Prosecutors seek six months in prison for Peter Navarro in contempt case
Federal prosecutors on Thursday evening sought a six-month prison sentence for Peter Navarro, a former White House adviser to President Donald J. Trump, for ignoring a subpoena from the House committee investigating the attack on the White House. January 6, 2021 House. Capitol.
Prosecutors said they were seeking a sentence at the high end of the range because of his “bad faith strategy” of “sustained, deliberate disregard of Congress.”
“The defendant, like the Capitol rioters, put politics, not the country, first and stonewalled Congress' investigation,” they wrote in their sentencing memo. “The defendant chose loyalty to former President Donald Trump over the rule of law.”
The memo reflected the sentencing recommendation for Stephen K. Bannon, who ultimately received a four-month prison sentence for defying his own Jan. 6 commission subpoena. The conviction would make Mr. Navarro the second Trump official to be convicted of ignoring the committee's subpoenas.
The sentencing will take place on January 25 in Federal District Court in Washington.
Mr. Navarro was convicted in September of two counts of contempt of Congress, and this week the judge presiding over the case, Amit P. Mehta, denied a request by his lawyers to throw out the verdict and convene a new trial to call. Mr. Navarro had argued that jurors were exposed to political bias while having lunch outside the courthouse where demonstrators were protesting.
“The evidence shows that the jurors interacted only with each other” and a court security official, Judge Mehta wrote in a ruling Tuesday.
Mr. Navarro's lawyers argued that the subpoena violated the idea that a president could order his subordinates to refuse to testify before Congress, citing executive immunity.
In their own memo, they wrote that “history is littered” with people who “have refused to comply with congressional subpoenas, and that Dr. Navarro should not be disproportionate to that of persons in similar circumstances.”
Mr. Navarro, a Harvard-educated economist and outspoken critic of China, helped craft some of the Trump administration's most hostile trade policies and played a role in the response to the U.S. pandemic. But after the 2020 presidential election, he became more focused on trying to keep Mr. Trump in power.
Mr. Navarro made frequent television appearances in which he cast doubt on the election results and made misleading claims of voter fraud. He also documented these claims in a report, as well as in a memoir he published after leaving the White House, in which he described a strategy known as the Green Bay Sweep aimed at overturning the election results.
When the committee asked Mr. Navarro to testify, he repeatedly invoked executive privilege, insisting that Mr. Trump had told him not to cooperate. But Judge Mehta ruled that Mr. Navarro could not raise executive privilege in his defense at trial, saying there was no compelling evidence that Mr. Trump ever told him to ignore the committee.