Peter Navarro, the Trump administration’s former top trade adviser, filed a lawsuit Tuesday against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the select committee investigating last year’s Capitol riot, arguing that they have no legal right to hold him in contempt for refusing to cooperate with the panel.
Navarro is among a handful of Republicans who have invoked executive privilege to keep their communications with former President Donald Trump confidential, but President Biden rejected those claims.
The House voted last month to hold Navarro in contempt for not complying with a subpoena delivered to him in early February.
The former Trump aide — whose 88-page complaint also names each member of the committee, the House of Representatives, and DC’s US attorney as defendants — said Biden overstepped his authority and contends that Democrats have weaponized the House panel to punish Trump and his supporters.
“Repeated abuses by partisans and political score settlers like those on the Committee have institutionalized a partisan weaponization of Congress’ investigatory powers that now threatens the delicate balance and separation of powers between the legislative, judicial, and executive branches of our government,” Navarro says in the court document, initially obtained by Politico.
The 72-year-old also revealed in the lawsuit that the FBI served him a subpoena last week to appear Thursday before a federal grand jury and to turn over “any communications” with Trump about the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
Navarro, who is acting as his own attorney in the case, said he believes the House select committee is violating the separation-of-powers clause of the Constitution by acting like a member of the judiciary.
“The committee’s members along with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi over a more than five year period have been engaged in a ‘repeatable strategic game’ of ‘gotcha’ and punishment that threatens to reduce the institutions of executive privilege and testimonial immunity to ping pong balls of partisan politics,” Navarro writes.
“In this strategic ping pong game, whichever party controls both the House of Representatives and White House will effectively weaponize Congress’s investigatory powers in ways designed to: (1) punish political rivals and (2) deny individuals the opportunity to effectively run for political office or serve in government,” he continued.
Navarro says the court must address the issue of whether a sitting president can reject his predecessor’s claims of executive privilege, and warns of the consequences if GOP lawmakers regain majorities in 2024.
“If the Committee and Joe Biden manage to pull this deadly game off now and effectively establish the principle in settled law that an incumbent can strip his predecessor of both executive privilege and testimonial immunity, just imagine what will happen to Joe Biden and his advisers if Republicans win both the White House and House in 2024,” he says.
Federal courts have so far largely backed the work of the Jan. 6 panel.
In January, the Supreme Court decided not to block a ruling from a lower court that allowed the release of a cache of documents held by the National Archives that Trump fought to keep from the committee.
The decision gave the Jan. 6 committee access to presidential diaries, visitor logs, drafts of speeches and other records it had been seeking.
But the justices in an unsigned opinion noted that there are lingering questions about the limitations of executive privilege.
“The questions whether and in what circumstances a former President may obtain a court order preventing disclosure of privileged records from his tenure in office, in the face of a determination by the incumbent President to waive that privilege, are unprecedented and raise serious questions and substantial concerns,” the order said.
A number of Trump aides, including former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and one-time White House strategist Steve Bannon, have also ignored the subpoenas.
Bannon was indicted last November by a federal grand jury on two counts of contempt of Congress for not responding to a subpoena issued by the Jan. 6 committee.