Former White House Trade Adviser Peter Navarro—whom former White House bad ideas generator Jared Kushner discovered on Amazon when the e-tailer suggested buying him together with a case of Grey Goose and a pallet of generic Percocet—is attempting to delay his upcoming trial in the weirdest, most ironic way imaginable.
On Friday, Navarro pleaded not guilty to contempt of Congress charges after rebuffing a subpoena from the House Jan. 6 committee, which had hoped to question him about his involvement in Donald Trump’s shambolic coup attempt. But what really raised eyebrows was his request for a postponement of his trial, which U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta set for Nov. 17.
Mehta set the schedule after Navarro’s attorneys initially requested an April 2023 trial date to avoid interfering with Navarro’s plans to market a pro-Donald Trump book he will release in September.
But Justice Department attorneys rejected that request, saying the trial should begin as quickly as possible and that the government has “serious concerns about delaying trial for a book tour.”
Of course, it’s particularly ironic—or perhaps fitting—that Navarro wants to delay his trial for a book tour, since his previous book outlined his central role in Donald Trump’s months-long quest to literally end America.
Late last year, Navarro released In Trump Time: A Journal of America’s Plague Year. The book included a detailed plan for illegally overthrowing the legitimate government of the United States. You know, normal stuff.
In a Jan. 4 analysis, Washington Post senior political reporter Aaron Blake described Navarro’s open coup plotting:
In an interview with Rolling Stone and in his new book, Trump White House adviser Peter Navarro lays out the plot to overturn the election. According to him, the “Green Bay Sweep,” as he called it, involved getting Congress to debate the electoral results of six swing states that went for Joe Biden for four hours each — a 24-hour made-for-TV spectacle — after which the results of the election would be declared in dispute and Congress would revert to the fallback in such situations: the House picking the new president with one vote per congressional delegation. Republicans would hold a majority of congressional delegations and thus would “likely” win in that scenario, Navarro deduced.
For some reason, Navarro thought it would be a great idea not only to write about his involvement in the Trump team’s attempt to end American democracy, but also to bray about it on national television. Perhaps Navarro wasn’t aware of it at the time but, as MSNBC’s Ari Melber helpfully pointed out to him, what Navarro was describing to his readers was a coup.
MELBER: “You just described this plan as a way to take an election where the outcome was established by independent secretaries of state, by the voters of those states, and legal remedies had been exhausted, with the Supreme Court never even taking, let along siding with, any of the claims that you just referred to, so legally they went nowhere. … Then you will use the incumbent, losing party’s power—that was a Republican Party that was losing power—to overtake and reverse that outcome. Do you realize you are describing a coup?”
So what we have is a key witness to a plot against the government of the United States refusing to testify to Congress about stuff he’s already exhaustively detailed in a book and multiple media interviews—and now that he’s in legal peril as a result of his obstinance, he wants to delay justice because he needs to promote yet another book. What’s gonna be in this one? A list of online zip-tie sellers and his grandma’s secret recipe for homemade bear spray?
So yet another tragicomic dipshit is throwing his life away for the chance to bask in the piss-warm glow of Donald Trump’s eternal perfidy. Will Trump visit him in prison? Only if Navarro is sentenced to be suspended from the ceiling in a go-go cage at the West Palm Beach Spearmint Rhino. And even then I doubt Trump would bother to make eye contact.
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