Like Bannon, Navarro had his defense precluded by the trial judge, rendering conviction a certainty.
It’s not quite sentence first, verdict afterwards, but sometime this week, maybe even by tomorrow, former Trump White House adviser Peter Navarro will be convicted of contempt of Congress in Washington, D.C.
I try not to get ahead of myself on legal issues involving contingencies — nothing is certain, stranger things have happened, etc., etc. But we’ve seen this show already.
Last July, former Trump adviser Steve Bannon was convicted of the same offense under circumstances analogous to his pal Navarro’s case: Bannon ignored subpoenas from the House January 6 committee, claiming that former president Trump had invoked executive privilege and directed him not to cooperation. There turned out to be scant evidence that Trump had given him anything resembling formal direction, and Judge Carl Nichols (a Trump appointee) precluded his defense. After a swift trial, the Washington, D.C., federal jury convicted him in nothing flat. Bannon was sentenced in October to four months’ imprisonment but has remained at liberty pending appeal.
I said at the time that Bannon’s conviction and sentence were better seen as the start rather than the end of the case because his defense — to the limited extent he has one — is purely legal. He had no shot with the jury. Once the trial judge ruled against him on the law of executive privilege, it was inconceivable that Bannon could convince the jury he had now willfully defied the committee’s subpoenas. His only hope is that the D.C. Circuit or, ultimately, the Supreme Court, may reverse the pretrial rulings of Judge Nichols. That ain’t much hope.
For Navarro . . . mutatis mutandis. Oh, he has a bit more to work with. Unlike Bannon, who had been ousted from the Trump White House long before the 2020 campaign, Navarro was on the then-president’s staff in the weeks after the November 2020 election — the time frame about which the J6 committee sought to question him. He wants to argue, then, that his status as an executive official rendered him immune from congressional interrogation on separation-of-powers grounds, regardless of whether there is evidence that Trump gave him instructions on how to deal with the committee’s subpoenas.
To say I wouldn’t bet the ranch on Navarro’s eventual appeal probably overstates his prospects. The D.C. Circuit enforced a January 6 committee subpoena against Trump himself, a decision the Supreme Court declined to disturb. As we’ve covered at length, the proposition that a former president retains executive privilege and can successfully invoke it without the support of the incumbent president is doubtful.
Moreover, while Navarro technically was a White House adviser, the committee wanted to question him about his political activities in support of Trump’s futile quest to overturn his election defeat, not his executive role in developing trade policy. Even if a court were properly sensitive to the need to protect the confidentiality of executive communications, that sensitivity would not far extend into partisan political activity. (Interestingly, similar issues have arisen in former Trump chief-of-staff Mark Meadows’s attempt to get his indictment by Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis removed to federal court. Meadows is on stronger footing than Navarro since the wide-ranging functions of a presidential chief of staff, unlike those of an adviser with a narrow policy portfolio, blur the lines between executive and political functions.)
In any event, Navarro’s trial is scheduled to begin in Washington, D.C., federal court today, before Judge Amit Mehta (an Obama appointee). It won’t take long. Once Navarro is convicted this week and sentenced (probably in about three months), the case will be decided on appeal.