Peter Navarro’s Green Bay Sweep
When a month ago former Director of the National Trade Council Peter Navarro referred to efforts to subvert the 2020 presidential election as a “Green Bay Sweep,” MSNBC host Ari Melber said, “Do you realize you are describing a coup?” Apparently the House Select Committee on January 6 thinks so too. On Wednesday Navarro was issued a subpoena by the Committee.
“Mr. Navarro appears to have information directly relevant to the Select Committee’s investigation into the causes of the January 6th attack on the Capitol,” Democratic Rep. Bennie Thompson, who chairs the panel, said in a statement that was part of the subpoena letter. “He hasn’t been shy about his role in efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election and has even discussed the former President’s support for those plans.”
So what is a Green Bay Sweep, anyway? It’s a Steve Bannon-created metaphor comparing what Bannon, Navarro and their co-conspirators tried to do to steal the 2020 presidential election with the playbook of the Green Bay Packers from the 50s and 60s. When playing offense, the Packers would flood a zone with blockers and advance the ball slowly but dependably behind them until they could get close enough to the end zone to make a safe pass or end run for a touchdown. It was a reliable (and somewhat boring) way to win. The difference is it’s legal. A coup is not.
What Navarro, Bannon and their fellow plotters were attempting was to block the electoral college vote count on January 6, 2020, with challenges issued by various Republican members of the House and Senate who were secretly aligned in favor of Donald Trump. Each challenge could take up to 2 hours of debate by each chamber, individually. Or so the plot went.
The goal was not to get the election overturned on January 6th but to create such a spectacle that Pence would be forced to exercise his alleged authority as president of the Senate to “put the certification of the election on ice for at least another several weeks” while Congress and the state legislatures pursued the alleged fraud allegations. The dark particulars of exactly how this would keep Trump in office after that remain obscure.
Navarro claimed there were as many as 100 senators and congressmen committed to executing the plan. However, and here’s the rub, the plan was dependent on Vice President Mike Pence being on board and exceeding his authority to stop the vote. What the plotters didn’t realize was, not only did Pence not want to cooperate with them, he knew that he couldn’t cooperate under law. He simply lacked the authority to do so.
But that doesn’t render the plot harmless. A conspiracy to overthrow the government, no matter how stupidly planned or impossible of execution, is still an attempted coup d’état. That is one definition of treason, and Committee chair Bennie Thompson would like Mr. Navarro to tell the Committee what he so freely and openly told Ari Melber. Should Navarro refuse to do so he might try invoking executive privilege, which would be an odd usage of that exemption considering that he said it out loud to millions of people on Melber’s show “The Beat.”
That’s where Navarro stands right now, between a rock of his and Bannon’s devising and the very hard place known as the United States House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack. There may be two ways out for Navarro, cooperation or prison. Either way is fine with me. The evidence the Committee already has of an unlawful attempt by Trump and his cronies to overthrow the sovereign authority of the United States of America is overwhelming. We the People don’t really require the help of the traitor known as Peter Navarro to prove it. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.