Peter Navarro Spent Years Daring the Feds to Catch Him. They Just Did.

Donald Trump’s former adviser and top loyalist Peter Navarro was sentenced Thursday to four months in prison for contempt of Congress, after he failed to comply with a subpoena from the congressional January 6 investigative committee.

Navarro spent years avoiding the congressional subpoena, and was finally convicted in September of two counts of contempt of Congress. He had tried to claim executive privilege before the trial, arguing that Trump had directed him to assert privilege so he could avoid the charges. Presiding Judge Amit Mehta rejected Navarro’s request.

When Mehta issued Navarro’s sentence Thursday, the judge said he wanted to show “respect for the law” and the need for “general deterrence” against similar behavior.

“This was a significant effort by Congress to get to the bottom of a terrible day in American history,” he said.

Just before his sentence was issued, Navarro tried to argue that he was the victim of a two-tiered justice system, a popular claim for Trump and his allies. Mehta shut him down immediately.

“Sitting here with four lawyers at his table who are extremely competent and have done an outstanding job, a real head-scratcher,” Mehta said. “There is, some would say, a two-tiered system of justice. This is not it.”

Navarro was indicted in June 2022 for failing to provide testimony and failing to provide documents to the House select committee investigating the January 6 insurrection. He said he didn’t comply with the subpoenas because Trump had told him to claim executive privilege—except Trump failed to tell the January 6 committee about this, nor did he submit anything to back up Navarro’s claim.

The former economic adviser is the second Trump ally to be found guilty of defying a subpoena related to January 6. Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon was similarly found guilty of contempt of Congress last year for refusing to comply with a January 6 committee subpoena. He was sentenced to just four months in prison and a $6,500 fine. Bannon appealed his case and has yet to serve his sentence.

Navarro can appeal his sentence. Mehta has not yet said whether the sentence would be stayed pending appeal.

Trump collected another slew of endorsements from a cautious GOP leadership following his double-digit win in New Hampshire on Tuesday, with some members, like Senator John Cornyn, making the jump mere minutes after the race was called.

But some of the biggest names were missing from the deck, suggesting that not every Republican is giddy to fall back in line behind Donald Trump. Perhaps most notably, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Senator John Thune—the number two Republican in the upper chamber—have yet to raise their glass to the GOP front-runner.

At the moment, neither McConnell nor Thune has backed either contender in the race. Thune had previously tossed his hat in behind Senator Tim Scott, though he dropped out of the race in November. McConnell has yet to indicate who he prefers, emphasizing to a USA Today reporter on Tuesday that he has “stayed essentially out of it.”

It’s not the first time the duo has been mum on Trump’s bid to return to the White House. In December, McConnell and Thune stayed silent after the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that Trump would not be allowed on the state’s primary ballot, on the basis that Trump violated the Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment when he spawned an insurrection on January 6, 2021.

The pair’s silence suggests that the Republican anti-Trumpers foresee a better Republican Party without the wannabe despot, who beat his primary rival Nikki Haley by 11 percent during the first primary of the season.

But the pressure is mounting as more and more Republicans demand that Haley exit the race in favor of turning toward a grueling general election rematch between Trump and President Joe Biden.

“I’m looking at the math and the path going forward, and I don’t see it for Nikki Haley,” Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel told Fox News’s Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum on Tuesday. “I think she’s run a great campaign, but I do think there is a message that’s coming out from the voters, which is very clear.”

“We need to unite around our eventual nominee, which is going to be Donald Trump, and we need to make sure we beat Joe Biden,” McDaniel added.

Donald Trump is probably kicking his past self, after E. Jean Carroll’s lawyers on Thursday used his previous testimony from a totally different legal trial to make their case for damages.

The Carroll trial is just to set damages, because presiding Judge Lewis Kaplan has already ruled that Trump defamed Carroll. Carroll is seeking at least $10 million in damages.

Her lawyers played a clip of Trump’s video deposition that he sat for last year, ahead of his bank fraud trial in New York. In the clip, Trump brags that his Doral resort in Miami “could be worth $2.5 billion by itself.”

In another clip, Trump claims that his value has only increased since becoming president. “Probably my most valuable asset … that’s the brand,” he said. “I became president because of the brand. I think it’s the hottest brand in the world.”

“I did an NFT deal the other day.… It sold out in less than a day,” he added, referring to some truly wild digital art of himself that he sold in late 2022.

