Peter Navarro (profile here), a former Trump adviser involved in efforts to overturn the 2020 election, was arrested Friday for contempt of Congress. Ex-Trump fixer Michael Cohen, who ought to know, thinks he’ll go to prison.
Navarro, who’s not a lawyer, plans to represent himself. On Saturday, he unveiled the first leg of his defense: Buy his book. Specifically,
“I need everybody in America to buy [my] book on Amazon today. That is for two reasons: One, that’s going to be my legal defense fund – these people are coming at me hard – and number two, that book is about why we need to take back the House of Representatives from the kangaroos on Capitol Hill.”
MSN says (here) the January 6 panel subpoenaed Navarro “after he admitted in public, including in his book In Trump Time, that he was part of a team of Trump’s inner circle who planned on pressuring then Vice President Mike Pence to stop the certification of the 2020 election results,” adding that he “refused to comply with the House subpoena, citing executive privilege.”
The other leg of his defense apparently is that the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot and Trump’s attempted coup is a “kangaroo committee.” That’s actually immaterial. What’s relevant in court is whether it’s operating with congressional authority (spoiler alert: it is) and has power to subpoena witnesses and evidence (spoiler alert: it does).
Thought for the day:
Stupidity isn’t a crime, per se, but isn’t a defense either; and raises the odds of people who break the law being convicted.
I wouldn’t bet very heavily on Navarro avoiding the slammer.
Meanwhile, after his arrest, Navarro had complaints. See photo at left, but his gripes don’t stop there.
He also complained that “his arrest prevented him from appearing on Mike Huckabee’s TV show,” and he was “incarcerated in the same cell as John Hinkley, Jr.,” who shot Reagan in 1981.
It was too much for MSNBC anchor John Heilemann, who cut away from Navarro’s post-arrest press conference because there’s “only so much bug-eyed gibberish that we can tolerate here” on his network (see story here). That kinda sums up Navarro’s legal defense, too.