WASHINGTON — Peter Navarro, the White House trade adviser under former President Donald Trump, has been subpoenaed by the House committee investigating last year’s insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
Navarro has acknowledged publicly that he and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon worked on a plan to coordinate with lawmakers on a process to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election.
Navarro, who was director of the Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy and assistant to the president, is the latest member of the Trump administration to be subpoenaed.
The committee is investigating the origins of a Jan. 6, 2021, siege at the Capitol by a mob of Trump’s supporters that interrupted a joint session of Congress to certify the Electoral College votes from the election. That includes examining whether there was an organized effort by the former president and his supporters to overturn the election results.
Navarro “hasn’t been shy about his role in efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election and has even discussed the former President’s support for those plans,” Mississippi Democrat Bennie Thompson, the committee’s chair, said in a statement. “More than 500 witnesses have provided information in our investigation, and we expect Mr. Navarro to do so as well.”
Navarro has said the plan was to force a delay in the certification by having members of Congress object to Electoral College votes from six states. It was called the “Green Bay Sweep,” after a renowned play of that football team during the 1960s under coach Vince Lombardi.
“The plan was simply this. We had over 100 congressmen and senators on Capitol Hill ready to implement the sweep,” Navarro said in a Jan. 4, 2022, interview on MSNBC. “We were going to challenge the results of the election in the six battleground states," including Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Wisconsin and Nevada.
However then-Vice President Mike Pence refused to cooperate, saying he had no authority to do so. After the mob of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol, interrupting the process, the effort lost some support among Republicans.
However Trump has continued to promote his unfounded claims that he lost the election because of fraud. The Republican National Committee recently took the unusual step of censuring the two GOP members of the Jan. 6 committee, Reps. Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois. The RNC’s statement that the committee is persecuting citizens who were “engaged in legitimate political discourse” has divided the party in Congress.
