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(Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
On September 7, a jury in Washington, DC, found Trump advisor Peter Navarro guilty of contempt of Congress for failing to comply with a subpoena from the January 6 Select Committee. Almost immediately after the jury was dismissed, Navarro’s lawyers moved for a mistrial, alleging that the panel had been contaminated by seeing protestors when they briefly stepped outside for some air in the company of a federal marshal.
“In the midst of deliberations, the jury was paraded outside the Courthouse in front of protestors who had gathered to express their disapproval of the events of January 6, the Trump Administration, and all those who served in the Trump Administration, including Dr. Navarro,” his lawyer Stan Woodward fulminated in a motion for new trial, adding that “To say that the jury was unaffected by this series of events is to strain credulity.”
After full briefing and argument, Judge Amit Mehta denied the motion this afternoon.
“To begin, the court holds that Defendant waived the argument that the jury’s verdict was tainted by improper external influence because he failed to raise it with the court before the verdict,” the court wrote, noting that Navarro’s lawyers only moved for a new trial once the court could neither question the jurors as to whether they had seen the protestors, nor issue a curative instruction.
“A defendant cannot learn of alleged improper external influence on the jury, remain silent and gamble on a favorable verdict, only to complain afterwards that a new trial is warranted because the jury was unduly prejudiced by that outside influence,” he went on.
But even if Navarro’s objection had been timely, it would have failed, Judge Mehta concludes, noting that the protestors and the jurors don’t appear to have clocked each other at all on any of the contemporaneous video footage.
The evidence establishes that the jurors only interacted with each other and CSO Torres in John Marshall Park. No one directed any words or displayed any signs at them. No one approached them. Moreover, the scene itself was relatively placid. There was no indiscriminate yelling or chanting. No one held a sign above their head. There were no activities resembling a “protest.” As for the Ashli Babbitt and Rosanne Boyland t-shirts, the evidence does not establish that any juror saw these images, let alone understood their significance. Defendant not only fails to demonstrate prejudice, he has not shown that any juror was actually exposed to any improper external influence. court of the contemporaneous opportunity to determine precisely what transpired during the jurors’ break.
The order does not rehash earlier criticism of Navarro’s counsel for submitting irrelevant footage of Navarro being mobbed by protestors as evidence that the jurors had been “paraded” before the crowd, although there is some throat-clearing that the Rumble video described by Navarro’s team as “created to assist defense counsel,” fails to “depict the eight minute-period when the jurors were outside on break.”
Thus ends the saga of the rando academic plucked from obscurity by Jared Kushner after an Amazon search for economists crazy enough to think that a trade war with China would be “good and easy to win.” After the autodidact epidemiologist saddled the government with tens of millions of doses of hydroxychloroquine, Navarro donned a new hat as a lay statistician, declaring it UNPOSSIBLE that Biden could have won the election. Finally he played pro se lawyer, telling Congress that its subpoenas were illegal and refusing to even come in and plead the Fifth. So now he joins fellow “Green Bay Sweep” plotter Steve Bannon in the on the putative pardon list if Trump ever gets back to the White House.
What a long, strange, ridiculous trip it’s been.
US v. Navarro [Docket via Court Listener]
Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes the Law and Chaos substack and appears on the Opening Arguments podcast.
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