WASHINGTON (CN) — Peter Navarro, a former senior adviser to Donald Trump, has been ordered to report to prison March 19, which would make him the first member of the former president’s inner circle to spend time in prison for actions related to efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
Navarro was sentenced to four months in prison in January on contempt of Congress charges stemming from his refusal to provide documents or testify before the special House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
He has since appealed his conviction to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, contending that he was protected by executive privilege — a legal doctrine intended to protect some of the president’s communications with his advisers — which U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta barred Navarro from using as a defense at trial.
Mehta, a Barack Obama appointee, had ruled that Navarro failed to provide any evidence that Trump had actually invoked that privilege for Navarro. Nonetheless, he would have had to appear before the congressional committee to claim the privilege on a question-by-question basis.
After sentencing, Mehta rejected Navarro’s request for an administrative stay to delay his sentence.
In a reply memo to the D.C. Circuit on Sunday, Stanley Woodward Jr., Navarro’s appellate attorney of firm Brand Woodward, revealed that his client had been ordered to report to federal prison next Tuesday.
“Dr. Navarro has now been ordered to report to the custody of the Bureau of Prisons, FCI Miami, on or before 2:00 p.m. EDT on March 19, 2024,” Woodward said.
“Should this court deny Dr. Navarro’s motion [for release pending appeal], he respectfully requests an administrative stay so as to permit the Supreme Court review of this court’s denial.”
Navarro requested he be treated the same 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, and seemed skeptical of Bannon’s assertion that his attorneys had advised him he was protected by executive privilege.
The three-judge panel, made up of U.S. Circuit judges Cornelia Pillard, Justin Walker and Bradley Garcia — appointed by Barack Obama, Trump and Joe Biden, respectively — has yet to rule in Bannon’s case.
Unlike Navarro, Bannon was not subpoenaed by the House committee for actions taken as a Trump adviser, since 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.”
Navarro argued in Sunday’s filing that the appeals court should intervene and take up his case to answer the open question as to how executive privilege should be properly invoked. Woodward said the question is also a “substantial question of law” that gives the court cause to grant Navarro’s request for release pending a decision on the matter.
“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.
The committee identified Navarro as a “key political force” behind the Capitol riot, for his role in crafting a scheme known as the “Green Bay Sweep” to keep Trump in office despite his 2020 electoral defeat to Biden.
The scheme, named by Bannon after a Green Bay Packers' play, aimed to use Trump loyalists in the House and the Senate to contest the ballots from six swing states that Biden had won to allow Republican-dominated legislatures from those state to decertify their states’ election results.
Had it been successful, the plan would have effectively given Trump more Electoral College votes and therefore to have won the election.
Navarro, in a book named “In Trump Time,” described having worked closely with Bannon in the weeks after the Nov. 3, 2020, election to claim voter fraud in those six states in order to lay the groundwork for the congressional challenges.
Follow @Ryan_Knappy
Subscribe to Closing Arguments
Sign up for new weekly newsletter Closing Arguments to get the latest about ongoing trials, major litigation and hot cases and rulings in courthouses around the U.S. and the world.
