Peter Navarro, a former Trump White House adviser, was sentenced in late January 2024 to four months in prison for criminal contempt of Congress.
He was convicted in September 2023 of two counts of refusing to testify and provide documents to the House Select Committee who was investigating the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, NBC News reported.
U.S. District Judge Amit P. Mehta, who delivered the sentence, criticized Navarro.
“What I find disappointing is that in all of this, even today, there’s little acknowledgment of what your obligation is as an American — to cooperate with Congress, to provide them with information that they’re seeking,” he said. “Fine, you think it’s a political hatchet job, it’s domestic terrorists running the committee. They had a job to do, and you made it harder. It’s really that simple.”
“You are not a victim,” Mehta continued. “You are not the object of a political prosecution, you aren’t. You have received every process you are due.”
Navarro had argued that he was protected in his refusal to appear before Congress by executive privilege that had been granted by President Trump. Mehta described Navarro’s argument as “pretty weak sauce.”
Navarro, a former economics and public policy professor at the University of California, Irvine, ran multiple times for political office in California but never won an election because winning elections often requires that people either like you or if they don’t like you, think you’re competent.
Neither applied to Navarro.
Larry Remer, who ran two of Navarro’s campaigns, describes his former client as “the biggest asshole I’ve ever known.”
Navarro, who was then a liberal Democrat, attacked the politics of the far right. The “insufferably bigoted, close-minded, and dangerously well-disciplined storm troopers on the religious right,” he wrote in a 1998 memoir, “wield far too much influence at the ballot box.” The GOP was in thrall to “buffoons, sociopaths, and zealots like Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, and Ralph Reed.”
https://time.com/5375727/peter-navarro/
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/08/trump-adviser-peter-navarro-california-170105
Navarro was not just a hopelessly incompetent campaigner, he also was a criminally inept one. In his campaign for mayor of San Diego, he was fined $4,000 for violating city and state laws for, in the words of one city attorney, because of “a pattern of disdain for the reporting laws that we’ve seen in the past from Peter Navarro.”
Navarro, however, rejected liberal Democrats after they rejected him. He then made a politically motivated move to the GOP and Donald Trump, who found in Navarro a kindred spirit:
Both are jackasses whose total and complete ignorance of immunology or infectious diseases — or for that matter anything else — did not keep them from talking about it.
Navarro put himself in conflict with Anthony Fauci, the longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and every immunologist — or for that matter any doctor — by supporting Trump who called for prescribing hydroxychloroquine for a coronavirus cure.
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/08/trump-adviser-peter-navarro-california-170105
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/12/07/peter-navarro-hatch-act-violations-443470
In July 2020 Navarro wrote a column for USA Today describing Fauci, who has served as one of the country’s foremost experts on infectious diseases for forty years, as “wrong about everything.”
This was biting praise from someone like Navarro who has been “right on nothing” for most of his life, whether it was understanding election laws or democracy itself. In early December 2020, the U.S. Office of Special Counsel called on Trump to take “appropriate disciplinary action,” against Navarro, including a fine or termination, for violating the Hatch Act, which prohibits White House and other executive branch officials from engaging in political activity.
Soon after the special counsel’s statement, Navarro released his bogus claims of election fraud during the 2020 Presidential Election, which the Washington Post described as what “might be the most embarrassing document created by a White House staffer.”
