Judge Tells Peter Navarro To Go Directly To Jail, Do Not Pass 'Go,' Do Not Collect $200
About friggin' time.
Weird Trump econ goblin Peter Navarro finally has a date to report to prison to begin serving his four-month sentence, hooray! It is March 19, which is one week from Tuesday. That’s soon!
Normally we wouldn’t be that excited to see anyone enter the Kafka nightmare that is America’s gulag archipelago. But we’ll make an exception for Navarro, a big-mouthed election truther whose coddling of Donald Trump’s lies about 2020 has done incalculable damage to the concept of reality in the public square.
We’re sure four months in a minimum-security pokey will do absolutely zilch to quash Navarro’s habit of writing bullshit reports claiming fraud without showing an iota of actual evidence, and he’ll probably walk out of prison in July clenching his fist in the air like a white Stokely Carmichael while declaring himself the most persecuted political prisoner since Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, but he’ll still have spent four months in prison for being a galactic blockhead, and that’s a thought to warm anyone’s cockles.
Naturally, Navarro is hoping that someone, anyone, will step in and rectify this horrible miscarriage of justice wherein he is being held accountable for things he admittedly did. Perhaps he could stay out of prison until his case goes through its appeals, pretty please:
“Dr. Navarro has now been ordered to report to the custody of the Bureau of Prisons, FCI Miami, on or before 2:00PM EDT on March 19, 2024,” his attorney revealed in court papers late Sunday. “Accordingly, Dr. Navarro respectfully reiterates his request for an administrative stay … Should this Court deny Dr. Navarro’s motion, he respectfully requests an administrative stay so as to permit the Supreme Court review of this Court’s denial.”
Navarro was convicted two months ago of defying a congressional subpoena from the January 6 committee. His defense was that any coup talks with Donald Trump were covered by executive privilege, ergo he should be able to sit in the most powerful office on the planet and plot how to overthrow the American government, as presidential advisers do.
How such a stance squares with Navarro’s willingness to go on Ari Melber’s show and tell MSNBC’s audience of elderly liberals pretty much everything the January 6 committee was going to ask him about is unknown. Therefore we are forced to conclude that his brain is pudding.
The judge in Navarro’s case, Amit Mehta, told him to slurp shit and die, though admittedly he didn’t quite phrase it that way.
The one-week deadline also would seem to give Navarro even less time than he already had to do the thing that another federal judge is ordering him to do, which is turn over hundreds of emails from his time in the Trump administration that he’s been refusing to give up under the same garbage executive privilege theory that already earned him a prison term:
[U.S. District Judge Colleen] Kollar-Kotelly, an appointee of President Bill Clinton, is giving Navarro until March 21 to review 600 records to determine whether additional government files are among them — or else face a potential contempt citation. She also said she plans to refer the matter to a magistrate judge to wade through the records and make sure the government gets those to which it is entitled.
March 21 is of course two days after Judge Mehta ordered Navarro to be officially measured for an orange jumpsuit, so he must have had a busy weekend.
It is also funny that Navarro has to report to prison when infected skin tag Steve Bannon was convicted of the same contempt charge for ignoring the January 6 committee. But the judge in Bannon’s case agreed to let him delay reporting for his four-month prison sentence while he appeals the conviction. Better luck on the random assignment of your criminal case to a particular courtroom next time, Peter.
Bannon, by the way, is still stiffing the lawyer who represented him in his contempt case to the tune of better than half a million dollars, as The Daily Beast reported a few days ago:
In its attempt to get a readout of Bannon’s personal finances and his ability to pay the bill, the law firm tried to question him under oath and sent subpoenas to learn more about his businesses and what’s in his personal bank accounts. Emails show that Bannon’s new lawyer, Harlan Protass, initially agreed in November to schedule a deposition and turn over materials.
But before scheduling the deposition, Bannon changed course and claimed that turning over his bank records would violate his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. We’re a bit unclear on why you would tell a federal judge that your bank records might show fraud and therefore you can’t possibly let someone else look at them, but we’re not super-geniuses.
On Feb. 6, Costello’s law firm told the judge that Protass has been toying with them and engaging in “a feeble attempt at stalling.” Joseph N. Polito, a senior counsel at Costello’s firm, wrote that the excuse “is beyond any and all logic.”
Oh, there’s logic to it: Delay, delay, delay, delay. It’s just that even if the Supreme Court overturned Bannon’s conviction tomorrow or the Manhattan District Attorney dropped the fraud charges it’s about to try him on in the “We Build the Wall” case, or heck, even if Donald Trump got re-elected and offered him a full pardon on the contempt charge, he’d still owe the dang lawyers half a million dollars for the work they did for him.
Basically, Steve Bannon has been in the public eye for eight years, he’s been revealed over and over and over as a nihilistic jerk whose entire ethos is thumbing his nose at the institutions of society that might hold him accountable for all his criming, and somehow he has yet to pay any real price for it.
Peter Navarro, however, might finally have to pay a price for being dumber than a collapsed quiche. So there’s that.
[POLITICO / Daily Beast]
Help Wonkette not stiff our lawyers.
But, but if they can throw Peter Navarro in jail for committing crimes, then they can throw YOU in jail for committing crimes!
Harlan Protass? Who's writing this, Charles Dickens?