CONTEMPTIBLE — Peter Navarro has never been particularly well known for his tact or humility. So it was hardly a surprise to see the obstreperous former Trump White House advisor emerge from a federal courthouse in Washington D.C. Thursday afternoon after his conviction for contempt of Congress and present himself as some sort of martyr.
“I said from the beginning I am willing to go to prison to settle this issue,” he said, “but I also know that the likelihood of my going to prison is relatively small because we are right on this issue.”
The “issue” is whether a former White House official can completely blow off a congressional subpoena after his boss has left office and after the sitting president has made clear that he is not invoking executive privilege over the relevant communications. Much as Navarro might like it to be, this is not the high-minded, momentous constitutional issue that he is claiming it is.
How did he get here? The short answer is that Navarro basically did this to himself.
By late 2021, the House January 6 committee was deep into its investigation into Trump and his allies’ efforts to overturn the 2020 election, but some witnesses had proven unwilling to cooperate or comply with subpoenas. It was not clear whether or to what extent the Justice Department would be willing to prosecute referrals for contempt of Congress under the circumstances, but the first such prosecution emerged with Steve Bannon in November 2021.
At that point, everyone was on notice: The DOJ was not simply going to look away or slow-walk the criminal referrals from the January 6 committee on this issue.
The following month, the House held former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows in contempt. Then, in April 2022, the House voted to hold both Navarro and Trump social media manager Dan Scavino in contempt as well. Navarro was indicted by the Justice Department in June.
Given the timeline, it seems clear that Navarro could have avoided his prosecution in a variety of different ways. He could have attempted to comply with the subpoena for documents by producing a log of responsive material — even if he believed the underlying material was protected by executive privilege. He could have complied with the subpoena for testimony by showing up and invoking various privileges and protections as he and his lawyers deemed appropriate, including both executive privilege and his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.
Those are the sorts of things that other people did. Meadows and Scavino, for instance, appear to have ultimately avoided prosecution because their lawyers engaged somewhat with the committee and, in Meadows’ case, produced some documents on his behalf. Navarro, for his part, was firmly defiant from the start.
If at some point Navarro thought that he might be able to call the bluff of either the committee or the Justice Department, that hope should have dissipated as soon as Bannon was indicted.
After that, it was not much of a leap to expect prosecutors to treat Navarro similarly. To be sure, the two differed in one way — Navarro was actually working at the White House after the 2020 election, while Bannon had left years earlier — but that was not enough to deter prosecutors.
Navarro, of course, remains defiant. He is convinced that his case is eventually headed to the Supreme Court (which is questionable) and he now awaits sentencing. At the moment, it is unclear whether the presiding judge will allow Navarro to remain out on bail pending his appeal to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, which is what happened to Bannon.
For the time being, a fairly clear lesson has emerged from the Justice Department’s handling of these cases: You may be able to screw around a bit with Congress and perhaps even string them along to avoid fully complying with their subpoenas. You cannot, however, completely thumb your nose at them and expect to avoid prosecution.
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— Pelosi will seek reelection: The San Francisco Democrat and first female speaker of the House told volunteers today that she would seek reelection in 2024, extending a 36-year House career and freezing her would-be California successors in a long-standing holding pattern. Shortly before announcing on Twitter, Pelosi told volunteers she would run again at a breakfast for them near downtown San Francisco, at the lodge of a local union for plumbers and pipefitters. She chose that venue because she wanted to tell her “closest supporters” in labor first, according to a close adviser who was granted anonymity to speak candidly. She has no other public events planned today, the person added.
— Alito rejects call to recuse in tax case: Justice Samuel Alito is emphatically rejecting calls for him to recuse himself from a closely watched tax case because he sat for interviews with a prominent conservative lawyer that became attention-grabbing articles for The Wall Street Journal opinion page. In an unusual four-page statement accompanying a routine Supreme Court order list Friday morning, Alito turned down the request from Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats that he step aside from the case the court has agreed to hear this term involving the constitutionality of wealth taxes. “There is no valid reason for my recusal in this case,” Alito wrote. “There was nothing out of the ordinary about the interviews in question.”
— DeSantis-packed court skeptical of Florida’s long-standing abortion protections: The conservative majority on Florida’s Supreme Court today expressed skepticism that long-standing abortion protections, enshrined in the state’s Constitution, were intended to safeguard the procedure. The justices heard arguments in a legal challenge to Florida’s 15-week abortion ban, which provides no exceptions for victims of rape or incest. The state’s GOP-led Legislature approved it and Gov. Ron DeSantis signed it into law in 2022 — and have since approved an even more restrictive ban at six weeks of pregnancy.
