DC Circuit upholds Trump adviser Peter Navarro's contempt conviction

WASHINGTON (CN) — A D.C. Circuit panel ruled on Tuesday that Peter Navarro, a senior trade adviser to President Donald Trump, cannot vacate his criminal conviction for his refusal to provide documents or testimony before a special House committee investigating his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot.

The three-judge panel rejected Navarro’s argument that Trump had invoked executive privilege for him and that he did not have to appear before the committee at all, let alone invoke the privilege.

U.S. Circuit Judge Patricia Millett, a Barack Obama appointee, wrote the court’s opinion and was joined by U.S. Circuit Judges Cornelia Pillard and Michelle Childs, an Obama and Joe Biden appointee, respectively.

Millett noted that Navarro had been subjected to subpoenas before where Trump or a designee had explicitly invoked the privilege — which is meant to encourage free and open communication between the president and his advisers — and thus should have known it did not apply in this case.

“The district court correctly concluded that Navarro first asserted executive privilege unilaterally without consulting with or receiving direction from President Trump,” Millett wrote. “Navarro, in fact, asserted executive privilege within three minutes of learning that the Select Committee intended to subpoena him and before he had even seen the subpoena’s content. Navarro also concedes that he did not communicate with President Trump or anyone close to President Trump during those three minutes.”

Navarro spent four months in prison last summer after a jury convicted him on two counts of contempt of Congress in 2023, which he recently published a memoir about titled “I Went to Prison so You Won’t Have To: A Love and Lawfare Story in Trump Land.”

The committee subpoenaed Navarro in early 2022, identifying him as one of the “political forces” behind the attack and accusing him of peddling false claims of widespread voter fraud.

The committee wanted Navarro’s testimony regarding his role in crafting the “Green Bay Sweep,” a scheme to use Trump loyalists in the House and Senate to decertify swing states’ 2020 election results to hand Trump the election. Navarro had described the scheme in a 2021 memoir titled “In Trump Time: My Journal of America’s Plague Year.”

Navarro received an email from the special committee in which former senior investigative counsel Dan George asked whether he could send the subpoena via email and whether Navarro had an attorney.

“Yes. No counsel. Executive privilege,” Navarro responded within three minutes.

U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta sentenced Navarro to four months in prison after barring Navarro from using his executive privilege claims as a defense at a bench trial.

Before trial, the Obama appointee had ruled Navarro failed to provide any evidence that Trump had actually invoked executive privilege for Navarro and barred him from using it as a defense before a jury.

At oral arguments in December 2025, Stanley Brand — of Brand Woodward and representing Navarro — argued his client’s case differed from two D.C. Circuit precedents set in the 1961 Peter Licavoli v. United States and 2024 Steve Bannon v. United States, which held that a willfulness in refusing a subpoena is enough to uphold a contempt conviction.

He specifically asserted that because the two cases arose in the context of advice-of-counsel defenses, which was not present in Navarro’s case, their holdings should not apply.

Millett wrote the difference between Navarro and Bannon’s case is “vanishingly small.”

“The only difference, then, between and advice-of-counsel defense and Navarro’s individual mistake is that Navarro immediately and categorically asserted executive privilege without consulting anyone, whether counsel or the president to whom the privilege belongs,” Millett wrote. “And he did so before even seeing the subpoena and its cover letter that made clear the subpoena sought some information that Navarro concedes is not privileged because he had discussed it publicly ‘in [his] recently published book, in interviews with reporters and on a podcast.’ That all cuts against Navarro’s purported good-faith defense, not in favor of it.”

The Justice Department declined to defend the conviction at oral arguments on Dec. 18, 2025, stating in a filing that it “is no longer taking the same position as the prior administration in this case. The feds asked the panel to appoint amicus curiae, or a friend of the court, to defend Navarro’s conviction, which it declined to do.

At the conclusion of the arguments, Navarro rose and attempted to make a statement before the panel and was swiftly denied. Circuit courts require appellants to make their statements via briefs, as they do not consider new facts at the appeal level and only consider new legal arguments.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

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