Federal Appeals Court Deals Legal Blow to Trump Aide Currently Facing Prison Sentence

A federal appeals court dealt another legal blow to former Trump administration official Peter Navarro Monday, siding with a judge who threatened him with contempt of court.

Navarro recently began his four-month prison sentence after being convicted on contempt of Congress charges in September for failing to comply with a Jan. 6 committee subpoena. A federal judge separately threatened in February to hold him in contempt of court if he failed to turn over emails from his time in the Trump administration to the National Archives in a ruling the appeals court affirmed Monday.

“Navarro argues that the United States cannot use D.C.’s replevin statute because the [Presidential Records Act] itself has no express cause of action for the United States to seek the return of Presidential records,” the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals court wrote Monday. “Rather, in Navarro’s view, the United States’s only enforcement mechanism is to discipline current employees possessing Presidential records under Section 2209, a mechanism the United States cannot use against Navarro because he is no longer an employee.

“These arguments are without merit under clear, longstanding precedent,” the panel continued.

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