A federal jury in Washington started deliberating on Thursday within the felony trial of Peter Navarro, a prime 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 attorneys largely agreed on the information within the case: that Mr. Navarro balked when ordered to cooperate with the panel. But in competition was whether or not that act amounted to a willful defiance of Congress, or a easy misunderstanding between Mr. Navarro and the committee’s workers.
“The defendant, Peter Navarro, made a choice,” mentioned 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 mentioned that even after the panel requested Mr. Navarro to clarify any opposition he needed to giving sworn testimony, he continued to stonewall.
“The defendant chose allegiance to President Trump over compliance with the subpoena,” she mentioned. “That is contempt. That is a crime.”
Stanley Woodward Jr., a lawyer for Mr. Navarro, countered that the federal government had merely failed to point out that Mr. Navarro’s choice to not 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 may resist a yr in jail and a high quality of as much as $100,000 for every depend.
Evoking pictures of violence and chaos on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, prosecutors additionally emphasised the function 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 induced 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, fairly than proving he ever supposed to blow off lawmakers.
“This case is not about what happened on Jan. 6,” Mr. Woodward mentioned. “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 Ok. Bannon, a former strategist and adviser to Mr. Trump, stood out for his or her baseless statements about election fraud, workers members who had labored on the committee mentioned in testimony on Wednesday.
In specific, Mr. Navarro and Mr. Bannon had collaborated on a method, often called the Green Bay Sweep, supposed to encourage Congress to reject the outcomes of the election in key swing states that had been known 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 choice rested on the truth that Mr. Trump had asserted govt privilege to dam them from testifying. But after each have been indicted on contempt of Congress costs, federal judges dominated that these claims, for various causes, didn’t quantity to a sound 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 disregard the subpoena. In a listening to earlier than the trial, Judge Mehta additionally mentioned that even when the previous president had clearly asserted that privilege, the committee was not searching for 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 govt privilege through the trial couldn’t be thought of a protection for Mr. Navarro’s conduct.
“Even if he believed he had an excuse, it does not matter,” Ms. Aloi mentioned moments later. “He had to comply with the subpoena no matter what, and assert any privileges in the way Congress set forth.”
Source: www.nytimes.com