A senior aide to Donald Trump will have to go to prison while he appeals his conviction for refusing to testify before Congress regarding his involvement in efforts to undo the results of the 2020 election. Peter Navarro, a 74-year-old economist, “has not shown that his appeal presents substantial questions of law or fact likely” to undo the conviction or his four-month sentence, a unanimous panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled Thursday.
Navarro can still ask the Supreme Court to rule in his favor, but such an intervention would be extremely unusual. He is required to report to a prison in Miami by March 19, his attorneys said in a recent filing.
An attorney for Navarro declined to comment.
Months following the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, Navarro published a book in which he described a plot to throw the election to Trump during the vote certification that day. He credited the idea to right-wing podcast host and former Trump strategist Stephen K. Bannon. But when the House committee investigating Jan. 6 issued subpoenas for the two men to elaborate on those plans, they ignored them. Now both are fighting four-month prison sentences for contempt of Congress.
Bannon is “the only comparable individual,” Navarro’s attorneys noted, and “was released pending appeal.”
Navarro, like Bannon, argued that he did not have to respond to the House committee because of Trump’s executive privilege to withhold some internal communications. But he had no documentation indicating Trump ever planned to assert that privilege to keep him from testifying, and Trump has never publicly corroborated his account. Judge Amit P. Mehta called his immunity claim “weak sauce” and did not allow him to make it at trial.
The D.C. Circuit agreed that most of Navarro’s arguments would be viable only if “privilege has actually been invoked in this case in some manner by the President,” which “did not happen here.”
Navarro argued that Mehta’s ruling can’t stand because if “a former president” was “unexpectedly suffering from disability or death” and unable to invoke executive privilege, an aide should still be able to guard White House communications. But “even if executive privilege were available to” Navarro, the appellate judges wrote, “it would not excuse his complete noncompliance with the subpoena” — he would still have been obligated to produce documents and testify on anything not covered by the privilege.
The court said Navarro also failed to address Mehta’s conclusion that the “uniquely weighty interest” both Congress and the current president had in investigating the Capitol attack would override any privilege claims by Trump. In 2021, a different panel on the D.C. Circuit ruled that the Jan. 6 committee was entitled to White House records, despite Trump’s privilege claims, because they were “necessary to address a matter of great constitutional moment for the Republic.” The Supreme Court declined to review that decision.
All three judges on the panel in Navarro’s case are appointees of President Barack Obama.
Navarro spoke at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference in February, saying he was “weeks away from a prison cell.” He compared himself to Trump, noting that they were both in unprecedented legal situations. “I am the first senior White House adviser ever convicted of contempt of Congress,” he said. “Trump is the first former president ever, ever, to be criminally indicted.”
A divisive figure in Trump’s White House because of his abrasive personality and strident views, Navarro was one of several allies Trump leaned on in late 2020 as the outgoing president searched for ways to stay in power. Trump’s infamous tweet telling followers to come to D.C. on Jan. 6 for a “wild” protest began with a link to a document of unfounded voter fraud claims compiled by Navarro.
The plan, as Navarro described it in his book, involved dragging out the vote count with 24 hours of speeches from Republicans in swing states won by Joe Biden. The hope was that the spectacle would put pressure on Vice President Mike Pence to reject the results from those states, kicking off a process that would end with the House deciding the election for Trump.
