(Headline USA) Just a week after House Republicans gave Hunter Biden a free pass for his egregious displays of contempt for Congress, former Trump White House official Peter Navarro was sentenced by an Obama judge on Thursday to four months behind bars over his own resistance to a subpoena from House Democrats’ partisan Jan. 6 committee.
Navarro was the second Trump aide convicted of contempt of Congress charges. Former White House adviser Steve Bannon previously received a four-month sentence but is free pending appeal.
A federal prosecutor, John Crabb Jr., told the court in Navarro’s case that the Justice Department enforced the law “without fear, favor or political influence.”
“This is a righteous prosecution,” Crabb claimed.
Nonetheless, the latest example of two-tiered justice comes after the House Judiciary Committee renegotiated the terms of a subpoena with the president’s degenerate son–likely out of concern that the corrupt Biden Justice Department would refuse to prosecute.
Hunter Biden had flagrantly defied an earlier one with the tacit approval of the White House by first holding a press conference on the U.S. Capitol steps when he was due to appear in Congress. Later, as the House was considering the motion to hold him in contempt, he disrupted the proceeding by showing up and asked to testify publicly on the spot.
He has since agreed to a private deposition but is likely to stonewall interrogators by pleading the Fifth Amendment as the Justice Department is currently pressing two other cases against him related to tax fraud and gun violations. The House, meanwhile, has formalized an impeachment investigation against his father, President Joe Biden.
Navarro, who served as White House trade adviser, was found guilty of defying a subpoena for documents and a deposition from the House Jan. 6 committee.
At the time he said he was withholding them pending the disposition in an appeal before the Supreme Court over whether former President Donald Trump had the right to assert executive privilege.
However, far-left D.C. District Court Judge Amit Mehta barred him from making that argument at trial, saying that he didn’t show Trump had actually invoked it
Mehta told Navarro that it took “chutzpah” for him to assert that he accepted responsibility for his actions while also suggesting that his prosecution was politically motivated.
“You are not a victim. You are not the object of a political prosecution,” the Obama-appointed judge said. “These are circumstances of your own making.”
Justice Department prosecutors said Navarro tried to “hide behind claims of privilege” even before he knew what the committee wanted, showing a “disdain” for the committee that should warrant a longer sentence. Prosecutors had asked a judge to sentence him to six months behind bars and impose a $200,000 fine.
Defense attorneys said Trump did claim executive privilege, putting Navarro in an “untenable position,” and they had asked for a sentence of probation and a $100 fine.
The judge ordered Navarro to pay a $9,500 fine in addition to the four-month sentence.
Navarro’s attorneys filed a notice that he was appealing his conviction and sentence.
Mehta is allowing Navarro’s defense to submit a written brief on the question of allowing him to remain free pending appeal.
Defense attorney Stanley Woodward said Navarro believed that he was “duty bound” to assert executive privilege.
“He need not be punished to prove a point,” Woodward told the judge.
Navarro’s lawyers had advised him not to address the judge on Thursday, but he said he wanted to speak after hearing the judge express disappointment in him. Responding to a question about why he didn’t initially seek a lawyer’s counsel, he told the judge, “I didn’t know what to do, sir.”
The judge said Navarro should have known how to respond to a subpoena from the House committee because he received one several weeks after Bannon was charged with criminal contempt of Congress.
“I know you think it’s a political hatchet job,” Mehta told Navarro.
The House committee “had a job to do, and you made it harder,” the judge added. “It’s really that simple.”
Navarro also said that the Jan. 6 committee had led him to believe that it accepted his invocation of executive privilege.
“Nobody in my position should be put in conflict between the legislative branch and the executive branch,” he told the judge.
Mehta said that asserting executive privilege is not “magic dust to avoid a duty.”
“It’s not a get-out-of-jail-free card,” the judge added.
The Monopoly metaphor has become a common trope deployed by radical leftists in their lawfare attacks on Trump, including Mehta’s colleague, radical Marxist Judge Tanya Chutkan, who used it in the initial ruling to deny Trump’s assertion of presidential immunity—a case that is now pending before the Supreme Court.
Judge Chutkan has a weird fixation with Trump being in jail.
Last year, she suggested to one J6 defendant that Trump should be behind bars. Now she claims presidential immunity doesn’t result in a “get-out-of-jail-free” card.
Monopoly game legal theory. pic.twitter.com/LBUnzXXw3W
— Julie Kelly 🇺🇸 (@julie_kelly2) December 2, 2023
In its final report, the House Jan. 6 panel, which was hand-picked by then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., declared that Trump criminally engaged in a “multi-part conspiracy” to overturn the election results and failed to act to stop his supporters from storming the Capitol.
It has since been revealed that the committee deleted more than 100 encrypted files and preserved only about half of the four terabytes of data it produced from its monthslong show trial.
The committee also was exposed for its selective cherry-picking of footage, which conveyed a false narrative about the Jan. 6, 2021, uprising to fit the leftist talking points that it was an insurrection.
That abject falsehood has been at the heart of more than 1,000 politically motivated prosecutions—including that of Trump himself in the case currently pending before Chutkan, which was brought by illegitimate special counsel Jack Smith using the evidence compiled by the Jan. 6 committee.
Navarro’s sentencing comes after a judge rejected his bid for a new trial. His attorneys had argued that jurors may have been improperly influenced by political protesters outside the courthouse when they took a break from deliberations. Shortly after their break, the jurors found Navarro guilty of two misdemeanor counts of contempt of Congress.
But the judge found that Navarro didn’t show that the eight-minute break had any effect on the September verdict. He found no protest was underway and no one approached the jurors—they interacted only with each other and the court officer assigned to accompany them.
Bannon, who also made executive-privilege arguments, was convicted of two counts.
Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press
