin, who led the first and second impeachments of Trump, respectively), just as the committee is exploding congressional norms by subpoenaing Republican members who supported Trump (Kevin McCarthy, Jim Jordan, Mo Brooks, Joe Perry, and Andy Biggs). For good measure, Navarro added that he would also spearhead Biden’s impeachment.
What a surprise: The next day, the FBI met him at the airport, and Navarro found himself in handcuffs and leg-irons. It was a gratuitous display of raw power, a sheer intimidation tactic. Navarro is a jackass, but the criminal charges smack of selective prosecution. They are also so dodgy that a judge released Navarro on his own recognizance despite the Feds’ having handled him like a mafia button man.
Democrats are sadly mistaken if they’ve convinced themselves that there will be no price to pay for blowing up congressional norms — a partisan committee, hand-picked by the majority, excluding the minority, and armed with subpoena power to conduct a de facto criminal investigation of its political opposition — and now leveraging that despotism with the executive branch’s law-enforcement powers.
As I observed on the podcast (and have argued in these pages), the January 6 Committee is endeavoring to establish that Donald Trump is guilty of felony obstruction of Congress — the offense charged against many Capitol Riot defendants, and which a California federal judge has opined that Trump probably committed. The objective is to pressure the Justice Department to indict Trump on that charge . . . just as it has dutifully indicted Bannon and now Navarro at Congress’s behest.
Most days, I’m pretty sure the idea is to ensure that Trump runs and wins the Republican nomination for the presidency in 2024. Democrats figure that’s their best shot.