Former President Donald Trump‘s adviser Peter Navarro was threatened on Tuesday with contempt for defying a judge’s order to return stacks of presidential records to the National Archives.
U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly ordered Navarro to return dozens of records he had argued were his personal documents and did not need to be returned to the government, according to a six-page opinion.
Kollar-Kotelly said that many of the records contained in a 50-document sample of the records Navarro claimed were personal were generated in the weeks after the 2020 presidential election. Navarro issued a series of reports in the closing weeks of 2020 that relied on allegations of voter fraud to support Trump’s claims that the election was stolen.
“It is clear that Defendant continues to possess Presidential records that have not been produced to their rightful owner, the United States,” the judge wrote, disputing Navarro’s claims that some of the records in his possession were simply personal records he had written himself.
“The mere fact that the material is a journal entry does not mean it is a personal record,” wrote Kollar-Kotelly, an appointee of former President Bill Clinton. Even though the Presidential Records Act makes exclusions for diary or journal entries, “the classification between a Presidential record and a personal record can hinge on what the covered employee prepared the material for, and what he did with the material,” the judge said.
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Kollar-Kotelly is giving Navarro until March 21 to review up to 600 records to determine whether any additional government documents are among them. She also said she plans to refer the matter to a magistrate judge to sift through the records to ensure the government obtains any it says should return to the National Archives.
Navarro is already slated to report to federal prison for a 2023 conviction for defying a subpoena from the House Jan. 6 committee, though it is not clear what date the Bureau of Prisons has set for his arrival. Judge Amit Mehta denied Navarro’s efforts earlier this month to remain free while he appeals his conviction after Mehta sentenced Navarro to four months in prison in January.