Former White House advisor to President Donald J. Trump and esteemed election researcher Peter Navarro (The Navarro Report) joins several other top Trump officials being subpoenaed by the House congressional committee in pursuing their witch-hunt “investigation” into the events of January 6, 2021.
Navarro, an outspoken critic of massive election irregularities showing widespread evidence of fraud in the 2020 U.S. presidential election, was indicted on June 3 by a federal grand jury for refusing to cooperate with the now-months-long January 6 probe.
Navarro joins three other high-profile members of the Trump administration who have refused to cooperate with the demands of the committee comprised of seven Democratic members and two Republicans. Earlier this year, President Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows, and Dan Scavino, Jr., deputy chief of staff, both defied subpoenas by the seemingly untouchable Department of Justice (DOJ), but were not prosecuted.
Meadows and Scavino have remained unscathed despite having scoffed at committee members. Notably, Navarro is the only one charged with criminal contempt of Congress by the DOJ.
Former White House advisor and popular “War Room” podcaster Steve Bannon has also been targeted.
As reported by The New York Times, “prosecutors charged Mr. Navarro, 72, with what amounted to a misdemeanor process crime for having failed to appear for a deposition or provide documents to congressional investigators in response to a subpoena issued by the House committee on Feb. 9. The indictment includes two counts of criminal contempt of Congress that each carry a maximum sentence of a year in prison, as well as a fine of up to $100,000.”
On Tuesday, Navarro issued a defiant statement from a federal district court in Washington, D.C., where he had filed a civil lawsuit against the January 6 committee following his arrest in Nashville the previous Friday. He reported an arrest at an airport between flights by authorities who placed him in “handcuffs” and “leg irons,” and then jailed him in a cell.
Navarro told reporters outside the courthouse that he questioned the legitimacy of the “kangaroo” January 6 committee which is headed by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and consists of Chairperson Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) and majority members Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), Elaine Luria (D-Va.), Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), Pete Aguilar (D-Calif.), Stephanie Murphy (D-Fla.), and Jamie Raskin (D-Md.). So-called Republican committee members include Liz Cheney (R-Wy.) and Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.).
The committee was defying its own rules and “essentially acting as judge, jury, and executioner,” said Navarro, who has decided not to hire an attorney to represent him in what he deems a “weaponizing of investigatory powers of Congress in a way that is unconstitutional.”
Here are his full remarks regarding his lawsuit against the congressional committee:
On Tuesday in this courtroom right here, I filed a civil suit against the kangaroo committee on the Hill (seven partisan Democrats and two RINO Republicans). The essence of that civil suit was that the subpoenas issued by the committee are ultra vires [beyond their jurisdiction], unlawful, and unenforceable.
I made that case based on four legal arguments. First is that this committee is neither duly authorized nor properly constituted, meaning that it doesn’t follow the rules of either the House itself or the committee’s own authorizing resolution….
I am not the only one who has filed to question the validity of that kangaroo committee. Nancy Pelosi herself calls that committee unprecedented, and she is absolutely right.
The second point… is simply that over a five-year period, Congress has weaponized the investigatory powers of Congress in a way that is unconstitutional. Congress has the right to investigate, but only for non-punitive legislative purposes. What that kangaroo committee is doing right now is investigating for punitive purposes.
They’re essentially acting as judge, jury, and executioner. Their clear mission is to prevent Donald John Trump from running for president in 2024 and being elected president. People like me are in their way, and they’re not coming for me and Trump, they’re coming for you. All 74 million of you who voted for Donald John Trump….
I bet there isn’t a single person here who read that whole case. The third issue is that the Constitution has a prohibition on what are called bills of attainders. That is bills against undue punishment of citizens of this country. Today, the punishment which was inflicted on a man presumed innocent and innocent until proven guilty demonstrates the utter disregard for Constitutional law the Department of Justice has.
I sent them a letter on Wednesday offering a modus vivendi [agreement]. I told them contact an individual who would discuss this matter. What did they do? They didn’t call me. I spoke to the FBI agent who arrested me, I spoke to him on Wednesday night, and I told him, “whatever you need. You don’t have to come banging on my door like you did last week, getting me out of bed. I’m here to cooperate.”
I was on my way to Nashville today to do a TV appearance with Mike Huckabee and instead of coming to my door where I live… they intercepted me getting on the plane. They put me in handcuffs, they brought me here, put me in leg irons, stuck me in a cell. Historical note, I was in John Hinkley’s cell. That’s punitive. What they did to me today violated the Constitution.
In my lawsuit, I discussed going back to [Nixon v. General Services Adminsitration (sic)] and other cases that what this government is supposed to do when they have an issue such as they’ve had — this is not their first rodeo, they’ve had plenty of people question the validity of their subpoenas. What they’re supposed to do is the “least burdensome alternative.”
I told them to go negotiate with Donald John Trump and his attorneys because I am in an untenable Constitutional position. There’s no settled law on this. And by the way, the law leans squarely towards my right to senior testimonial immunity and President Trump’s right to executive privilege….
They put the hammer down, the full force of the government trying to intimidate me….
I have represented myself in this matter because part of the Democrats’ strategy is to engage in so-called Lawfare, that is to use the legal system for effectively coercion and illicit ends. I do not want to spend several hundred thousand dollars on lawyers. This is not about me; this is about a Constitutional principle that is important for effective presidential decision-making and what the Justice Department is doing is wrong….
That is an important principle that lies at the heart of this case. Let’s see what happens going forward, but on Wednesday I reached out to the Justice Department… they responded with effectively the same kind of thing you’d see in Stalin’s Russia or the Chinese Communist Party.
And I’ll note, interestingly for the record, that the only two people who have been indicted on criminal charges are me and Steve Bannon and we’re also some of the only people in the world who have been sanctioned by the Chinese Communist Party.
Navarro’s arrest comes just days before the House Committee is set to air six prime-time televised hearings of the January 6 committee proceedings. The media already is gushing over the event as “surprising and exciting,” with the potential for a “smoking gun” considering investigators have pored over thousands upon thousands of pages of interviews and data of what happened at the Capitol.
Navarro, who served as director of the Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy under the Trump administration, was instrumental in investigating the early-morning vote surges during the 2020 presidential election in the crucial states of Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin.
He would go on to pen The Immaculate Deception, the first volume of the distinguished, three-part Navarro Report, which in part notes that “an analysis conducted by the Voter Integrity Project of the New York Times publicly reported data on Election Day that showed several vote ‘spikes’ that were unusually large in size with unusually high Biden-to-Trump ratios,” claiming “such spikes or surges could well indicate that fraudulent ballots had been counted.”
At present, the evidence of widespread fraud remains overwhelming, and confidence among Americans concerning the U.S. election process remains low. Yet, fearless patriots such as Navarro and Bannon continue to offer a glimmer of hope that our nation is always pursuing a greater perfection — and that leftist lies must be drilled down upon. For therein lies the purpose of America: “To secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”
