It’s been an unwritten rule in this country that you are not allowed to go after political enemies after an election. It’s meant to help maintain order and avoid riots. Now it looks like Joe Biden is breaking that age-old rule. His own Justice Department just filed a lawsuit against one of Donald Trump’s top White House advisors.
According to Politico:
The Justice Department on Wednesday sued former Donald Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro in an effort to force him to turn over emails from his tenure in the White House.
Navarro, who worked for the White House during the entirety of Trump’s presidency, had used “at least one non-official email account … to send and receive messages constituting Presidential records,” the Justice Department said in a court filing. Attorneys also accused him of “wrongfully retaining them” in violation of federal record-keeping laws, as Navarro did not copy the messages into an official government account, nor did he respond to the National Archivist’s initial request for the emails.
The Justice Department approached Navarro about producing the missing emails, but he refused to return records “absent a grant of immunity for the act of returning such documents,” the department said.
The National Archives first became aware of Navarro’s use of a personal email account last year, according to the filing, after the House select panel investigating the coronavirus pandemic obtained emails showing Navarro used the ProtonMail account for official White House activities.
The civil lawsuit was assigned to U.S. District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, an appointee of former President Bill Clinton.
It’s a separate case from Navarro’s indictment for contempt of Congress, which the Justice Department is also handling. The Jan. 6 select committee subpoenaed him for documents and testimony in February, but he refused to comply with their summons, prompting the panel to ask the Justice Department to pursue charges against him. Navarro has also acknowledged receiving a federal grand jury subpoena related to Jan. 6.
Here is a copy of the filing from the Justice Department against Mr Navarro.
In a statement, Navarro’s attorneys, John Irving and John Rowley, denied withholding documents from the government.
“As detailed in our recent letter to the Archives, Mr. Navarro instructed his lawyers to preserve all such records, and he expects the government to follow standard processes in good faith to allow him to produce records,” Navarro’s lawyers said. “Instead, the government chose to file its lawsuit today.”
The letter cited by Navarro’s lawyers had asked for immunity “in advance of any production of materials responsive to your request.”
The decision by the Biden Administration to pursue a former Trump official in this way is horrifying but sadly not surprising at this point. While Navarro is a far cry from Donald Trump himself, do you think Biden would actually consider pursuing charges against his political rival?
