Peter Navarro Becomes Roadkill

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(Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Yesterday, a jury in Washington, DC found Trump’s former White House economics advisor Peter Navarro guilty on two counts of contempt of Congress. It was the final, inevitable rejection of a tiny man who failed to grasp the limits of his own power and never understood DC politics.

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Navarro labored in relative obscurity as an economics professor in California until 2016, when Jared Kushner went trawling through Amazon’s book section looking for someone with geopolitical theories as juvenile and nationalistic as his father-in-law’s. He clicked on the title Death By China, and the rest is history. Soon Navarro was installed at the White House, advising Trump on everything from the joys of trade warring to the efficacy of ivermectin against COVID-19. Like Kushner, Navarro possesses an uncanny confidence that his innate genius blesses him with better insights than a mere expert, whatever the topic. But unlike Kushner, whose moneyed disdain (and weird voice) disinclines him toward public speechifying, Navarro is prone to frenetic public rants, waving his hands and sighing in exasperation at the stupidity of everyone around him.

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After Trump’s loss in 2020, Navarro devoted himself to “proving” that the election was stolen, producing a memo filled with trenchant observations like “no Republican has ever won a presidential election without winning Ohio while only two Democrats have won the presidency without winning Florida.” His theory seems to be that the differential between in-person votes for Trump and absentee ballots for Biden, so widely predicted that it was given the name “Red Mirage, Blue Wave,” was statistically impossible.

Not content to opine on the vagaries of state election law, Navarro turned his attention to federal election procedures, teaming up with MAGA podcaster Steve Bannon to ratf*ck the electoral certification through a harebrained plot they dubbed “The Green Bay Sweep.” Naturally the two talked up their scheme publicly in the weeks before January 6, and then Navarro wrote a book about it after.

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Peter Navarro to Bannon: “You were the hero on J6, Steve. You were the guy who had the .. strategy to go up to Capitol Hill. Pence was the quarterback. We had 100 people working on the .. team who were going to make sure we remanded the results back to the battleground states.” pic.twitter.com/Sg6KKXvKP9

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) December 16, 2021

But while Bannon seems to have grasped that the only way to get the fake swing state electors certified was to surround Congress with hordes of menacing rioters, Navarro remained confident in his own powers of persuasion. What kind of morons could fail to be convinced by the unimpeachable logic of a lay statistician and self-taught expert on the Electoral Count Act?

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In fact the only venue where Navarro refused to air his grievances was Congress. In response to subpoenas from the January 6 Committee for documents and testimony, Navarro fired off a pissy email declining to comply.

“Please be advised that President Trump has invoked Executive Privilege in this matter; and it is neither my privilege to waive or Joseph Biden’s privilege to waive,” he wrote. “Accordingly, my hands are tied.”

He adduced no evidence in support of this claim and didn’t even bother to hire a lawyer. But perhaps this last was proof of his genius after all — the only other witness to defy the committee entirely was Bannon, who paid attorney Robert Costello to tell the Committee to get bent, only to discover that advice of counsel is not a permissible defense to contempt of Congress.

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Before his indictment in June of 2022, Navarro filed a gloriously batshit lawsuit against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the January 6 Select Committee, and Matthew Graves, the US Attorney for the District of Columbia. After his arrest, he vowed to keep on representing himself pro se. But after a few weeks of spamming Judge Amit Mehta’s clerk with snotty emails, he eventually got himself assigned to Stanley Woodward, Jr., John Irving, and John Rowley, three MAGAworld attorneys who represent low- and mid-level Trumpland characters. In the Florida documents case, Woodward represents co-defendant Walt Nauta, and has represented at least seven other witnesses interviewed by the special counsel. Irving represents co-defendant Carlos De Oliveira, as well as three witnesses whom he claims have now hired alternative counsel. And Rowley at one point represented Trump himself, although he quit about five minutes after the indictment dropped.

In the event, this legal dream team appears to have done little more than preserve Navarro’s record for appeal. Judge Mehta barred them from asserting executive privilege as a defense, ruling that there was no evidence Trump had ever done so, and anyway, Navarro would have still had to show up to testify and invoke privilege on a question by question basis — as did virtually every other witness subpoenaed. During the two-day trial, they called no witnesses and barely cross examined those produced by the government.

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Strangely, the jury failed to be persuaded by Woodward’s suggestion that the government failed to prove its case because it didn’t establish his client’s whereabouts on the day of his scheduled testimony.

“Where was Dr. Navarro on March 2, 2022?” Woodward said, according to Politico. “We don’t know. … Why didn’t the government present evidence to you about where Dr. Navarro was or what he was doing? Something stinks.”

“Who cares where he was? What matters is where he wasn’t,” Assistant US Attorney John Crabb shot back on rebuttal. “He wasn’t where he was legally required to be.”

The jury voted to convict in about two hours, after which Woodward made an immediate motion for mistrial because the panel had taken a break in the park outside the courthouse, accompanied by a marshal, and potentially been exposed to protestors. That motion is still under consideration as of this writing. But for now, Navarro is scheduled to be sentenced in January.

“Guilty. I’m doing my duty to God, country, the Constitution, and my commander-in-chief. Standing tall thanks for your prayers,” he tweeted, seemingly oblivious to the identity of the man currently occupying the Oval Office.

Outside the courthouse, Navarro was characteristically defiant, inveighing against “Marxists” and waxing lyrical about the vitally important separation of powers issues posed by his case. And all the time he was dogged by one very funny protester, interrupting him mid-hector.

Navarro: The likelihood of me going to prison is relatively small because we are right on the issue

Protester: *coughs* bullshit

Anarchy Princess: You’re going to prison pic.twitter.com/f1abH5bHMo

— Acyn (@Acyn) September 7, 2023

It’s a fitting coda for a man thrust into the national spotlight for no particular accomplishment, but rather because his particular brand of quackery comported with Donald Trump’s ill-formed priors. And now, thanks to his own ill-formed belief in his own innate genius, Navarro has bumbled into two felony convictions. In the end, he’s going to jail in service of a man who couldn’t be bothered to invoke executive privilege in 2021, and chose not to back up Navarro’s pre-trial privilege assertions in 2023.

But at least Navarro got one last Truth Social post before Trump casts him aside and never thinks about him again.

US v. Navarro [Docket via Court Listener]

Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics and appears on the Opening Arguments podcast.

Topics

Crime, Donald Trump, Government, Peter Navarro