DOJ criminally indicts Trump stooge Peter Navarro, and now we’re off to the races
The DOJ has indicted Trump adviser Peter Navarro today on two counts of contempt of Congress and taken him into custody, per multiple major news outlets. He’ll now have to stand criminal trial. His arrest comes just one day after he appeared live on MSNBC and falsely claimed he was protected by executive privilege, while making threats against various public officials.
Days ago, Navarro let it be known that a DOJ grand jury had subpoenaed all of his communications with Donald Trump in relation to the attempted overthrow of the 2020 election. Grand juries never make these things public, and federal prosecutors very rarely do, so we typically only hear about them when a subpoena target decides to go public about it.
Once we learned that Navarro had been subpoenaed by the DOJ, it was clear that he would be indicted if he didn’t comply. The only question was whether the DOJ would indict him swiftly on the contempt charge and add any other charges later, or if the DOJ would wait and bring all of the charges at once. Now we have our answer.
Navarro must have either known, or strongly feared, imminent indictment when he opted to appear on MSNBC yesterday. Such that kind of threat-filled unhinged ranting is generally a sign that a villain expects he’s about to go down. Some will theorize that the DOJ may have stepped up the indictment after Navarro tried to muddy the waters yesterday, and that’s also possible. We’ll never know for certain. But the bottom line is that Navarro has been indicted.
This is a clear victory for the January 6th Committee, who fairly recently asked the DOJ to indict Navarro. The timing couldn’t be better. Even if Navarro sticks to his guns and doesn’t provide any last minute cooperation, the committee now gets to go into its televised hearings in six days and point to this indictment as proof of the legitimacy of its investigation. That may not matter to Trump’s base, but it’ll matter greatly to average Americans in the middle, who are the real target audience of these hearings.
The defeatists, who just yesterday were insisting on social media that Navarro had gotten away with it all, and have been proven wrong as usual, will now quickly work to come up with some new defeatist narrative. They’ll insist the charges are too weak. They’ll say the trial will take too long. They’ll whine about the fact that Navarro will likely be given bail while awaiting trial. They’ll say the prison sentence for contempt is too short. But none of that is relevant. The reality is that Navarro is going to prison unless he flips on Trump. And it’s pretty clear by now that Navarro will also end up being indicted on more serious charges for his underlying election crimes. It’s now also obvious that the DOJ is going to indict a whole lot more Trump people than Peter Navarro.
