Prosecutors said Navarro acted “above the law” by ignoring a subpoena from a congressional investigation inquiry into efforts to overturn the 2020 election result. He was found guilty by the 12-member jury after four hours of deliberations, following a trial that lasted two days. He faces up to a year in prison for each of the two contempt counts.
Outside the court in Washington DC on Thursday, Navarro said it was a “sad day for America”, vowing to appeal all the way to the Supreme Court.
“This is the first time in the history of our republic,” he said, “that a senior White House adviser, an alter ego (1) of the president, has ever been charged with this alleged crime.”
Navarro, who served as senior trade adviser to former President Donald Trump, was served with a subpoena by a US House of Representatives select committee in February 2022. But he did not hand over any of the requested emails or documents or appear to testify before the Democratic-led panel.
The committee had hoped to question Navarro about efforts to delay certification of the 2020 election, according to a former staff director for the panel who testified in court.
Navarro’s lawyer, Stanley Woodward, presented little evidence during the trial and instead sought to discredit the prosecutor’s case.
When contacted by the committee, Navarro said Mr Trump had instructed him to cite executive privilege. This is a legal principle that allows certain White House communications to be kept under wraps. But last week, Judge Amit Mehta, an Obama nominee, ruled there was no evidence that Mr Trump or executive privilege could have permitted Navarro to ignore the committee’s summons.
In his 2021 book, In Trump Time, Navarro said he was the architect of a strategy to challenge the election results, claiming widespread voter fraud. The plan was for congressional Republicans to delay certification of President Joe Biden’s victory. Navarro called this strategy the Green Bay Sweep, a reference to a tactic in American football. The House committee said Navarro’s claims of massive ballot fraud had been exposed as baseless by state and local officials.
Former Trump campaign strategist Steve Bannon was convicted of two counts of contempt for defying the House committee’s legal summons in July 2022.
(1) or, perhaps, “running dog” … 
Early political career
Campaigns for public office
While teaching at UC Irvine, Navarro unsuccessfully ran for office five times in San Diego, California.
Political positions
Navarro’s political affiliations and policy positions have been described as “hotly disputed and across the spectrum.” While he lived in Massachusetts studying for his PhD at Harvard, he was a registered Democrat. When he moved to California in 1986, he was initially registered as nonpartisan, and became a registered Republican in 1989. By 1991, he had again re-registered as an Independent, and carried that affiliation during the 1992 San Diego mayoral election. Around this time, he still considered himself a conservative Republican.
Navarro rejoined the Democratic Party in 1994 and remained a Democrat during each of his subsequent political campaigns. In 1996, while he was running for Congress, Navarro was endorsed by then-First Lady Hillary Clinton and spoke at the 1996 Democratic Convention, saying, “I’m proud to be carrying the Clinton-Gore banner.”
Navarro supported Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign in 2008. Navarro supported President Barack Obama’s phase-out of incandescent light bulbs, the adoption of wind energy, and carbon taxes in order to stop global warming.
During the early stage of the Trump administration, Navarro was still known to be a Democrat, but by February 2018 he had again re-registered as a Republican.
Trump campaign advisor
In 2016, Navarro served as an economic policy adviser to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Navarro was invited to be an advisor after Trump’s advisor and son-in-law Jared Kushner saw on Amazon that he co-wrote Death by China.
So, having failed to secure elected office, Navarro’s “ego” must have been well “altered” by an appointment at the White House … 