Chief Justice Roberts Rejects Peter Navarro's Last-Ditch Bid to Avoid Prison - The New York Times
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Mr. Navarro, a former adviser to President Trump, must report to a Miami prison on Tuesday for a four-month sentence after he was convicted of contempt of Congress for defying a subpoena.
After Peter Navarro was convicted and sentenced, Judge Amit P. Mehta rejected his request to remain free while on appeal, saying there were no substantial legal questions for the courts to consider. Credit...Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times
By Adam Liptak
Reporting from Washington
March 18, 2024
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. ruled on Monday that Peter Navarro, a trade adviser to Donald J. Trump during his presidency, must start serving a four-month sentence for contempt of Congress while he pursues an appeal.
The order will make Mr. Navarro, who refused to comply with a subpoena seeking information about the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, the first senior aide to Mr. Trump to serve time in connection with the plot to overturn the 2020 election. Mr. Navarro must report to a federal prison in Miami on Tuesday.
Chief Justice Roberts, acting on his own without referring the matter to the full Supreme Court, said he saw no reason to disagree with an appeals court's determination that Mr. Navarro had not "met his burden to establish his entitlement to relief."
The chief justice added that his order applied only to the question of whether Mr. Navarro should remain free while he appealed and did not express a view on the appeal itself.
A House committee had sought testimony and documents from Mr. Navarro about his plan to stall the certification of the election by holding up the counting of electoral votes. He refused to comply, saying that Mr. Trump had told him to invoke executive privilege.
After Mr. Navarro was convicted and sentenced, Judge Amit P. Mehta rejected his request to remain free while on appeal, saying there were no substantial legal questions for the courts to consider. The key point, wrote Judge Mehta, who was appointed by President Barack Obama, was that "the court found no evidence that President Trump ever invoked the privilege."
A unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit agreed that Mr. Navarro, 74, must start serving his sentence. The judges said he “has not shown that his appeal presents substantial questions of law or fact likely to result in reversal, a new trial, a sentence that does not include a term of imprisonment, or a reduced sentence of imprisonment.”
The panel added, in an unsigned opinion, that Mr. Navarro had not shown that “the privilege has actually been invoked in this case in some manner by the president.”
In an emergency application asking the Supreme Court to intervene, Mr. Navarro’s lawyers said he was not a flight risk or a danger to public safety.
“For the first time in our nation’s history, a senior presidential adviser has been convicted of contempt of Congress after asserting executive privilege over a congressional subpoena,” they wrote.
They added that important legal questions remained unresolved. “Chief among them,” the lawyers wrote, “are whether an ‘affirmative’ invocation of executive privilege was required to preclude a prosecution for contempt of Congress; what was required of former President Trump for a ‘proper’ invocation of privilege; and whether such an invocation required ‘personal consideration,’ all questions of first impression.”
In response, the Justice Department lawyers wrote that Mr. Navarro’s arguments were all based on a faulty premise. “Executive privilege belongs to the executive branch, not to an individual present or former employee,” their brief said, “and if the head of that branch declines to assert the privilege, a subordinate cannot do so.”
Stay on topic or risk comment deletion.
Tags
Who is online
305 visitors
No respite for Mr Navaro...
heh, full cultural immersion. he should be really popular at first, right up until he's admitted into the prison infirmary.
Odd, I’ve been repeatedly told on this site that the Supreme Court is the trump court and only exists to help trump.
more kindling for a bed of coals before the big log gets tossed on...
Trump does not care about Navarro. This does not harm Trump.
And stop with the hyperbole. The key concern with the SCotUS is that they accepted the Trump immunity appeal. There is no valid reason to do so. There is no way that the SCotUS will overturn the ruling that Trump does not enjoy total immunity while in office. They will uphold the lower courts ruling. But they will not hear the case until late April and then will (based on the time it took for them to rule on eligibility) likely take months to deliver their ruling on immunity.
It is quite easy to argue that the SCotUS is complicit in Trump's delay tactics. That specific criticism does hold water.
Don't exaggerate the claim to an unqualified "SCotUS only exists to help Trump". That is ridiculous.
There we go...
