WASHINGTON (CN) — A D.C. Circuit panel on Thursday rejected former Donald Trump adviser Peter Navarro’s bid to remain free pending an appeal of his four-month prison sentence for contempt of Congress.
Instead, the panel affirmed that he must report to federal prison on March 19.
Navarro, a senior trade adviser in the Trump administration, would be the first member of the former president’s inner circle to spend time behind bars for attempting to overturn the 2020 election.
The three-judge panel — made up of U.S. Circuit Judges Patricia Millett, Cornelia Pillard and Robert Wilkins, all Barack Obama appointees — concluded that Navarro’s appeal had failed to present “substantial questions of law or fact” that would warrant a stay of his sentence.
Navarro was sentenced in January to four months in prison after a jury found him guilty on two contempt of Congress charges. Navarro had refused to provide documents or testify before the special House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Immediately following the sentence, Navarro appealed to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. He contended he was protected by executive privilege — a legal doctrine intended to protect some of the president’s communications with his advisers, and one which U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta barred Navarro from using as a defense at trial.
Mehta, also an Obama appointee, ruled that Navarro had failed to present any evidence that Trump had actually invoked that privilege for Navarro. The appeals panel agreed with Mehta, ruling that Navarro’s appeal had not presented a substantial question of fact regarding that finding and that Navarro had therefore forfeited the argument. Further, because neither Trump nor President Joe Biden had invoked the privilege, there was no “close question” that the privilege was presumptive rather than up to the courts.
Navarro’s attorney, Stanley Woodward Jr. of firm Brand Woodward, on Sunday revealed that Navarro had been ordered to report to federal prison in Miami “on or before 2:00 p.m. EDT on March 19, 2024.”
In the filing, Woodward asserted that the appeals court should intervene and hold off enforcement of his sentence to answer the open question as to how executive privilege should be properly invoked. Woodward said the issue presented a “substantial question of law” that gave the court cause to grant Navarro’s request for release.
"For present purposes, it matters only that the district court decided a substantial 'open question' in a way that, by the district court’s own admission, 'hamstrung [Dr. Navarro’s defense] dramatically,'" Woodward wrote.
But the appeals panel again reaffirmed Mehta’s decision — ruling that even if the privilege had been properly invoked, Navarro had forfeited any challenge of that decision “because executive privilege is a qualified privileged that would be overcome by the imperative need for evidence.”
Had Navarro been covered by the privilege, it still “would not excuse his complete noncompliance with the subpoena,” the panel said. He would still be required to turn over unprivileged documents and to appear before lawmakers to invoke the privilege on a question-by-question basis.
Navarro had requested he be treated similarly as fellow former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, who received a similar four-month sentence for contempt of Congress charges from U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols, a Trump appointee. A D.C. Circuit panel heard arguments in Bannon’s appeal in November, where they seemed skeptical of Bannon’s assertion that his attorneys had advised him he was protected by executive privilege.
In that case, a three-judge panel made up of U.S. Circuit judges Cornelia Pillard, Justin Walker and Bradley Garcia — Obama, Trump and Biden appointees, respectively — has yet to rule.
Unlike Navarro, Bannon was not subpoenaed by the House committee for actions taken as a Trump adviser, as he was fired from his role as chief strategist in the Trump White House in August 2017. His ouster came in the wake of the white supremacist "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where Trump came under fire for saying there were “very fine people on both sides.”
Speaking to reporters following his sentencing, Navarro, who was identified by the committee as a “key political force” behind the Capitol riot, promised to bring his appeal all the way to the Supreme Court if he had to.
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