Peter Navarro is serving in my father's White House and even went to prison for standing up against the corrupt January 6th committee. Today, he joins me to talk about his experience in prison and the lessons he learned from it.
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00:09:44.000Joining me now, the author of I Went to Prison So You Won't Have To, White House Senior Counselor for Trade, Peter Navarro.
00:10:00.000It's me and my sweetheart on the stage of the Republican National Convention July 17th, 120 days after prison.
00:10:11.000And it's like literally the night of the day I get out.
00:10:16.000Don, I didn't know what was going to happen that night.
00:10:18.000I had no idea whether people even knew who I was at the time, but the reception, which is so heartwarming to me.
00:10:26.000And I think the lesson of my case basically that was brought to the American people is, hey, those Democrats, they are weaponizing our justice system.
00:10:37.000They're doing everything possible to put people like Navarro Bannon in prison, trying to put your dad in prison for 700 years.
00:10:50.000Well, let's get to you and your brother.
00:10:53.000I mean, how many hours of your life, how many millions of dollars in legal fees did you have to?
00:11:01.000I mean, everybody, Don Jr., that I served with in the first Trump White House paid some kind of price, whether it was billions of dollars by Dan Scavino, Mark Meadows, and Mike Flynn, or me going to prison.
00:11:50.000You know, what was funny about that, of course, is they wouldn't let you in the visitor's room because they squirreled us away in some place because you would have brought the house down there.
00:12:00.000But there's all sorts of fun stories in the book about a really dark place, prison.
00:12:08.000There's a lot of stories in there about it.
00:12:10.000And not only did I survive, I don't know if you had time to even look at the book, but while I was in there, I uncovered this $5 billion taxpayer scandal and actually on the outside now because I'm blessed to have been able to go to the White House and they're working with the Bureau of Prisons to fix all it.
00:12:53.000It's all the politicians who were wearing, were in their district attorney rose, Letitia James, Alvin Bragg, Jack Smith's way at the top of my list.
00:13:36.000We find out that this guy, Walter Giordina, guy who puts me in leg irons and handcuffs, he goes back to the original steel dossier in 2016.
00:14:23.000Was, I don't know if you ever heard of Crimson, Operation Crimson River, but that was the one where they accused your dad of getting money from the Egyptians for his campaign.
00:15:00.000They also had a trick, Don, is where if you logged in with an improper password like three times into your FBI equipment, I think it worked on the laptop too.
00:15:13.000The point is that what my, I'm a microcosm of this vast conspiracy, a word I never use lightly, but it turns out when you see the arc of history, the arc of history through the lens of this Giordina,
00:15:29.000we see, yeah, they were all these people, Comey, Clapper, Page, Strzz, Rosenstein, Schiff, they were involved in two things: an insurrection, which was an attempted overthrow of the government when your dad was in the oval, and election interference by trying to stop them from winning the 2016, 2020, 24 election.
00:15:51.000So I went to prison, so you won't have to.
00:15:58.000If I lose that appeal, everybody in the White House, this White House, right, and every White House going forward will be subject to going to prison if they don't bow to the knee of partisan Congresses.
00:16:12.000So, talk about that a little bit, Peter, because I mean, you literally made the decision to go to prison rather than comply with an illegitimate congressional demand.
00:16:22.000Now that you've had sort of more time to reflect on it, how do you sum that all up?
00:16:27.000I mean, you're talking about the threats for the future.
00:16:30.000The other side is always talking about the biggest threat to democracy.
00:16:33.000It seems like that if people are made to comply to nonsense and go against everything they believe, not have to follow the law.
00:16:42.000I mean, that's a true threat to democracy.
00:16:47.000Back in the 1780s, President George Washington goes before Congress and establishes what's called the doctrine of executive privilege.
00:16:58.000Washington says to Congress, I can no more command you to come to the White House than you can command me to go to Capitol Hill.
00:17:07.000And over time, the Supreme Court basically reinforced the importance of this doctrine in what's called the candor and confidentiality of presidential decision-making, which is to say that senior advisors like me must be shielded from this prime of Congress to protect the candor and confidentiality and therefore the effect of decision-making of the president.
00:17:33.000That was like well established for like two centuries here until Joe Biden came along.
00:17:39.000I mean, it was the policy of the Department of Justice itself that if I got a subpoena or if a guy like me got a subpoena, then I had absolute testimonial immunity.
00:18:17.000The way my case went down, everybody involved in my incarceration was a Democrat, judge, jury, executioner, Congress, Merrick Garland, on down, right?
00:18:29.000But here's the problem: it's like whenever the opposing party controls the White House and the House of Representatives, and therefore the Justice Department, you run the risk of being able to put the other side in prison if they don't bow to your subpoenas.
00:18:51.000So every White House advisor going forward will be subject to a prison term if they refuse to testify before Congress.
00:19:01.000And that's obeying their oath of office.
