Peter Navarro claims to have evidence that would clear former President Donald Trump of any suspected wrongdoing regarding the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot. Now, the trick is showing it to congressional investigators.
The former White House adviser recently told the Daily Beast that the House committee investigating the siege of Congress, which is signaling that Trump may face criminal referrals, would not dare reach out to him.
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“They don’t want any part of me. I exonerate Trump and Bannon," he said, referring to former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, who was charged with contempt of Congress after he defied a subpoena from the panel.
The Washington Examiner reached out to a representative of the committee for comment on whether it is interested in testimony or documents from Navarro but has not heard back.
However, even if investigators do want to hear from Navarro, despite the carrot-on-a-stick strategy, he told the Washington Examiner on Friday that he would resist cooperating anyway.
“The president asserted executive privilege,” Navarro said. "He didn’t assert it with respect to this specific committee — he asserted it broadly."
Trump instructed several former advisers in the fall not to cooperate with the committee, citing executive and other privileges. But he is facing challenges in maintaining it as President Joe Biden has rejected his claims of executive privilege, and after two lower court losses, Trump is taking the fight to stop the release of documents to the Supreme Court.
"I’m happy to give every member of the committee a copy of my In Trump Time book," Navarro added. "I’m happy to do that, but I’m not going to cooperate with a partisan witch hunt. It’s not my privilege to waive. That’s the important legal point."
In his memoir, which was published in early November, Navarro talks about working with Bannon to implement what he dubs the "Green Bay Sweep." The plan was to enlist members of Congress and put pressure on then-Vice President Mike Pence to stall the Jan. 6 certification and send electoral votes back to several battleground states where GOP-led legislatures could try to overturn the results over concerns about fraud and irregularities. Navarro claims the rioters who swarmed the Capitol, disrupting the counting of electoral votes, prevented a sufficient number of lawmakers from committing to the plan.
"Their narrative is that Trump instigated the violence. My fact-based claim is that the last thing Trump, Bannon, or me wanted that day was violence because we needed peace and calm on Capitol Hill to implement to Green Bay Sweep," he said. "The only reason why we weren't able to execute the strategy was because of that violence."
Navarro insists he did not have extensive conversations with Trump on the plan to overturn the election but noted that he did brief the president on his election fraud reports. Those reports, which contained some dubious claims, have done little to sway election officials on the federal, state, and local levels who said there is no evidence of widespread fraud. A wave of election lawsuits by Trump and his allies also failed to gain traction.
Navarro also said he did not directly coordinate with Trump allies at Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C. The group, which includes Bannon, has become the subject of keen interest for the committee as it looks for evidence of coordination with the White House related to the violence that ensued.
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In early December, Navarro defied a subpoena from a different congressional committee investigating the coronavirus health crisis. He cited concerns about executive privilege. So far, the Jan. 6 committee has not subpoenaed him.
"I am not going to be intimidated. Nor am I going to spend a single dime on attorneys," he wrote in a recent op-ed criticizing Congress's "assault on executive privilege."