SHAKY GROUND — A number of Donald Trump’s allies are growing concerned that his lead in Iowa’s first-in-the-nation caucuses isn’t built to last, reports NBC News. Trump supporters are trying to beef up the campaign’s lean Iowa operation with more experienced hires. They are scrambling to fill roles handling regional political work around the state — jobs that “should have been filled six to eight months ago,” according to one Republican operative based in Iowa.
And they are preparing for months of battle against Republican presidential opponents who trail badly in the polls but have built better machinery to find and secure votes, according to interviews with a dozen sources including longtime Trump campaign allies, state and local officials in Iowa and GOP strategists.
ARM IN ARM — Not long ago, it looked like Kristi Noem’s star was flaming out. Following a turbulent first term, the South Dakota governor elected not to run for president, and the media turned its focus elsewhere. But if the 2024 primary is in part a tryout to be former President Donald Trump’s next running mate, Noem’s national standing appears to have been rekindled. She’s suddenly front and center in the veepstakes.
Noem is running a $5 million national ad blitz — a taxpayer-funded effort backed by Covid aid designed to lure more workers to South Dakota, but with the benefit of increasing her profile. She is doing regular hits on Fox News. And, perhaps most important, she is avoiding any of the pitfalls of a presidential run of her own — no hardball questions about Jan. 6 or Trump’s indictments and no pressure to perform in a debate.
Instead, at a sold-out GOP fundraiser in Rapid City, S.D. today, the governor will stand beside Trump as she introduces him in her home state. A person familiar with the plans told POLITICO on Thursday night that she would use the occasion to endorse the former president.
THREAT ASSESSMENT — During his 2018 run for governor, Ron DeSantis not only pledged to protect Florida’s Everglades and waterways, he also acknowledged that humans played a role in exacerbating the climate change that threatened them, writes the New York Times.
“I think that humans contribute to what goes on around us,” Mr. DeSantis told the editorial board of The Florida Times-Union, a Jacksonville newspaper. “The resiliency and some of the sea-level rise, we have to deal with that,” he added, although he pointedly said he was “not Al Gore,” referring to the former Democratic vice president who reinvented himself as a climate change activist.
Now running for president five years later, the Florida governor no longer repeats his previous view that humans affect the climate, even as scientists say that the hurricanes battering his state are being intensified by man-made global warming.
HALF MEASURES — The U.S. military is preparing to cut its presence in Niger nearly in half in the next few weeks, as troops move out of the capital of Niamey amid widespread protests, according to two Defense Department officials with direct knowledge of the move, writes Lara Seligman.
DOD recently began repositioning a number of forces away from the airport at Niamey to a second, smaller base at Agadez, some 500 miles away, Pentagon spokesperson Sabrina Singh told reporters on Thursday. As a result, the overall number of troops in Niger could drop from 1,200 before the July 26 coup to somewhere “right in the middle” of 500 to 1,000 in the next few weeks, said one of the DOD officials, who like others interviewed for this story was granted anonymity to discuss sensitive plans.
This would be the first significant movement of U.S. troops out of Niger since a military junta seized power in late July. The Biden administration has yet to officially call the incident a “coup,” a label that would require ending military and other aid to the country. However, the Pentagon has suspended training operations with Nigerien forces. Meanwhile, flights out of Agadez, a U.S.-funded drone base key to hunting militants in the region, have been sporadic.
Any major reduction in U.S. military presence in Niger would be a blow to the counterterrorism fight in the Sahel. The French military, which also has a major presence in Niger, is reportedly in talks with the military junta to withdraw its forces.
The DOD officials cautioned that no final decision has been made on the exact number of U.S. troops that remain in Niger after the repositioning. That figure depends on how many can be accommodated at Agadez and how many Pentagon leaders decide are needed to continue the counterterrorism mission, said the officials.
CUTTING THE CORD — For about 15 million Charter Spectrum customers in the United States, all channels associated with Disney — including ESPN, right as the football season starts and the U.S. Open is on — turned off abruptly recently. Contract disputes between cable companies and the channels they carry are not new, but this one is stretching on and has implications for the future of cable in general, given that many consumers use it largely to watch live sports. So, how did we get here? In his newsletter Stratechery, Ben Thompson explores the history of ESPN, the cable bundle and why we’re at these crossroads.
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