Of coure the Supreme Court finding that a Trump advisor was illegally prosecuted by the Biden DOJ would help Trump. Are you at all familiar with his claims?
. The key concern with the SCotUS is that they accepted the Trump immunity appeal. There is no valid reason to do so.
Ask Jack Smith, he listed a number of them.
on't exaggerate the claim to an unqualified "SCotUS only exists to help Trump".
You should pay better attention
That was not the claim. You changed it. I stated that the SCotUS denying Navarro's appeal does not harm Trump.
You should engage in honest commentary rather then sophistry.
My claim, that you were replying to, was that "that the Supreme Court is the trump court and only exists to help trump.|"
If the Court actually cared about "helping Trump," it would have granted Navarro's appeal.
That wasn't the question before the court.
I observed that people are NOT making the claim that the “SCotUS only exists to help Trump". That is NOT what people claim. You are exaggerating. Read what I wrote.
Navarro was one of the people advocating for trump to use authoritarian tactics to stay in power after he lost in 2020. Let Navarro rot in jail for four months, maybe it will knock some sense into him.
Not a real crime, or the president's son would be in jail. It'll be in a country club type of lockup anyway.
Hmmm... so he's not been convicted and he's not going to jail?
Off topic. Only warning.
It is.
I was just watching navarro on TV ranting to the media in a strip mall parking lot across from the prison. I wonder if anyone has created a gofundme type page to keep him in ramen and velveeta and uh, ... personal items, for the duration of his sentence?
I wish the media would stop giving him a platform, but it's all he's got now.
he was hopping mad while touching all the trumpster bases. hopefully the facility has inmate counseling services.
so would Jim Jordan.
Jim Jordan and Hunter Biden are NOT topics of this article.
Oh, look a skinny newbie.
Bubba 01:666
"don't worry, I'll protect you..., sweetie..."
A lesson to ya...don't thumb your nose at Congress
another idiot that doesnt assert innocence, but claims "immunity"
Former Trump White House aide Peter Navarro made one last stand in front of television crews on Tuesday mere moments before getting thrown in the clink—but his fiery speech, framed to aid himself and the former president, was interrupted by a brutal fact-check from none other than Fox News.
“It was only with my case that somehow that has changed,” Navarro said, steps away from the Miami prison, claiming that he was entitled to “absolute testimonial immunity.”
“And here’s where the homework is, because the big constitutional separation of powers are these: Can Congress compel a senior White House adviser, what they call the alter ego of a president, to testify before Congress?” Navarro continued. “And executive privilege goes back to George Washington and his remarks to the Congress regarding the Jay Treaty, and he said, very simply and clearly, succinctly, elegantly, that to write to the Congress, he said, I cannot command you, as members of Congress, to come to me. You cannot command me to come to you.”
That warranted an immediate interjection by Fox News host Sandra Smith, who after a quick correction to Navarro’s rant, completely cut away from the beleaguered Trump ally to cover President Joe Biden’s campaign stops in Nevada and Arizona.
“To fact-check there, it is no longer an alleged crime that he’ll be serving this four-month sentence for,” Smith said. “He has obviously been convicted, and there was no evidence that would have excluded him, per executive privilege, from testifying.”
Navarro was ordered to appear at the federal prison in Miami by 2 p.m. on Tuesday, ready to physically but not mentally surrender. He had filed an emergency stay appeal on Friday to avoid spending the next four months in jail after he ignored a subpoena from Congress, but Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts threw that plea out the window on Monday.
by now, he's been thru prison orientation, got his new wardrobe and slippers, and found his cell and new cellmate. all that's left is to meet all of his new friends, have some dinner in the cafeteria, maybe watch a little TV, and then make a phone call to arrange making his new protection payments.
Conveniently located in the metropolitan area of downtown Miami, FDC Miami maybe the only Fed Prison with a view. This coed, low security facility gets 4 stars on Yelp.
sounds great! only club fed prisons have AC in the south. time to start taking the stamped in red stuff home, huh?
Stamped in red?
The wardrobe options vary from a beige or hunter green jumper for the gentlemen or a pink one for the ladies.
Depending on your status, you may be allowed some civilian clothes like at the Father Daughter Dance.