The House committee investigating last year’s Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol on Wednesday subpoenaed former Trump White House trade advisor Peter Navarro to question him over his role in efforts to delay the certification of the presidential election.
The committee said Mr. Navarro has already publicly discussed his work with former White House advisor Steve Bannon and others “to ultimately change the outcome” of the election in his book, “In Trump Time: My Journal of America’s Plague Year,” and repeated “many claims of purported fraud in the election” in a three-part report posted on his website, “The Navarro Report.”
“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,” said Rep. Bennie G. Thompson, the Mississippi Democrat who chairs the investigative committee. “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.”
The committee also refers to comments Mr. Navarro made in an interview that Mr. Trump and “more than 100 members of Congress” were on board with the plan to delay the election certification of Democrat Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory, a maneuver described in Mr. Navarro’s book as the “Green Bay Sweep.”
Mr. Navarro said in a statement that there were no nefarious intentions behind the plan and that he had no part in the attack on the Capitol.
“I refer this tribunal to Chapter 21 of ’In Trump Time’ for what is in the public record about the Green Bay Sweep plan to insure election integrity – the last three people on God’s good earth who wanted chaos and violence on Capitol Hill were President Trump, Steve Bannon, and I,” he said. “Why did [House Speaker Nancy] Pelosi, the Capitol Hill police, and the Pentagon leave the perimeter unguarded?”
Mr. Navarro signaled that he is unlikely to testify until the committee negotiates Mr. Trump’s claim of executive privilege.
“It is not my privilege to waive,” he said. “They should negotiate any waiver of the privilege with the president and his attorneys directly, not through me.”
Several former advisors cited the former president’s claims of executive privilege and the need to keep Oval Office conversations private in refusing to testify before the panel.
Mr. Trump raised the claim in a lawsuit to block the release of White House documents to the committee. The Supreme Court rejected Mr. Trump’s appeal to block the release, citing President Biden’s decision that executive privilege did not apply to the release of documents created under the previous administration.
The committee has voted to hold three witnesses in contempt of Congress for refusing to testify. All three cited Mr. Trump’s claims as grounds for their refusal.
“More than 500 witnesses have provided information in our investigation, and we expect Mr. Navarro to do so as well,” Mr. Thompson said.
• Joseph Clark can be reached at jclark@washingtontimes.com.
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