Peter Navarro is staying locked up, after the Supreme Court rejected his bid to stay out while he appeals his contempt conviction. It’s the former Trump White House adviser’s second such rejection in as many months.
How is that even possible, you might wonder?
Recall that Navarro was sentenced in January to four months’ imprisonment for contempt of Congress after he refused to comply with a subpoena from the House Jan. 6 committee. Trying to stay free pending appeal, he filed an application to Chief Justice John Roberts, who handles emergency requests from Washington courts. In a March 18 opinion, Roberts wrote that he saw no basis to side with Navarro, who then reported to prison. Though he could have done so, the chief justice apparently didn’t feel the need to involve his colleagues, which prolonged the matter in retrospect.
That’s because Navarro subsequently asked for a redo at the beginning of this month — from a different justice, Neil Gorsuch. He was allowed to try, but the odds of success were low, to put it generously.
Those long odds were confirmed Monday morning, when his bid was rejected again. This time, unlike Roberts, Gorsuch referred the matter to the full court, setting up for a definitive resolution. And this time, there was no explanation accompanying Navarro’s loss. Roberts’ colleagues likely felt that the chief justice already said all that needed to be said, or perhaps that nothing needed to be said in the first place. To be sure, this doesn’t mean that the Supreme Court is done with Navarro. His underlying appeal attacking his conviction is still pending in the Washington federal appeals court. If he loses there, he may press on to the justices. By then, of course, he’ll have long been released. The Federal Bureau of Prisons lists his release date as July 17. Navarro said in his bid to Gorsuch that the briefing alone in his D.C. Circuit appeal won’t be done until July 19. Subscribe to the Deadline: Legal Newsletter for weekly updates on the top legal stories, including news from the Supreme Court, the Donald Trump cases and more.
Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro," a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
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