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The House select committee tasked with investigating last year’s Capitol riot announced Wednesday it had subpoenaed former White House trade adviser Peter Navarro over his alleged involvement in a scheme to stop the certification of the 2020 election results.
In a letter to Navarro, committee Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) noted that Navarro had described the plan in his recent book “In Trump Time” — and even given it the moniker of “Green Bay Sweep.”
Thompson also cited a December interview with The Daily Beast in which Navarro said that former President Donald Trump was “certainly on board with the strategy,” along with “over 100 congressmen.”
According to Navarro, who said he forged the plan with former White House strategist Steve Bannon, the “Green Bay Sweep” involved repeated challenges by GOP lawmakers to the election results in key battleground states on Jan. 6 of last year, forcing time-consuming debate in Congress.
“The political and legal beauty of the strategy was this: by law, both the House of Representatives and the Senate must spend up to two hours of debate per state on each requested challenge,” Navarro told The Daily Beast. “For the six battleground states, that would add up to as much as 24 hours of nationally televised hearings across the two chambers of Congress.”
As time went on, the Navarro-Bannon theory went, pressure would build on then-Vice President Mike Pence to reject the slates of electors in the contested states, sending them back to each state legislature where Republican lawmakers could attempt to overturn the results.
But instead of rejecting the results, Pence certified the elector slates, infuriating die-hard Trump supporters who breached the Capitol and occupied it for hours.
In a statement Wednesday night, Navarro decried “the domestic terrorists running the January 6 partisan witch hunt” and insisted that “President Trump has invoked Executive Privilege; and it is not my privilege to waive.
“They should negotiate any waiver of the privilege with the president and his attorneys directly, not through me,” he added. “I refer this tribunal to Chapter 21 of ‘In Trump Time’ for what is in the public record about the Green Bay Sweep plan to insure [sic] election integrity – the last three people on God’s good earth who wanted chaos and violence on Capitol Hill were President Trump, Steve Bannon, and I. Why did [House Speaker Nancy] Pelosi, the Capitol Hill police, and the Pentagon leave the perimeter unguarded?
“Pence betrayed Trump,” Navarro added. “[Former Pence Chief of Staff] Marc Short is a Koch Network dog. [Former White House Chief of Staff Mark] Meadows is a fool and a coward. [Reps. Liz] Cheney and [Adam] Kinzinger are useful idiots for Nancy Pelosi and the woke Left.
“I note for the record, the subpoena was leaked to key members of the press well before I received it,” Navarro concluded. “This was a screwjob to every reporter who didn’t get the leak and it underscores the political and partisan nature of an inquiry which discredits itself on a daily basis.”
Moments after The Post received the statement, a spokeswoman for the former White House official sent along a second statement with the attacks on Pence, Short, Meadows, Cheney and Kinzinger removed.
Thompson’s letter demanded Navarro submit certain documents by Feb. 23 and sit for a deposition on March 2.
The House previously voted to hold both Bannon and Meadows in contempt of Congress for opting not to cooperate with the committee’s investigation.
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