A grand jury on June 3 indicted Peter Navarro, a former adviser to President Donald Trump, for contempt-of-Congress charges after he refused to cooperate with the controversial January 6 panel’s probe into the Capitol breach.
At the time of the vote, Jan. 6 Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) rejected the claims of executive privilege.
“Executive privilege doesn’t belong to just any White House official. It belongs to the president,” Thompson said. “Here, President Biden has been clear that executive privilege does not prevent cooperation with the Select Committee by either Mr. Scavino or Mr. Navarro.
“Even if a president has formally invoked executive privilege regarding testimony of a witness—which is not the case here—that witness has the obligation to sit down under oath and assert the privilege question by question. But these witnesses didn’t even bother to show up.”
The Democrat-controlled House later voted to certify the charge.
Now, a grand jury has voted to move forward with criminal proceedings against Navarro.
He has been indicted for two counts of contempt of Congress. One count is in response to his failure to produce documents requested by the committee while the other is for his failure to answer the committee’s subpoena to show up and testify.
The decision makes Navarro the second former Trump White House official to be indicted.
Navarro did not respond to a request for comment from The Epoch Times.
In October, the commission set its sights on former White House adviser Steve Bannon, who left the White House years before the Jan. 6 rally.
Trump’s attorneys have argued that Bannon and other former officials shouldn’t comply because the requested information is protected by Trump’s executive privilege.
The panel also set its sights recently on Ginni Thomas, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ wife, over claims that she texted Meadows during the Jan. 6 rally.
In view of the partisan nature of the summons and charges advanced by the commission some Republicans, including Trump, have accused it of a “witch hunt” exclusively targeting Democrats’ GOP enemies.
Others, like McCarthy, have been more ambiguous in their critiques of the committee. When the commission sent out its subpoena to Bannon, McCarthy argued that the ongoing legal disputes made the subpoena’s legitimacy unknown.
“They’re issuing an invalid subpoena,” McCarthy said. “Issuing an invalid subpoena weakens our power. He has the right to go to the court to see if he has executive privilege or not. I don’t know if he does or not, but neither does the committee. So they’re weakening the power of Congress itself by issuing an invalid subpoena.”
“In fact,” Berke continued, citing Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) refusal to place minority-selected members on the commission, “the Select Committee is not even operating in compliance with the rules its own members voted to put in place.”
With the decision of the federal grand jury to indict Navarro, the case will now move to criminal proceedings. If convicted, each count carries a minimum sentence of one month in jail or a maximum sentence of 12 months in jail, in addition to a fine ranging from $100 to $100,000.