00:19:05.000So it's an untenable position to put people like me in.
00:20:01.000But the next two years, it was like chaos.
00:20:04.000It was impeachment, impeachment, hoax, hoax, hoax.
00:20:07.000It's like the country deserves a whole lot better than that.
00:20:13.000So we've got to stop that weaponization.
00:20:15.000And so what we do is like we got to focus on the people who were responsible.
00:20:20.000And I know the names of these people: it's James Comey, it's Brennan.
00:20:26.000And by the way, I think Jim Jordan yesterday just asked for Brennan's investigation and indictment, but it's Clapper, it's the page instruct, you know, the old twins at the FBI, very bad, very pivotal.
00:20:41.000They wind up with a payday from the Department of Justice rather than going to prison.
00:20:47.000Yeah, you'd love not to have to talk about this stuff, but like you also have to be playing the same game because they keep doing the same thing to us.
00:21:12.000It's like, and it's good economics in a way, because if you think about it, if you don't hold people accountable, it's the perverse incentive for them to do it again.
00:21:23.000So I come at it from both the law and economics.
00:21:25.000It's like, I want to rein these people in.
00:21:28.000So, I mean, look, Merrick Garland, Matt Gray, at the Justice Department, the people who were involved in my incarceration, Matt Graves, the U.S. Attorney, Merrick Garland, the prosecutors, Elizabeth Loy, John Crabb, and then the judge himself.
00:22:09.000Hey, listen, that's why they sued Trump in New York and Atlanta and DC.
00:22:14.000And the only place that went nowhere was Florida, and they didn't want to do there, but they had no choice based on the way the jurisdiction works.
00:22:20.000So, I mean, you know, they're clearly venue shopping, and so they understand.
00:22:24.000And again, we've never played the game the way that they do, but you know, hey, they play it well and it's worked.
00:22:28.000But, Peter, I'd ask, you know, for those who may not necessarily understand all of the legal nuances, what is the Supreme Court precedent here?
00:22:37.000What are the other major constitutional issues here as it relates to executive privilege, et cetera?
00:23:21.000The only time executive privilege was qualified, it was done in a very limited way.
00:23:27.000The text says cabin to criminal matters.
00:23:31.000And the things I was involved with had nothing to do with criminal matters.
00:23:36.000It was simply that I refused the subpoena.
00:23:38.000So the Supreme Court, in the best possible world, says that senior White House advisors have absolute testimony immunity according to what had been 50 years of Department of Justice policy, that executive privilege is presumptive.
00:23:57.000You know, there was some debate about how executive privilege was invoked in my case, which the judge, the Democrat judge, used to dick around and violate the constitutional separation of powers between the judiciary and the president.
00:24:36.000And again, if I lose, then anybody who serves in the White House serving the president will run the risk at some point, either inside or out afterwards, going to prison if they don't go and spill their guts about very private and confidential, important conversations in the White House.
00:24:58.000I mean, you can imagine all the negotiations with China or Russia or something like that.
00:25:05.000All the options that advisors talk about, confidentiality, you don't want that out there.
00:25:12.000I mean, that's what George Washington saw when he negotiated the Jay Treaty.
00:27:01.000So if I remember correctly, when I went down to visit you, I think you were the only person in that Miami federal penitentiary serving time for a misdemeanor.
00:27:11.000Yeah, everyone else, you know, felons, you're in there for a misdemeanor.
00:27:14.000Again, they wouldn't let you do, you know, hold off till the appeal process went through.
00:27:19.000They just wanted you off the grid during an election cycle, I guess.
00:27:22.000And, you know, what did your fellow inmates think about your situation?
00:27:27.000And perhaps what surprised you most about the federal prison system from the inside?
00:27:32.000Yeah, so I have two claims to fame down there.
00:27:37.000I was the only guy with a misdemeanor among 200 felons.
00:27:42.000And many of them, I mean, some of them were white-collar crimes, but a lot of them were gun-related drug stuff.
00:27:48.000So this was not a no country for old men, right?
00:29:18.000You know, it's like in prison, it's like it's very clique, right?
00:29:22.000There's the gangs like the white-collar guys were white.
00:29:28.000The Haitians had a lock on the kind of internet scam crime.
00:29:33.000The Puerto Ricans were generally in for drug running, often with gun-related offenses.
00:29:41.000And the Puerto Ricans wind up in U.S. prisons because there's no prisons in Puerto Rico because they're too corrupt down there to run them.
00:29:50.000So I, you know, it's like Bobbin and Wing, but every day, I mean, look, what you have to do when you're in there is have a routine.
00:30:03.000I was in a joke with Bannon all the time.
00:30:06.000Bannon tries to try to say he was in a better situation because he had a cell.
00:30:12.000I love Bannon, but yeah, he did not lose the same weight that you lost in prison.
00:30:17.000Unless it would have been a better meal plan.
