Federal prosecutors had asked a judge to impose on Navarro the same “severe” penalty of six months incarceration that they requested for Stephen K. Bannon, a former Trump political adviser, with whom Navarro said he worked on a plan to delay and ultimately change the outcome of Congress’s formal count of the 2020 presidential election results.
Navarro was the second Trump aide sentenced for stonewalling Congress’s Jan. 6 investigation, after Bannon received four months behind bars, a punishment that has been put on hold pending appeal. Navarro is also expected to appeal his conviction. Either Bannon or Navarro could become the first person incarcerated for defying a congressional subpoena in more than half a century under a statute that is rarely prosecuted and that is punishable by up to a year behind bars.
“I was torn…. Nobody in my position should be put in conflict between the legislative branch and the executive branch,” Navarro told the court in a brief statement after his lawyers initially said he would not speak on advice of counsel. “I did not know what to do” when subpoenaed by Congress, Navarro insisted. “Is that the entire lesson from this process? … Get a lawyer? I think in a way it is.”
Navarro, 74, was found guilty in September of two counts of criminal contempt of Congress for refusing to produce documents or testify after receiving a House subpoena in February 2022. Lawmakers had asked Navarro, a former trade and pandemic adviser who served throughout Trump’s term in office, about his claim of working with Bannon on an operation called “The Green Bay Sweep.” The plan aimed to get Trump loyalists in Congress to contest ballots from six swing states that Biden won and throw the election to the House, though claims of voter fraud were repudiated by state officials and the courts.
Prosecutors accused Navarro of pursuing a bad-faith strategy of “utter contempt” and “utter disregard” for Congress, putting allegiance to Trump and partisan politics over country and the rule of law in refusing to cooperate with House investigators probing the Jan. 6 attack that came after Trump urged his supporters to march to the Capitol. Five people died in or immediately after the rioting, which led to assaults on least 140 police officers, caused $3 million in damage and forced the evacuation of lawmakers.
“The committee was investigating an attack on the very foundations of our democracy. There could be no more serious investigation undertaken by Congress,” Assistant U.S. Attorney John Crabb Jr. told the judge, urging him to make clear that no one, no matter their position, be permitted to ignore Congress or their legal obligations. “The defendant believes he is above the law. But no one is above the law, we are a nation of laws. And the rule of law is essential to a functioning democracy.”
Navarro’s attorneys asked for probation, saying the judge at one point seemed to acknowledge that Navarro genuinely thought Trump had invoked executive privilege, a provision under the Constitution’s separation-of-powers principle to preserve the confidentiality of White House discussions from Congress.
Mehta ultimately rejected Navarro’s claim, finding after holding an evidentiary hearing that whatever Navarro thought, he failed to prove the existence of a conversation or a formal invocation of privilege by Trump that directed Navarro not to cooperate with lawmakers.
“Dr. Navarro’s trial and conviction involves a series of firsts: the first time an incumbent President waived the executive privilege of a former president; the first time a senior presidential adviser was charged with contempt of Congress by the Justice Department, let alone the Justice Department of a political rival,” attorneys John S. Irving, John P. Rowley III and Stanley E. Woodward Jr. wrote.
“We are frankly at but a pit stop on our journey toward understanding what executive privilege means, and how it is invoked,” Woodward said Tuesday, referring to the defense’s anticipated appeal to higher courts. Still, the attorney argued that Navarro “should not be punished to prove a point,” or face jail for conduct similar to that of past presidential advisers who had avoided it. “He did what he did because he thought he was duty-bound to invoke executive privilege.”
Before charging Navarro, a Harvard-trained economist and author of several books on U.S.-China trade policies, the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington opted not to take legal action against two other Trump officials who were referred by the House Jan. 6 committee for contempt prosecutions: former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and communications chief Dan Scavino. Both had received letters from a lawyer for the former president directing them not to respond to subpoenas from the committee, citing executive privilege.
“Had the President issued a similar letter to Defendant, the record here would look very different,” Mehta said earlier in Navarro’s case. The judge noted that the Biden administration also had made clear it was not asserting the privilege in his case, saying it was not in the national interest.
Prosecutors argued that Navarro, acting without an attorney, rebuffed the committee’s request and erroneously relied on a press statement issued by then-President Trump in November 2020 that said Navarro did not have to cooperate with a different committee investigating the pandemic response.
No one has been jailed for contempt of Congress since the red-baiting House Un-American Activity Activities Committee hearings of the Cold War era. President Ronald Reagan’s former assistant secretary of state, Elliott Abrams, and former senior CIA official Alan D. Fiers Jr. each served less than a year of probation and community service for taking part in a cover up of the Iran-contra scandal, court records show, before receiving pardons from President George H.W. Bush in 1992.
In the 1970s, Watergate era figures G. Gordon Liddy and former attorney general Richard Kleindienst were charged and pleaded guilty to contempt of Congress but did not go to prison for that crime. At the time, Liddy had already been sentenced to prison in a related case.
