Former senior Trump adviser Peter Navarro is due to report to prison Tuesday, and it couldn't happen to a more deserving person. In September, Navarro was convicted of contempt of Congress after Navarro refused to comply with a subpoena from the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, coup attempt.
In January, he was sentenced to four months in prison, with U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta noting that it took "chutzpah" for Navarro to claim he was taking responsibility for his crime while simultaneously claiming to be the victim of politically motivated prosecution. He was ordered to report to a Miami, Florida, prison by Tuesday, and on March 14, a unanimous panel of judges in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit rejected his bid to delay that prison sentence, ruling Navarro hadn't shown them any reason to believe his appeal was "likely" to be successful. On Monday, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts also rejected Navarro’s latest bid to delay the sentence, signing an order saying he had “no basis to disagree” with the appeals court.
So it's the pokey for Donald Trump's former trade adviser, but Navarro can't plausibly pretend that this comes as a surprise. Anyone who goes to work for the orange man knows there's a chance they'll come out of it wearing an orange jumpsuit.
Trump has apparently been worried about wearing “one of those jumpsuits” himself if he doesn't win the White House and the free get-out-of-jail privileges he believes he can squeeze from it. Seeing photographs of yet another of his closest allies in prison garb won't do much to improve his recent mood.
Navarro's defiance of a congressional subpoena seems to have been motivated solely by his own self-interest; from his position as trade adviser, Navarro spearheaded an election-nullification strategy he dubbed the "Green Bay Sweep."
According to a memoir Navarro published in November 2021, that plan laid out how Republican lawmakers from six battleground states would mount such vigorous challenges to the election's results that then-Vice President Mike Pence would have no choice but to delay certifying the election, somehow send the results back to the states, and hopefully force the House to elect the president.
That was indeed one of the plans Trump and his team intended to carry out on Jan. 6. Another was the gathering of a mob of conspiracy-believing Trump supporters who would march to the Capitol during the joint session of Congress in an effort to intimidate both Pence and reluctant lawmakers into blocking the vote-counting.
Both plans relied on peddling bizarre conspiracies claiming that the election was stolen by Democrats, the manufacturers of voting machines, and other unnamed and invisible opponents. And it soon came to light that Navarro was peddlers of those theories on Trump’s team. Navarro frequently brought supposed proof of election fraud to the White House, according to former Trump administration aide Cassidy Hutchinson, and an investigation by The Guardian discovered that the "Dominion report"—a tawdry collection of conspiracy claims focused on supposed vote manipulation by Dominion Voting Systems, a major voting machine manufacturer—appeared to have been first drafted by a Navarro aide:
The original version of the Dominion report named Miller - who worked for the senior Trump adviser Peter Navarro – as the author on the cover page, until her name was abruptly replaced with that of Friess before the document was to be released publicly, the source said.
The involvement of a number of other Trump White House aides who worked in Navarro’s office was also scrubbed around that time, the source said.
Those conspiracy claims were pivotal after Trump's election loss, as Navarro and other administration allies fanned out to claim that the election had been rigged against him. (The Dominion report also likely cost Fox News nearly $800 million dollars after Dominion Voting Systems sued the network for promoting the conspiracy theories against it.)
Navarro was knee-deep in Trump's act of sedition and, at least so far, will be getting off with four months or less of prison time. And only because he defied a congressional subpoena to testify. It doesn’t have to do with the attempted coup itself. Navarro doesn't seem the least bit cowed by these events, either. Last July, he was still vowing that America would face a second Civil War if Trump and his friends weren't allowed to overthrow the government.
Yeah, whatever. Have fun in prison, you conspiracy-addled crank.
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