A federal jury in Washington started deliberating on Thursday in the prison trial of Peter Navarro, a high aide to President Donald J. Trump, who’s charged with contempt of Congress after he ignored a subpoena final yr from the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 assault.
In delivering closing arguments, prosecutors and protection legal professionals largely agreed on the information in the case: that Mr. Navarro balked when ordered to cooperate with the panel. But in rivalry was whether or not that act amounted to a willful defiance of Congress, or a easy misunderstanding between Mr. Navarro and the committee’s employees.
“The defendant, Peter Navarro, made a choice,” stated Elizabeth Aloi, a prosecutor. “He didn’t want to comply and produce documents, and he didn’t want to testify, so he didn’t.”
Detailing the House committee’s correspondence with Mr. Navarro, Ms. Aloi stated that even after the panel requested Mr. Navarro to clarify any opposition he had to giving sworn testimony, he continued to stonewall.
“The defendant chose allegiance to President Trump over compliance with the subpoena,” she stated. “That is contempt. That is a crime.”
Stanley Woodward Jr., a lawyer for Mr. Navarro, countered that the federal government had merely failed to present that Mr. Navarro’s determination not to comply was something apart from “inadvertence, accident or mistake.”
If Mr. Navarro have been to be convicted on the 2 counts of contempt of Congress he’s charged with, he might face up to a yr in jail and a positive of up to $100,000 for every rely.
Evoking pictures of violence and chaos on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, prosecutors additionally emphasised the position that Mr. Navarro’s conduct after the 2020 election could have performed in drawing scores of rioters to Washington that day to disrupt Congress’s certification of the outcomes.
That triggered Mr. Woodward to bristle, telling the jury repeatedly that the federal government was counting on emotional descriptions of Jan. 6 to tarnish Mr. Navarro’s picture, moderately than proving he ever supposed to blow off lawmakers.
“This case is not about what happened on Jan. 6,” Mr. Woodward stated. “What happened on Jan. 6 was abhorrent.”
As the Jan. 6 committee sought to interview senior White House aides final yr, Mr. Navarro and Stephen Okay. Bannon, a former strategist and adviser to Mr. Trump, stood out for his or her baseless statements about election fraud, employees members who had labored on the committee stated in testimony on Wednesday.
In specific, Mr. Navarro and Mr. Bannon had collaborated on a technique, referred to as the Green Bay Sweep, supposed to encourage Congress to reject the outcomes of the election in key swing states that had been referred to as for Joseph R. Biden Jr.
“It became clear to members of the investigative staff that efforts to overturn the 2020 election directly fed into the unrest at the Capitol,” Marc Harris, a senior investigative counsel, testified.
But at the same time as others in Mr. Trump’s inside circle cooperated, to a level, with the committee, Mr. Navarro and Mr. Bannon blatantly disregarded its calls for.
Both males claimed that their determination rested on the truth that Mr. Trump had asserted government privilege to block them from testifying. But after each have been indicted on contempt of Congress fees, federal judges dominated that these claims, for various causes, didn’t quantity to a legitimate protection in court docket.
In Mr. Navarro’s case, Judge Amit P. Mehta discovered that he by no means marshaled convincing proof that Mr. Trump had personally instructed him to ignore the subpoena. In a listening to earlier than the trial, Judge Mehta additionally stated that even when the previous president had clearly asserted that privilege, the committee was not in search of to interview Mr. Navarro about his personal conversations with Mr. Trump, which is what would historically be protected.
Accordingly, Judge Mehta instructed jurors on Thursday that any point out of government privilege through the trial couldn’t be thought-about a protection for Mr. Navarro’s conduct.
“Even if he believed he had an excuse, it does not matter,” Ms. Aloi stated moments later. “He had to comply with the subpoena no matter what, and assert any privileges in the way Congress set forth.”
