Chief Justice Roberts rejects Peter Navarro’s latest attempt to avoid prison time
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. ruled Monday that Peter Navarro, a trade adviser to Donald J. Trump during his presidency, must serve a four-month prison sentence for contempt of Congress while he appeals.
The order makes Mr. Navarro, who refused to comply with a subpoena seeking information about the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, the first senior aide to Mr. Trump to serve a prison sentence in connection with the plot to kill the 2020 law to be reversed. election. Mr. Navarro is scheduled to report to a federal prison in Miami on Tuesday.
Chief Justice Roberts, acting on his own without referring the case to the full Supreme Court, said he saw no reason to disagree with an appeals court’s finding that Mr. Navarro had “failed to meet his burden to determine his right to compensation.”
The chief justice added that his order applied only to whether Mr. Navarro should remain free while he appealed, and offered no opinion on the appeal itself.
A House committee had asked Mr. Navarro for testimony and documents about his plan to delay the certification of the election by holding up the counting of electoral votes. He refused to comply, saying Mr. Trump had told him to invoke executive privilege.
After Mr. Navarro was convicted, Judge Amit P. Mehta rejected his request to remain free while he was on appeal, saying there were no substantive legal questions for the courts to consider. The key point, wrote Judge Mehta, who was appointed by President Barack Obama, was that “the court found no evidence that President Trump ever invoked this privilege.”
A unanimous three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit agreed that Mr. Navarro, 74, should begin serving his sentence. The judges said he “has not shown that his appeal raises substantial questions of law or fact likely to result in a recusal, a new trial, a sentence that does not include prison, or a reduced prison sentence.”
The panel added in an unsigned opinion that Mr. Navarro had not shown that “the privilege was actually invoked by the President in any way in this case.”
In an urgent request When they asked the Supreme Court to intervene, Mr. Navarro’s lawyers said he was not a flight risk or a danger to public safety.
“For the first time in our nation’s history, a senior presidential adviser has been found in contempt of Congress after invoking executive privilege in response to a congressional subpoena,” they wrote.
They added that key legal issues remained unresolved. “Chief among them,” the lawyers wrote, “is the question of whether an ‘affirmative’ invocation of executive privilege was necessary to bar prosecution for contempt of Congress; what was required of former President Trump for a “proper” claim of privilege; and whether such an appeal required ‘personal consideration’ are all questions of first impression.”
In answer, Justice Department lawyers wrote that Mr. Navarro’s arguments were all based on a false premise. “Executive branch privilege belongs to the executive branch, not to any individual current or former employee,” their brief states, “and if the head of that branch refuses to assert the privilege, a subordinate cannot do so. ”