Former White House trade adviser Peter Navarro has been serving time in prison for refusing to comply with a Congressional subpoena, and has lost a separate legal bid to prevent having to turn over purported presidential records from his personal email account via The Epoch Times.
In an order dated April 1, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, consisting of three Democratically appointed judges, dismissed Mr. Navarro’s appeal. In it, he attempted to avoid giving up some of his White House records to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), claiming that they were personal rather than official.
Without a guarantee that the documents wouldn’t be used against him in his independent criminal trial for contempt of Congress for eluding legislators’ subpoenas about the Capitol breach on January 6, Mr. Navarro had refused to turn over the documents.
It has been noted at one point during the appeal process, Mr. Navarro argued in court filings that the Department of Justice (DOJ) lacked authority to demand immediate production of records, as defined by the Presidential Records Act (PRA), from his time as an economic adviser in the Trump administration.
“The United States has been entirely unable to identify a single statutory section which evinces the Congressional that such broad power are at their disposal,” he wrote in the March 26, 2023 reply in support of his motion for stay pending appeal.
“The reason for that is simple: Congress never intended to give the United States such broad powers in the PRA,” Mr. Navarro continued. “Congress wrote no sections which would establish that the United States must have those documents forthwith without determining whether such compelled production would damage the rights of the creator or recipient of such records.”
