WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court won’t get involved in Trump adviser Peter Navarro’s fight to keep his emails from his tenure during the first Trump administration.
The court on Monday declined to consider Navarro’s claim that he doesn’t have to give work-related emails to the National Archives and Records Administration.
Navarro, a trade adviser during the first administration, has been tapped by President-elect Donald Trump to be his senior counselor for trade and manufacturing.
Navarro served four months in prison this year after a federal jury convicted him of refusing to testify or provide documents to the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack.
The Supreme Court previously rejected his request that he be kept out of prison while he appealed that conviction.
In his latest request, Navarro said the federal law requiring presidential records be turned over to the National Archives is not enforceable.
The Presidential Records Act, Navarro’s lawyers told the court, does not allow the National Archives “to invade a former employee’s privacy to force the compelled production of Presidential records.”
Passed in response to former President Richard Nixon’s attempt to destroy White House tapes that incriminated him in the cover-up of the Watergate complex burglary, the law gives control over presidential records to the National Archives at the end of an administration.
At issue are emails Navarro sent through a personal account that were not automatically archived. Navarro refused to turn them over without assurances they could not be used in his criminal prosecution for contempt of Congress.
The Justice Department sought to use a Washington, D.C., law to recover the documents. A federal appeals court said the government may use that “established common-law remedy to compel the return of materials that all agree are Presidential records under the Presidential Records Act of 1978.”
Under Navarro’s theory, a panel of judges from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit wrote, “the statute would leave the United States with no ability to retrieve Presidential records from employees if they refuse to return Presidential records after being disciplined or exiting federal employment.”
The Supreme Court let that decision stand.
