Peter Navarro, who served in the White House under former President Trump, was ordered to report to a Miami prison by March 19 to begin serving a four-month sentence for flouting a House Jan. 6 committee subpoena.
The order was revealed in a court filing Sunday by Navarro’s lawyer, Stanley Woodward.
In January, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta sentenced Navarro to four months in prison and ordered him to pay a fine of $9,500. The sentence was two months shorter than the six prosecutors had sought, but Mehta drastically reduced the whopping $200,000 fine sought by the Justice Department.
The former Trump White House aide is looking for an appeals court to intervene to block the sentence while he fights the conviction.
TRUMP WHITE HOUSE OFFICIAL PETER NAVARRO SENTENCED TO 4 MONTHS FOR DEFYING JAN 6 SUBPOENA
Sunday’s filing in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia states that Navarro has now been ordered to report to the custody of the Bureau of Prisons, FCI Miami, on or before 2:00 p.m. on March 19. “Accordingly, Dr. Navarro respectfully reiterates his request for an administratively [sic] stay so as to permit the Court to resolve the instant motion. Should this Court deny Dr. Navarro’s motion, he respectfully requests an administrative stay so as to permit the Supreme Court review of this Court’s denial,” Woodward wrote.
A former adviser to the president on trade and manufacturing policies, Navarro was convicted in September of two counts of contempt of Congress for defying a subpoena for documents and a deposition from the House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol. The subpoena required Navarro to appear and produce documents in February 2022 and sit for a deposition in March 2022, but Navarro refused to provide the materials and testify. As a private citizen, he was indicted on June 2, 2022.
According to Woodward’s latest filing, almost the entirety of the government’s opposition to Navarro’s request for release pending appeal, “is that former President Trump did not invoke executive privilege as to the Select Committee’s subpoena to Dr. Navarro.” He noted how matters of executive privilege and immunity have rarely been tested in court.
“In so arguing, the government appears to conflate the assertion of executive privilege with the district court’s requirement that President Trump ‘properly’ invoke executive privilege, the requirements of which the district court decided for the first time,” Woodward wrote.
He adds, “the government blithely dismisses Dr. Navarro’s argument that requiring a formal invocation by a former president risks vitiating the privilege entirely insofar as to hold otherwise would preclude a former president unexpectedly suffering from disability or death to assert the privilege and enable the recalcitrant or disgruntled to affirmatively waive the privilege unbeknownst to the president. The government does not reconcile this reality as against the elements of a ‘proper’ invocation of privilege it seeks this Court to affirm because it can not.”
The order means Navarro could become the first high profile Trump official to serve time in a case related to efforts to challenge the 2020 election results.
Another Trump aide, Steve Bannon, was convicted in July 2022 for similarly flouting a House Jan. 6 committee subpoena, but the judge in his case, U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols, granted Bannon’s motion to stay his four-month sentence while he appeals. By contrast, Mehta denied Navarro’s similar request to remain out of prison while he looks to overturn his conviction, and therefore, Woodward is bringing the matter to a three-judge appeals panel.
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