Navarro argues contempt of Congress conviction at appeals court

Michael Macagnone, CQ-Roll Call on Dec 18, 2025

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WASHINGTON — A panel of federal appellate judges expressed skepticism Thursday about Trump adviser Peter Navarro’s effort to toss his contempt of Congress conviction for refusing to provide documents and testimony to the select House panel investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

At oral arguments, three judges of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit repeatedly questioned Navarro’s argument that he did not have to appear or provide documents because he invoked executive privilege on behalf of then-former President Donald Trump.

At the time of his 2023 conviction, Navarro was not working for the White House. He had served as a presidential adviser and director of the Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy at the White House during the first Trump administration. Navarro currently is a senior counselor for trade and manufacturing.

Stan Brand, arguing on behalf of Navarro, said his client should not be faulted for acting “based on his instructions or what he believed his instructions were from the president.”

Brand argued that the Justice Department broke with decades of history by prosecuting a former White House official despite an invocation of executive privilege, which normally protects presidential advisers from testifying about advice they provide the president.

Navarro and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon were the first contempt of Congress convictions in decades. Navarro and Bannon were among several witnesses who refused to cooperate with the House select committee.

Judge Patricia Millett criticized the lack of evidence for Navarro’s assertion that Trump invoked the executive privilege in response to the subpoena. Ahead of Navarro’s trial, Judge Amit P. Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia found that there was no evidence Trump specifically invoked executive privilege in response to the subpoena to Navarro.

“It is not ours to invoke, it is not yours, it is not Dr. Navarro’s. It is for the president to invoke,” Millett said.

Millett said that she did not like the prospect of judges trying to infer whether a president had invoked executive privilege or not.

“That is a terrible separation of powers problem that the lack of evidence in this case has put us into,” Millett said.

Brand argued that once Navarro said executive privilege was involved, the House had a duty to engage in an accommodations process with Trump’s attorneys rather than jumping to recommending prosecution.

Judge J. Michelle Childs responded that an invocation of executive privilege didn’t give Navarro the right to ignore the subpoena.

“You have to show up first, right?” Childs said.

Childs compared it to the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, where a witness may decide whether to respond to an individual question, but not whether to show up in court.

The arguments Thursday were unusual in that the Trump administration took the rare move of declining to defend a federal criminal conviction. Instead, the DOJ asked the judges to appoint an outside attorney to defend the conviction, which the judges declined to do.

Brand argued alone seeking to overturn the conviction, and he faced a raft of questions from the judges.

At the end of the argument, when the judges noted that “there was nothing to rebut” after Brand finished his argument, Brand noted “it’s been a very strange journey on that front.”

In 2024, Navarro served a four-month sentence in federal prison following his conviction on two counts of contempt of Congress for defying a subpoena for documents and testimony from the House panel.

Bannon had his conviction upheld by the D.C. Circuit last year. Bannon has appealed his conviction to the Supreme Court with the backing of the Republican House, which has argued the Jan. 6 panel was not properly constituted.

The Supreme Court has not announced whether it will decide Bannon’s case, and the Trump administration has declined to weigh in and defend the conviction.