Peter Navarro, a 74-year-old millionaire who served as a trade advisor to the previous president of the United States, became one of the main spokespersons for Donald Trump’s false victory in November 2020. He even prepared a dossier, in the light of his inspiration , in which he “demonstrated” the great electoral theft to annul the result of the polls, without referring to any evidence although, being a lie, no valid argument is required either.
This Thursday he returned to the headlines. A jury considered Navarro the author of a double crime of contempt for refusing to respond to the subpoena of the bipartisan congressional commission that investigated the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, in the failed coup d’état that Trump instigated, as well as his refusal to provide documentation about his conspiracy report.
After a two-day oral hearing in federal court in Washington, in which three prosecution witnesses appeared and none from the defense, the jury needed just four hours to reach a guilty verdict on those two counts of disobedience, each punishable by up to one year in prison and a fine of $100,000.
After former advisor and provocateur Stephen Bannon was found guilty a few months ago of this same crime and identical refusal to appear in Congress, Navarro becomes the second senior Trump executive official to be convicted in a criminal case linked to efforts to try to undemocratically derail Democrat Joe Biden’s victory at the polls.
Both Bannon and Navarro were loud spokespersons for the widely discredited theories that Trump was denied re-election due to non-existent fraud in several key states in the country.
Like his former cabinet colleague, Navarro challenged the legislative investigative committee that requested information about his falsehoods to spread the alleged electoral theft, as well as the brazen plan with which they plotted to reverse the electoral result at the joint meeting of the two chambers, on January 6, 2021, in which Biden’s victory was to be ratified.
Like Bannon, the former trade adviser appealed to “executive privilege.” They maintained that Trump, once he left office, instructed them not to provide any testimony or facilitate documents on matters investigated by that committee.
Without any argument to support that privilege, as happened with Bannon, Navarro had no excuse to defend his innocence. The eight men and four women on the jury reached a guilty verdict fairly quickly on Thursday. Judge Amit Mehta set the hearing where he will determine the sentence for next January 12.
Once outside the courtroom, Navarro spoke to reporters, giving the impression that he was more concerned about those protesting around him than about the case itself. In a trademark phrase of the one he idolized Trump, he repeated that “today is a sad day for the United States,” as if he were the barometer of the public’s mood.
“I don’t say this so much because of the verdict but because one cannot express oneself and have a decent and honest conversation with the American people,” he complained, alluding to the existing division in the United States and the “Marxist ‘woke’ left,” another phrase patented by the former president. “This is crazy,” he bellowed. He said it referring to those others around him and not to the crazy plan he created to shake democracy in the United States.
He suggested that the verdict was a foregone conclusion, another lesson learned from the good trapper’s manual, to announce that he will appeal the ruling.