These boasts could drive up the amount he will ultimately owe Carroll in damages. Legal analyst Lisa Rubin explained on MSNBC last week that the jury “is allowed to consider how much Donald Trump is worth.”

“If you’re trying to punish someone, if they only have $10 in their pocket, that’s very different than punishing someone who has hundreds of millions—if not billions—of dollars in their pocket.”

This latest exhibit is proof that Trump’s multiple legal trials are intertwined and what he says in one case can quickly doom him in another.

New York Attorney General Letitia James accused Trump, his sons Don Jr. and Eric, the Trump Organization, and other company executives of fraudulently inflating the value of various real estate assets to get more favorable terms on bank loans. The judge presiding over that trial, Arthur Engoron, determined in September that Trump indeed committed fraud and ordered that all Trump’s New York business certificates be canceled, making it nearly impossible to do business in the state and effectively killing the Trump Organization.

But even though Trump isn’t worth as much as he claims, because his sworn statements put his value so high, he could end up owing Carroll a massive amount in damages. Her minimum of $10 million is already on the low end. Carroll’s expert witness Ashlee Humphreys, a Northwestern University marketing professor who analyzes social media trends, testified last week that the price to repair the harm caused by Trump’s defamatory comments could be as high as $12.1 million. And that doesn’t even include punitive damages.

Trump already owes Carroll $5 million in damages after a jury in May unanimously found him liable for sexual abuse and battery against Carroll in the mid-1990s and for defaming her in 2022 while denying the assault.

The Republican representative who sent the now-infamous text urging former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows to use “Marshall law” to overturn the 2020 election has just one regret: the typo.

South Carolina Representative Ralph Norman was one of at least 34 Republican members of Congress who texted Meadows about overturning the presidential election. Norman defended his message during a Wednesday night interview on CNN.

When host Kaitlan Collins asked him if he regretted sending the text, Norman replied, “The only thing I regret, I misspelled ‘martial law.’”

“Look, everything happened so quick in that election, the time that was given to see if the ballots were real,” Norman said.

He then proceeded to spout multiple conspiracies, including that false ballots had been cast and that “questions” remain about the validity of the 2020 election. He also cited the movie 2000 Mules, a right-wing purported “documentary” that just spreads more falsehoods about the election.

Collins pointed out that everything Norman mentioned has been disproven multiple times. No evidence of election fraud has been found, including by people that former President Donald Trump hired.

She also pointed out how ironic it is that Norman, who has endorsed Nikki Haley in the Republican primary, is calling now to let the voters decide instead of dubbing Trump the nominee outright.

Just three days before President Joe Biden was inaugurated, Norman texted Meadows that “our LAST HOPE is invoking Marshall Law!!”

“PLEASE URGE TO PRESIDENT TO DO SO,” Norman wrote.

Donald Trump’s plan to threaten Nikki Haley’s financial backers immediately backfired on him on Wednesday, as several prominent people in the MAGA camp proceeded to donate to the GOP front-runner’s primary opponent, launching a spontaneous fundraising drive for the South Carolina governor.

“When I ran for office and won, I noticed that the losing candidate’s ‘donors’ would immediately come to me, and want to ‘help out.’ This is standard in politics, but no longer with me,” Trump posted during a late-night social media tantrum.

“Anybody that makes a ‘contribution’ to Birdbrain, from this moment forth, will be permanently barred from the MAGA camp,” he added, derogatorily referring to Haley, whom he put in his own presidential Cabinet as ambassador to the U.N.

But then several of Trump’s former staffers chimed in on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, apparently hard-withdrawing their MAGA cards in favor of sending some money to the ambassador.

“Done,” posted Trump’s former deputy press secretary, Sarah Matthews.

Haley caught on quickly, posting a link to her donation page.

That set the stage for other voters to gleefully join in the fundraising fray.

Others noted that the mob boss–style threat seemed particularly on edge for a candidate who just won the New Hampshire primary by double digits, and questioned the legitimacy of the financial threat from a man facing several pricy upcoming criminal trials and a potential $370 million fine for committing bank fraud to expand his real estate empire.

Despite the local drive’s overnight popularity, it will hardly replace some of Haley’s biggest backers—like venture capitalist Reid Hoffman—who began pausing donations to the campaign after Haley’s lackluster results on Tuesday.