00:30:19.000And he got more sleep because if you've got like one cellmate you got to worry about with a closed cell door versus 50 in your dorm that you got to worry about, it's a different situation.
00:32:08.000You got nonviolent first time offenders primarily benefiting from the First Step Act.
00:32:15.000And the idea is if they behave themselves, then they'll get out earlier based on time credits for basically learning new skills and doing some remedial work and things like that.
00:32:40.000And I started to ask some questions and it turns out, Don, that that of the more than 50,000 inmates in the whole system, every one of them was not getting out when they should.
00:32:54.000It was anywhere from three months to a year or more that they were being held over because the prison bureaucracy makes money off to keeping people in prison.
00:33:05.000Well, first of all, after you punish somebody enough, if you keep them beyond that, they'll more likely recidivate because when you're in there.
00:34:18.000Again, this is a vignette from I Went to Prison, so you won't have to.
00:34:23.000There's a calculator that they used to get the credits, and that was what was screwing it up.
00:34:30.000So I pledged in the book that I say I do two things: I get the calculator finally fixed, and then if there wasn't room in the halfway houses, people would go directly to home confinement.
00:34:43.000So one of the first things I do is like I get the calculator fixed.
00:34:47.000It turns out there was one guy, he was like the wizard of Oz.
00:35:30.000And it's like it's pretty cool, Don, if you think about it.
00:35:33.000I go to prison, like, okay, write my book, but actually, I'm able to write a book about solving a $5 billion problem after turning myself into an investigative reporter.
00:36:26.000You'd go out with these mayonnaise jars with sand, you do this kind of thing.
00:36:31.000The reason why you did that is that the guards didn't want anybody to have dumbbells because they didn't want anybody to have any strength to give them any trouble, right?
00:36:39.000So, were the mayonnaise jars made of glass or plastic?
00:36:59.000I mean, for example, there's a little post that I went to prison, so you want to have to, but there's no oranges or grapefruit in a Miami prison.
00:37:09.000So you get these like gallon tin cans of like peaches and crap filled with sugar, right?
00:37:16.000So you use the empty cans and you get some cement from like the workshop that gets purloined and maybe a bar that would otherwise be used for a fence post.
00:37:27.000And they turn those into dump to barbells, right?
00:37:32.000So you go out and you do some workouts and stuff like that.
00:38:05.000And there's a story about, for example, how there was an SIS raid on the dorm where they completely threw all my belongings and mattresses all over the place because that particular unit wasn't representative of the guards themselves, but that particular unit didn't like Donald Trump.
00:38:28.000So they were like harassing me that day, smashing shit.
00:40:04.000I never played in any of the softball or basketball games, even though I was attempted because the first thing they tell you is, hey, if you get injured here, you're screwed.
00:40:15.000So don't put yourself at that kind of risk.
00:42:39.000It's something that I don't think anybody ever envisioned, which is to completely restructure an international trading environment, which is fundamentally and institutionally skewed against America.
00:42:54.000By the very rules of the World Trade Organization, Don, other countries are allowed to charge us higher tariffs and have higher non-tariff barriers, and they all do.
00:43:05.000And what your father has done with his reciprocal trade doctrine is wipe that off the charts.
00:43:12.000And we've got most of the world now agreeing to tariffs that we put on them, tariff reductions on their end, and a whole host of reductions and non-tariff barriers by them.
00:43:26.000At the same time, that we're going to be collecting an astonishing amount of money from the tariffs over the next 10 years, which will basically turn us from a debtor nation into one where we've got a chance of balancing our budget.
00:44:36.000Now, China, China has revealed itself with this rare earth issue as a country which is using the weaponization of their manufacturing floor,
00:44:55.000their supply chains, to exert pressure, not just on the United States, but to every other country that might do something that gets in the way of the Chinese dream of world domination by their 100-year birthday of the Chinese Communist Party, which is 2049.
00:45:21.000We are in a good place with China with respect to defending ourselves.
00:45:25.000We have tariffs a little over 50%, which is the way things should be because of all the crap they do to us.
00:45:36.000But there's a dispute now over their intention to weaponize their supply chains to force us to stop defending ourselves, which is just unacceptable.
00:45:52.000So no one knows how to negotiate better than your father.
00:45:58.000It's a high-stakes poker game, but I think the markets certainly have confidence in your dad's ability to do that.
00:46:08.000You know, the last thing I would say is that we've still got this fight on inflation.
00:46:26.000But to the extent that Biden engaged in totally fiscally irresponsible behavior and the Federal Reserve accommodated that with easy monetary policy, they left us pretty much with a mess.
00:46:45.000So that's going to be a topic for the midterm elections.
00:46:50.000We're going to be working hard to keep prices coming down.
00:46:55.000They're going to try to say it was our fault when it was theirs, but that's politics.
00:47:01.000But your father has done more, and I guess it's nine months now, than presidents do in two terms.