Navarro, 74, was found guilty in September of two contempt charges for refusing to produce documents or testify after receiving a House subpoena in February 2022. A former trade and pandemic adviser who served throughout Trump’s term in office, Navarro claimed credit for hatching a scheme with longtime Trump political adviser Stephen K. Bannon to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential race.
In a 20-page sentencing request, prosecutors said Navarro’s “bad-faith strategy of defiance and contempt” deserved severe punishment. Like the rioters, Navarro “put politics, not country, first, and stonewalled Congress’s investigation” even after learning that his claim of executive privilege would not excuse his actions, the prosecutors said.
“The rioters who overran the Capitol on January 6, 2021, did not just attack a building — they assaulted the rule of law upon which this country was built and through which it endures,” assistant U.S. attorneys Elizabeth Aloi and John Crabb Jr. wrote. “By flouting the Committee’s subpoena and its authority to investigate that assault, the Defendant exacerbated that assault, following the attack on Congress with his rejection of its authority.”
Prosecutors also earlier requested a six-month sentence for Bannon, a right-wing podcaster and provocateur who was convicted and ultimately sentenced in October 2022 to four months in prison, a penalty that remains suspended pending appeal. 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.
U.S. District Judge Amit P. Mehta set sentencing for next Thursday.
Navarro’s attorneys asked for probation, saying the judge has recognized that Navarro genuinely thought Trump had invoked executive privilege. They said he should not have to face the “untenable position” of risking jail because of “antiquated, questionable precedent” in Washington for actions that matched those of past presidential advisers who avoided incarceration.
“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 advisor 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 III wrote. “History is replete” with refusals to comply with congressional subpoenas, they said, “and Dr. Navarro’s sentence should not be disproportionate from those similarly situated individuals.”
Navarro’s federal trial in Washington included just one day of testimony from three prosecution witnesses, and no witnesses for Navarro. Mehta rejected his defense’s plans to claim that Trump, after leaving office, invoked executive privilege and directed his former aide not to cooperate with lawmakers. After holding an evidentiary hearing, Mehta said Navarro had failed to establish that such a conversation or a formal claim of privilege took place.
Prosecutors argued that Navarro, acting without an attorney, rebuffed the…
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