OPINION:
No one has the right to be more disgusted about President Biden’s pardon of his son Hunter than I am.
While Hunter will never see a day of prison for his heinous crimes, I spent four months in a Miami gulag for defending the constitutional separation of powers against a partisan attack aimed squarely at interfering with the 2024 presidential election.
Here, the contrast is striking — are you Biden apologists at The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN and MSNBC paying attention?
Hunter was found guilty on three gun felony counts and pleaded guilty to nine tax evasion charges. That’s up to 42 years in prison alone and up to $1.4 million in fines.
Yet these crimes are child’s play compared with the heinous acts Hunter might well have been prosecuted for, starting with his alleged human trafficking and prostitution sins.
There’s also Exhibit A on Hunter’s laptop — which the FBI finally admitted was genuine.
Miranda Devine’s documentary “Laptop From Hell” shows a coked-out Hunter breaking drug laws — along with a Ukraine-Burisma influence-peddling shakedown and treasonous schemes with Chinese Communist Party officials undermining U.S. economic and national security.
Memo to Brian Kilmeade at “Fox & Friends” and the inimitable Jeanine Pirro on “The Five”: The 200 felons I broke bread with during my four months in a Miami prison look like Boy Scouts compared to Hunter Biden. Yet collectively, these convicted criminals will spend over 500 years in prison while Hunter eats steak and bonbons and cleans his cracked-out false teeth with gold toothpicks.
Now contrast this situation with my own — are you listening to Joe Scarborough, Mika Brzezinski, Jake Tapper, Greg Gutfeld, Margaret Brennan and Chris Cuomo?
As a top adviser to former President Donald Trump, I was issued an unlawful subpoena to testify before a Jan. 6 witch hunt committee investigating Mr. Trump for the sole purpose of interfering in the 2024 election.
I refused to testify not just because the subpoena was from an unduly authorized and illegally constituted partisan committee. I refused because Mr. Trump had invoked George Washington’s doctrine of executive privilege. Accordingly, it was my duty to this country, the Constitution and my oath of office to refuse to appear.
Over the course of my trial proceedings, the Department of Justice itself had to admit that, according to more than 50 years of DOJ policy, senior aides such as myself have absolute testimonial immunity. The DOJ prosecutors further acknowledged that this policy exists to preserve the constitutional separation of powers between the White House and Congress and promote effective presidential decision-making, as the Supreme Court has repeatedly opined.
Nonetheless, DOJ justified my prosecution in large part because Mr. Biden himself issued an illegal letter stripping Mr. Trump of executive privilege and, by implication, me. As Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh said on the illegality of Mr. Biden’s act in Trump v. Thompson (2022):
“A former President must be able to successfully invoke the Presidential communications privilege for communications that occurred during his Presidency, even if the current President does not support the privilege claim. Concluding otherwise would eviscerate the executive privilege for Presidential communications.”
I was found guilty anyway by an all-Democratic jury and sent to prison by an all-Democratic appeals court before I could have my appeal heard. Yes, the only working railroad in America is the District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals.
Now, Hunter Biden gets the most sweeping pardon of anyone in U.S. history this side of Richard Nixon after his daddy promised America he would not do it.
I do not want any such pardon and will refuse any that might be offered. All I want now, not for myself but for my country, is for the Supreme Court to hear U.S. v. Peter Navarro on appeal and overturn my conviction, as more than 200 years of constitutional law surely say it must.
If the court does that, our nation’s highest court will settle very good law on two key constitutional issues:
First, can Congress subpoena the president or a senior White House adviser without violating the constitutional separation of powers? The answer must surely be no; anything less would destroy executive privilege and the candor and confidentiality of presidential communications it protects.
Second, what constitutes a proper invocation of the privilege? Here, the court must reaffirm, as noted in the Nixon era, that the privilege itself is presumptive. Anything less would throw future White House aides to the partisan wolves and discourage the kind of effective presidential decision-making that executive privilege provides for.
Memo to the American media: Mr. Biden and a gaggle of lawfare jackal Democrats with names like Pelosi, Thompson, Schiff, Raskin, Garland, Bragg, Willis, Graves, Aloi, Crabbe, Mehta, Marchan, Pillard and Millett have done enormous damage to our republic by weaponizing our justice system. The unconscionable pardon of Hunter Biden throws salt into a wound in the American citizenry.
If U.S. v. Peter Navarro winds up settling good law that forever preserves George Washington’s doctrine of executive privilege and the constitutional separation of powers from the mischief of the legislative branch, my prison sojourn will have been (mostly) worth it, and I’ll be a happy man.
Yet even with that, there will always be a bitter taste in my mouth — and the mouths of the American people — from the blanket pardon of Hunter Biden by the worst president in American history.
• Peter Navarro served as Donald Trump’s manufacturing czar and chief China hawk. He is the author of “The New MAGA Deal: The Unofficial Deplorables Guide to Donald Trump’s 2024 Policy Platform.” Follow him at www.peternavarro.substack.com.
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