Political Prisoner Peter Navarro Issues Warning About The Left

Poor Democrats.

They’ve all come down with a case of short-term memory loss. It’s like they’re suffering from collective amnesia. They all seem to have forgotten what real weaponization of justice looks like. I know, it’s hard to believe. After all, they wrote the book on it. 

“[T]his is like nothing we’ve ever seen,” California’s own lying leftist Sen. Adam Schiff recently told MSNBC’s Alex Witt, as the two comrades commiserated on what they’re selling as President Donald Trump’s “ongoing efforts to weaponize the Department of Justice (DOJ) against his political opponents.” 

It’s like the previous four long years of Joe Biden’s regime and its relentless lawfare campaign against Trump, his political allies, and everyday Americans never happened. The Democrat Party excels at little, but their expertise in revisionist history is unparalleled. 

For those leftists who have forgotten the past so much that they will indeed repeat it, let me reintroduce you to Peter Navarro. A longtime Trump adviser, Navarro is the first senior White House official ever to be charged with and thrown in prison for contempt of Congress. 

He spent four months as a political prisoner in a Miami federal prison for refusing to comply with a subpoena to testify before the Democrat-controlled House’s kangaroo court known as the January 6 Committee. Navarro claimed “testimonial immunity,” as many senior presidential advisers had done before him, in refusing to sit before Congress. But Navarro would receive no quarter from the witch hunt orchestrators. He faced a Hobson’s Choice. 

“Either I obeyed my oath of office, respected and honored executive privilege and refused the subpoena and risked prison, or I went and bent the knee to that committee and dishonored the privilege and my oath of office,” Navarro told me this week on The Federalist Radio Hour. 

Navarro lays out his experiences under the crushing weight of a revenged-obsessed Biden administration and Democrat-controlled Congress in his new memoir, I Went To Prison So You Won’t Have To: A Love and Lawfare Story in Trump Land, He opens with his very public and punitive arrest at the hands of Christopher Wray’s corrupt FBI. 

‘That’s How They Roll in Dem Land’

On June 3, 2022, the hounded former Trump adviser was looking forward to a couple of days in Nashville with his fiancee, Bonnie Brenner, who coauthored the book with Navarro. They were at Reagan International ready for their flight when he saw Walter Giardina, the unctuous FBI special agent at the center of some of the most corrupt investigations in recent memory, standing by the plane gate door. Navarro looked back to discover three more FBI agents behind him and two in front. 

Navarro said he was handcuffed and his finance was “perp-walked” out of the airport.  He said CNN seemed to know he was getting arrested before he did. Taken into custody, Navarro said he was bound in leg irons and placed in the same cell where the would-be assassin of President Ronald Reagan was held. 

“I get there and a guard makes a point of telling me that that was the same cell that John Hinckley [Jr.] was put in the day he shot Reagan. And I’m thinking to myself, ‘Why are you telling me this? What’s the moral equivalence of a guy in for a misdemeanor, defending the Constitution, versus an assassin trying to kill a president?’ That’s how they roll in Dem land,” Navarro said. 

Not coincidentally, Navarro’s airport handcuffing and the indictment that followed arrived less than a week before the Jan. 6 Committee’s prime-time hearing, a show trial made for television. 

It was just the beginning of Navarro’s odyssey through Biden’s weaponized Justice Department and a court system populated by partisans in black robes. It would ultimately lead to March 19, 2024, the day he began his prison sentence for, as he puts it, “a crime that wasn’t a crime.” 

“Here’s what’s disturbing about this; every single individual that led my path to incarceration was a Democrat,” Navarro said. 

The Democrat-led House voted along straight party lines to hold him in contempt. Biden’s Attorney General Merrick Garland, his D.C. henchmen, U.S. Attorney Matt Graves, and politically rabid case prosecutors John Crabb and Elizabeth Aloi drove the charges. And U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta, an Obama appointee who gave generously to his presidential benefactor’s campaign and presided over a trial whose jury pool was drawn from the overwhelmingly Democrat citizenry of Washington, D.C. 

‘Politics by Other Means’

Navarro was one of many victims of the left’s expensive and relentless campaign against their political enemies. Trump, their most wanted, faced, fought and defeated the full force of the Democrats’ lawfare blitzkrieg. But these were costly victories. Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, who wrote the foreward to Navarro’s book, also spent four months in prison for telling the rigged January 6 Committee where they could shove their subpoena.  

“Every single person I served with in a high level in the White House paid some kind of price being targeted,” said Navarro, who currently serves as Trump’s senior counselor for trade and manufacturing.

The Justice Department swamp creatures in the first Trump administration drained dry the president’s National Security Adviser, General Michael Flynn, forcing him to sell his house to help pay off millions of dollars in legal bills in an absolute miscarriage of justice. Aides Dan Scavino and Mark Meadows, too, were mashed beneath the Democrats’ lawfare machine, each held in contempt of Congress but ultimately not indicted. John Eastman and Jeff Clark were targeted alongside dozens of other attorneys and Republican activists in the phony “fake electors” prosecutions. 

“And what is this all about? What it’s about is lawfare; it’s politics by other means, to paraphrase Clausewitz,” Navarro said. 

‘A Wakeup Call’

Now the Trump Department of Justice is moving to bring some of the weaponizers to justice. The same Democrats who drove or rode along for the persecution of their political enemies are now calling accountability “retribution” while they pretend their abusive past never happened. 

Incredibly, one of their sainted martyrs is the corrupt James Comey. A grand jury last week indicted the disgraced former FBI director on charges of making false statements to Congress and obstruction of a congressional proceeding. Comey, an architect of the Russia Collusion Hoax and the grand wizard of the Constitution-shredding Crossfire Hurricane investigation, has done some truly awful things inside and outside his deep state lair. But The New York Times, the same newspaper that won unmerited Pulitzers for promoting the failed coup of Trump’s first term in office, insists that “The Comey Indictment Plunges the Country Into a Grave New Period.”

America has already lived through the grave period of weaponized justice via leftist lawfare. Now the chickens, as they say, are coming home to roost. 

Navarro’s book is more than a memoir of his harrowing days as a political prisoner; it’s a warning.

“Why I wrote the book and am fighting in the courts is that I hope it’s a wakeup call and an eyeopener to the American people about just how far down the path of lawfare and the weaponization of government we’ve gone,” he said. “My whole message is, if we don’t hold them accountable they will do it again. There’s no question about that.”

Listen to The Federalist Radio Hour with guest Peter Navarro here. 

Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.