Former Trump Advisor Finding Out About Consequences

Navarro acted ‘above the law,’ prosecutors say

Peter Navarro was a perfect candidate to be a Trump White House advisor. He has a history of being overconfident about always being right and is not bound by convention. Or truth, for that matter. I suspect he may actually believe stuff he says, but it’s so easily disproved that the endorphin high thinking he got away with something keeps him coming back. 

Navarro’s propensity to babble nonsense in front of the media included defending indefensible administration propaganda about the COVID pandemic, especially concerning use of a malaria drug to treat the disease.

Today isn’t going to be a good day for Navarro. Nobody but himself thinks he has a snowball’s chance in hell of being acquitted on two misdemeanor counts of contempt based on his refusal to provide documents and testimony to the (since disbanded) House select committee investigating circumstances surrounding the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol.

From a Los Angeles Times column in June, 2022:

• Investigators would like to know more about Navarro’s interactions with the scheming former president and about Navarro’s so-called Green Bay Sweep, the plan he wrote calling for Vice President Mike Pence to block the Senate from certifying the 2020 election and for Republican-led legislatures to decertify the vote in key battleground states.

• Navarro happily blabbed to reporters about his subversive efforts and described them in a book after the election, which the committee noted in the subpoena he chose to ignore.

• Lately, however, the armchair mutineer has been reduced to mewling on Fox News and other Trumpaganda media outlets about his treatment by the justice system he sought to subvert — “Who are these people? This is not America” — and grifting appeals for money to help bail him out of his legal jam.

The prosecution called three witnesses connected with the January 6 committee. Navarro’s defense had zero witnesses after U.S. District Judge Amit P. Mehta ruled the former Trump advisor could not use executive privilege as a defense.

Navarro claimed he told committee members to contact Trump about what might be protected by executive privilege. No evidence was produced about the former president invoking executive privilege, mostly because he didn’t. And there was no corroborating evidence that the discussions concerning privilege ever took place.

Right-wing provocateur Stephen K. Bannon was convicted last summer of contempt of Congress for the same behavior and is out pending appeal on a sentence of four months of incarceration and paying a fine of $6,500.

Prior to the 2016 election, Navarro was tasked by the presumptive GOP nominee to defend the billionaire’s economic proposals in response to a scathing analysis by researchers at Moody’s Analytics.

I’ll quote myself and the Washington Post about his response:

• Navarro whipped out a half-baked 11-page statement hoping to refute their conclusion that Trump’s plans for trade, taxes and immigration would effectively kill nearly 10 million American jobs and cause an unusually long recession.

• The Washington Post’s snarky headline, “Trump economic plan is the best and everybody should love it, Trump adviser says” should give you a clue of what they found:

• In the Trump-requested report, a University of California-Irvine economist and business school professor, Peter Navarro, contends that deporting 11 million immigrants who have entered the United States illegally would not hurt the economy. That’s because those immigrants would cease to draw public assistance and their jobs would be taken by native-born Americans, particularly African-Americans.

• Navarro also contends that Trump’s threat of high tariffs on Chinese goods would force Chinese leaders to change their trading practices and eliminate their trade surplus with America, boosting economic growth in the United States.

• And he says Moody’s was wrong to rely on other independent analyses that have concluded that Trump’s tax cutting plan would increase the federal budget deficit by trillions of dollars over a decade. Those analyses are wrong, Navarro says, because Trump has said his tax plan will not increase the deficit.

His real problem with the Moody’s analysis had little to do with actual data and more to do with the fact that the lead author of the Moody’s plan was a Democrat and had contributed to Hillary Clinton.

In December 2020, the United States Office of Special Counsel ruled that Navarro repeatedly violated the Hatch Act by using his official capacity to influence elections in speaking against Trump's opponent Joe Biden during the presidential campaign.. 

After the election he was part of the coterie, including Steve Bannon, who coordinated an effort called "The Green Bay Sweep", with more than 100 Republican state legislators, to overturn the election.

Navarro penned a “special report” alleging widespread election fraud in December 2020. Part of what made it so special was that it was written by staffers in his office beginning two weeks before the election. 

“It’s going to be wild.” Navarro’s ghost written work was cited by the former President on December 19 as a reason why people should come to Washington DC on January 6.

Nowadays Navarro’s role in life is to use his media appearances to play the victim and ask viewers for money. From the Washington Post:

• “Do I look like a rich man?” Navarro, a longtime academic with hawkish views on China trade who joined the Trump administration at its outset and stayed until the tumultuous end, said last week. As photographers squatted and snapped, he clutched the lapels of his pinstriped jacket and held it open. “This is the same suit I wore in 2017 going into the White House, okay?”

