Peter Navarro, a senior counselor for trade and manufacturing to President Donald Trump, urged the Justice Department on Tuesday to “give reasons for shrugging off” his case.
The DOJ recently declined to defend its prosecution and subsequent conviction of Navarro, refusing to provide a reason. The Trump administration official said he feels entitled to an explanation.
“The Justice Department chose this fight and reversed decades of its own doctrines to win it,” Navarro wrote in an op-ed for the Hill. “It then doggedly insisted that I had no substantial issues so that it could keep me locked up pending appeal. Now, it now seeks to abandon its brief with no explanation.
“Why did it change its mind? Where does it stand now on the major substantial issues? These are the answers the defense, the court, any potential friend of the court, and the country must arrive at.”
Navarro was convicted on two counts of contempt of Congress for defying a subpoena related to a House select committee’s investigation of the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021. He served four months in a Miami federal prison for the charges last year during the Biden administration.
Last month, Trump’s DOJ struck an earlier brief and told the judge that it would not be “taking the same position as the prior administration in this case.” The department failed to provide any legal reasoning for the move.
Navarro argued that an explanation is necessary because otherwise the decision would be left to public speculation.
“The D.C. Circuit should say no to the Justice Department,” he wrote. “Demand that it give reasons for shrugging off this case. Put the department on the record. Then let the separation-of-powers questions be decided in the sunlight, not in the shadows of an unexplained government retreat.”
Navarro’s op-ed, published Tuesday morning, serves as a promotion for his new book, I Went to Prison So You Won’t Have To: A Love and Lawfare Story in Trump Land. Despite already serving his four-month sentence, Navarro said he is still pursuing an appeal of his conviction.
“I went to prison so that future presidential advisers won’t have to,” he concluded. “That’s why I am fighting back.”