The Daily Fuckup

Peter Navarro’s contempt-of-Congress case was still alive on Jan. 28, 2023, after a federal judge rejected his effort to throw out the indictment nine days earlier. Judge Amit Mehta ruled on Jan. 19 that the case could proceed, leaving Navarro to face trial on charges tied to his refusal to comply with a House Jan. 6 subpoena.

Navarro, a former White House trade adviser and one of Donald Trump’s most aggressive post-election defenders, was indicted on June 3, 2022, on two misdemeanor counts of contempt of Congress. Prosecutors said he ignored a subpoena from the House select committee investigating the attack on the Capitol and the effort to reverse the 2020 election. The House report documenting the contempt referral says the panel concluded Navarro had not produced the records or testimony it sought.

In his motion to dismiss, Navarro argued that Trump had protected the materials with executive privilege. Mehta found that Navarro had not shown a formal invocation of executive privilege that would excuse his noncompliance, and that was enough to keep the prosecution moving forward.

The ruling did not decide whether Navarro was guilty. It did, however, remove one early attempt to end the case before trial and left him exposed to the same basic question at the heart of the prosecution: whether a former White House aide can simply ignore a congressional subpoena and later claim the dispute should disappear.