Peter Navarro has apparently lost Fox News.
Reporting to federal prison on Tuesday after his last-ditch appeal to the Supreme Court was denied, the former Trump White House adviser spoke to reporters before starting his four-month jail sentence for contempt of Congress. Fox News, meanwhile, took Navarro’s presser live just as he began speaking.
In typical Navarro fashion, the MAGA acolyte delivered a grievance-filled speech where he urged the media to report on the “bigger stories” related to his conviction, which he described as an “unprecedented assault on the constitutional separation of powers” and executive privilege.
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“I’m asking you to fact-check everything I say today and write the bigger stories here, which I think are the important ones,” he bellowed. “Let’s talk about some facts here. I am the first senior White House adviser in the history of our republic that has ever been charged with this alleged crime.”
Moments later, just as the Donald Trump ally asserted that Congress couldn’t compel a presidential adviser to testify, Fox News anchor Sandra Smith cut away from his speech in order to take Navarro up on his fact-checking challenge.
“He began by saying ‘not about me.’ he said this was about a crippling blow to the justice system,” she stated. “To fact check there, it is no longer an alleged crime that he’ll be serving this four-month sentence for. He has obviously been convicted, and there was no evidence that would have excluded him, per executive privilege, from testifying.”
Smith continued: “So [Supreme Court Chief Justice] John Roberts, on Monday, refused to delay his prison time. He continues to appeal his conviction, Peter Navarro, for refusing to testify before Congress for his involvement in efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Seventy-four years old. Peter Navarro, on his way to prison.”
The matter-of-fact rebuke of Navarro by Fox News’ “hard news” division contrasts starkly with the sympathetic platform the conservative cable giant’s primetime opinion hosts have provided the former Trump adviser. “I feel very sorry that you are being treated unfairly. This is what I talk about when I often discuss what I call a dual justice system,” Fox News host and Trump confidant Sean Hannity told Navarro during a January interview.
Navarro was convicted last September of two counts of contempt of Congress for defying a subpoena by the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol attack. The ex-Trump aide, who proposed the “Green Bay Sweep” plan to overthrow President Joe Biden’s electoral victory, has argued that the ex-president gave him executive privilege to refuse to testify before Congress.
Navarro’s arguments, however, were roundly rejected by the courts. “That did not happen here,” a federal appeals court ruled last week, noting that there was no evidence that Trump gave Navarro executive privilege to defy a congressional subpoena. The Supreme Court, whom Navarro begged to intervene and save him from prison, said it found no reason to stay the appeal court’s decision and rejected Navarro’s plea to stay the sentence.
At the end of his speech on Tuesday, Navarro—who recently framed his “sacrifice” to those of dead soldiers—insisted that he doesn’t want a pardon from either Biden or a future President Trump, claiming he wants to win his appeal at the Supreme Court on the merits of his argument.
“I’ll see you on the other side,” he told reporters before heading to jail.
