July 21 (UPI) — A federal appeals court on Tuesday upheld the criminal conviction of Peter Navarro, a longtime adviser to U.S. President Donald Trump, for refusing to testify about the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Navarro was convicted of contempt by a jury in 2023 after he rejected a subpoena from the congressional committee investigating the insurrection.
In a book published in 2021, Navarro said he devised a strategy to delay Congress’ certification of the Electoral College vote on the results of the 2020 presidential election won by Joe Biden. He further talked about this strategy while promoting the book. This, in part, led the congressional committee to issue the subpoena seeking his testimony and related documents, none of which Navarro produced.
Navarro has claimed that Trump asserted executive privilege to keep him from testifying. However, judges have repeatedly said he has failed to produce evidence of this, and Trump has not backed up his claim.
“Dr. Navarro claimed executive privilege before even seeing the subpoena and refused to turn over documents, appear for his deposition or engage with the Select Committee’s efforts to accommodate his privilege claim,” Judge Patricia Millett wrote in the decision, which was made by a unanimous three-judge panel.
She wrote that Navarro’s claim failed because he also refused to produce documents and testimony that would not have been subject to executive privilege at all.
Navarro served a four-month sentence in 2024 but continues with his appeal as a matter of correcting precedent, his lawyer said Tuesday. He remains a senior Trump adviser.
“He intends to move swiftly with his appeal because his case affects every senior presidential adviser, regardless of political party, who believes in good faith they cannot comply with a congressional subpoena based on executive privilege,” said Abhishek Kambli, a former Justice Department attorney who recently took Navarro’s case.
Navarro is one of only two close Trump allies have faced criminal consequences over the insurrection. Steve Bannon was also convicted of criminal contempt for rejecting a subpoena and took his case to the Supreme Court before the Justice Department, after Trump’s reelection, said it would drop the indictment.
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