• Behind him, shuffling ever closer, a 38-year-old heckler who goes by “Anarchy Princess” waved a poster-size placard declaring, “TRUMP LOST (And you know it!).” When the sign brushed Navarro’s shoulders, he stopped talking, spun to his left and tried grabbing it — but Anarchy Princess wouldn’t let go. “Bro,” she scolded him, “you’re already facing charges! Go ahead and commit another crime!” Navarro, with a wooden smile, turned back to the microphones. “Here’s the thing,” he said, “if you look at the partisan nature of what’s —”

• “Trump lost! Trump to prison!” Anarchy Princess interrupted. “— the partisan nature of what’s going on, you can understand the partisan nature of …” He put it this way: “It’s the use and abuse of our legal system to punish political rivals. And one of the ways they try to do that is, they try to put you in prison, which they’re trying to do with me. But it’s also to bankrupt you, okay?”

The confrontation has gone viral. The woman in question (X/Twitter handle here: @SatireAP ) regularly trolls reactionaries on Capitol Hill.

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Peter Navarro started his ascension into the political world in San Diego, where he ran for office five times, garnering less support every time he ran. In his last shot for office (City Council, 2001 special election) he received 7.85% of the vote.

From an article in Politico titled Navarro left a trail of political wreckage in California

• Larry Remer, a veteran Democratic political consultant who ran two of Navarro’s campaigns, describes his former client as “the biggest asshole I’ve ever known.’’

• In San Diego, Navarro “came on the scene as a disruptive force...as a force of destruction from the progressive left,’’ says Remer. As the founder of a no-growth group called Prevent Los Angelization Now, “he tapped into something that was very strong.’’

• A former Republican and independent, Navarro made the switch to the Democratic Party after his independent run for mayor in 1992. In subsequent losing campaigns for city council, county supervisor and Congress, he dismissed the GOP as aligned to an “every man for himself” approach, at one point arguing that instead, “we ought to progressively tax the rich to help everybody else.”

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MSNBC’s Chris Hayes invited former Trump attorney Michael Cohen as a guest yesterday, and here’s what he had to say:

• "The extent of the damage that Donald Trump causes for those people who get caught up—like myself—in this cult of Trump, this dumpster cult, it’s so far reaching that Peter Navarro has not yet contemplated the full extent of it."

Hump Day News Hits

New jail-death lawsuit accuses sheriff’s deputies of being involved in drug sales behind bars Via the Union-Tribune. (Well, surprise, surprise, surprise!)

• Sheriff’s deputies have tolerated illegal drugs inside San Diego County jails and profited from their sale and distribution for years, according to a new lawsuit filed by the relatives of a man who died in custody last year.

• Lawyers representing the family of Leonel Villasenor laid out the allegations in a 61-page complaint filed this week in San Diego federal court. Villasenor’s minor child, who is identified in court records only as A.N.Y., and his mother, Yvette Young, are demanding more than $40 million in combined damages.

• Villasenor, who was 31, died in the Men’s Central Jail in downtown San Diego last year after ingesting a combination of fentanyl and methamphetamine, the lawsuit alleges.

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Mike Huckabee: Election will be decided by ‘bullets, not ballots’ if Trump is prevented from running Via DeadState 

• During a recent episode of his Huckabee program on the Trinity Broadcasting Network, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee said that if Donald Trump’s legal cases prevent him from running for president in 2024, there’s likely going to be violence.

• “Do you know how political opponents to those in power are dealt with in third-world dictatorships, banana republics, and communist regimes?” Huckabee said in a video flagged by Right Wing Watch. “The people in power use their police agencies to arrest their opponents for made-up crimes in an attempt to discredit them, bankrupt them, imprison them, exile them, or all of the above.”

• “If you are not paying attention, you may not realize that Joe Biden is using exactly those tactics to make sure that Donald Trump is not his opponent in 2024,” he continued.

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Nihilistic Poll Brained Celebration of Nothingness by Hamilton Nolan at How Things Work

• Entertainment is, and has always been, more profitable than journalism. The problem for society is that a steady diet of politics-as-entertainment eventually dissolves the moral issues at the core of politics and washes them out of the public conversation. 

• All you are left with is looks and verve and personality and style and who’s up and who’s down. When the media forsakes its role as the moral referee—when they outsource their politics desks to a bunch of former White House spokespeople who slide effortlessly into a new starring role as Person Who Looks Like They Are Doing News While Reciting Talking Points—it leaves the public, who we are all supposed to be working for, ignorant. 

• It allows politicians to glide into office on charm and then proceed to do a series of monstrous things that people do not understand. This sort of moral emptiness, this decision by the establishment media to not even try to wrestle with the material side of political decisions, is driven not by ideology, but by nihilism. They don’t want to do it the hard way, and nobody is making them.