MSNBC primetime host Ari Melber and former Trump White House official Peter Navarro clashed in a wild interview Tuesday night over the latter’s steadfast attempt to overthrow the 2020 election results and upend a democracy.
Melber teed up the segment with an old clip from former Trump strategist and Navarro sidekick Steve Bannon’s War Room: Pandemic podcast of Bannon describing exactly how the duo sought to overturn the election. The clip, from Jan 6, 2021, shows firsthand how Bannon, along with Navarro, hoped to deploy their half-baked “Green Bay Sweep” plan of action to overturn the 2020 election results. In so doing, they would gain Republican House lawmakers’ support with the end goal of a successful objection to the 2020 presidential election verification.
The tense interview kicked off with Melber asking: “What was the plan, and who was in on it besides you, Bannon, and Trump?”
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Right off the bat, Navarro fired back by claiming he’d put together a report chock-full of evidence of election fraud. “I went over tens of thousands of pages of documents and proved that the election was in all likelihood stolen,” Navarro said, “through fraud and election irregularities.”
Melber then jumped in, calling Navarro out over his unsubstantiated claim of election funny business. “That’s false,” the host declared. “That’s false.” Navarro responded: “You can say that’s false. That’s fine.” The MSNBC host got the last word in, saying, “Yes, it is fine!”
Seeking to get the segment back on track, Melber asked, again, “What was the plan itself, and who was in on it?”
The ex-Trump official replied with an equal parts long-winded and self-imploding answer that outlined his precise plan to overturn the 2020 election. “The [Green Bay] Sweep was simply that. We were gonna challenge the results of the election in the six battleground states. They were Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Wisconsin, Nevada,” Navarro said. “And basically, these were the places where we believed that if the votes were sent back to those battleground states and looked at again, that there would be enough concern amongst the legislatures that most or all of those states would decertify the election.”
Without skipping a beat, on his MSNBC nightly program The Beat, Melber proceeded to ask: “Do you realize you are describing a coup?” The ex-Trump official refuted, “No. I totally reject many of your premises there.”
In a late December interview with The Daily Beast, Navarro laid out in his own words just how the plot was designed to overturn the election. “The Green Bay Sweep was very well thought out. It was designed to get us 24 hours of televised hearings,” the ex-Trump trade adviser said. “But we thought that we could bypass the corporate media by getting this stuff televised.”
