The real reason Peter Navarro just gave away these January 6th Trump world secrets
This week longtime Trump political advisor Peter Navarro began flat out admitting, to anyone who will listen, that he and Steve Bannon conspired with a large number of congressional Republicans to try to overthrow the 2020 election results. This is nothing short of felony election tampering. So why is Navarro confessing?
The doomsday types are loudly insisting that Navarro is now bragging about his crimes because there have been “no consequences” for anyone involved in January 6th. But this is nothing short of ludicrous. Navarro’s self-confessed partner in crime, Steve Bannon, was just arrested in relation to the January 6th Committee probe and will stand criminal trial with a prison sentence likely to follow. Of course Bannon isn’t “getting away” with it, so there’s no sound reason for Navarro to think that he will either. But what’s really going on?
For one thing, Peter Navarro has a new Trump-related book to hawk. When these kinds of books become bestsellers, they can potentially be worth millions of dollars to the author. In fact we all just saw Mark Meadows try (and fail) to cash in with a Trump-related book that flopped. But the money from a book deal is huge when it works. In fact it can be enough to fund a fancy criminal defense for someone who knows they’re going to end up indicted and put on trial (this should perhaps be illegal but it’s not).
So it’s not difficult to figure out that Peter Navarro would like to sell copies of his book, and the best way to do that is to stir up as much controversy as possible. That requires revealing some juicy dirt about your enemies, or your allies, or even about yourself. Perhaps Navarro figures he’s going to be indicted in relation to January 6th anyway, so he’s willing to confess to some aspects of his crimes in order to raise money to pay for his lawyers. This would be a deranged strategy, but at least one former Trump White House advisor has in fact described Navarro as a “deranged” person.
Another angle: Navarro is incriminating himself and Steve Bannon, at a time when Bannon is already criminally indicted at the federal level and reportedly under active criminal investigation in New York on top of it all. Even if prosecutors already have enough to nail Bannon, it couldn’t hurt to have a cooperating witness on top of it all. So perhaps this is Navarro’s way of letting everyone involved know that he’s willing to flip on Bannon in exchange for leniency or immunity.
On the other hand, Peter Navarro is – objectively speaking – a complete idiot. And again, some of his own former colleagues think he’s deranged. So maybe he’s just flat out self destructing here by bragging about his crimes. But regardless of the specific reason (or combination or reasons) that Navarro is doing this, he’s certainly not “getting away” with anything. His co-conspirator Bannon has already been arrested. Now it’s just a matter of how smartly or (more likely) stupidly Navarro plays his own hand.
