MSNBC could only take so much of Peter Navarro’s unhinged ranting on Friday afternoon, pulling away from the former Trump adviser just minutes after he emerged from a courthouse and addressed reporters about his federal indictments.
“I am a devotee of breaking news as much as anyone but there’s only so much bug-eyed gibberish we can tolerate here,” MSNBC host John Heilemann deadpanned as the broadcast ditched Navarro.
The Justice Department announced on Friday that Navarro has been charged with two counts of contempt of Congress for ignoring the Jan. 6 House committee’s subpoena and refusing to produce documents to the panel. The Trump loyalist was taken into custody on Friday morning and appeared in a D.C. federal court later in the afternoon.
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Navarro, who is representing himself and currently does not have a lawyer, spent much of his court appearance complaining to Magistrate Judge Zia M. Faruqui about his arrest while blasting the Jan. 6 committee. He also repeatedly referenced the civil lawsuit he filed this week against the DOJ’s grand jury subpoena, claiming the indictments were a “preemptive strike by the prosecution” against his suit—which has already been ridiculed by another federal judge.
“I actually live right next to the FBI. It’s like a 100-yard walk to my door. What did they do instead of that? They let me get all the way to the airport, try to board the plane, come at me, put me in handcuffs, not let me use my phone, take me down, and put me in a jail cell,” he grumbled in the courtroom. “Who are these people? This is not America. I was with distinguished public servants for four years. Nobody ever questioned my ethics.”
Piggybacking on his performance before the judge, the one-time White House trade adviser played it up for the cameras once he stepped outside the courthouse.
“They intercepted me gettin' on the plane and then they put me in handcuffs, they bring me here. They put me in leg irons. They stick me in a cell,” he shouted to reporters, adding that he was also placed in “John Hinckley’s cell.”
Shortly after making those remarks, Heilemann cut into MSNBC’s live broadcast and explained to viewers why they weren’t going to stick with the Trump sycophant’s “bug-eyed” tirade.
“Mostly what we’re hearing from Peter Navarro, [he] has talked in those few minutes on camera about John Hinckley,” the MSNBC pundit noted. “Who claimed that Nancy Pelosi was on his side about the 1/6 committee, which he calls a ‘kangaroo committee,’ he said Nancy Pelosi was on his side because she called it ‘unprecedented’—somebody needs to get him a dictionary.”
Heilemann continued: “He also, in the best right-wing charlatan kind of tradition, hawked his book and said every American should buy his book and it’s available on Amazon.com.”
Before turning to his panel of guests, Heilemann added that they “may have extinguished the utility” of Navarro’s appearance but they would come back to it if he said “something more substantive.”
He later doubled down, tweeting, “The guy left me no choice.”
The network pulling away from Navarro running off at the mouth comes less than 24 hours after the ex-Trump aide ran to MSNBC host Ari Melber’s show to make his case that he was fighting for the executive privilege and separation of power.
“You’re waging this legal battle not to talk to the committee, not to talk potentially to DOJ,” Melber told Navarro on Thursday night. “So you’re risking going potentially to jail not to talk to them, but you’re out here talking in public.”
