Peter Navarro, a trade adviser to President Donald J. Trump, was convicted on Thursday of two counts of criminal contempt of Congress over his defiance of a subpoena from the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
The verdict, coming after nearly four hours of deliberation in Federal District Court in Washington, made Mr. Navarro the second top adviser of Mr. Trump’s to be found guilty of contempt for defying the committee’s inquiry. Stephen K. Bannon, a former strategist for Mr. Trump who was convicted of the same offense last summer, faces four months in prison and is appealing his conviction, as Mr. Navarro has also vowed to do.
Mr. Navarro stood to the side of his lawyers’ table, as he has for the duration of the trial, stroking his chin as the verdict was read aloud. Each count carries a maximum of one year in prison and a fine of up to $100,000. A hearing to determine his sentence was scheduled for January.
The jury’s decision handed a victory to the House committee, which had sought to penalize senior members of the Trump administration who refused to cooperate with one of the chief investigations into the Capitol attack.
The trial also amounted to an unusual test of congressional authority. Since the 1970s, referrals for criminal contempt of Congress have rarely resulted in the Justice Department bringing charges. Mr. Navarro was indicted last June on two misdemeanor counts of contempt, one for failing to appear for a deposition and another for refusing to provide documents in response to the committee’s subpoena.
The rapid pace of the trial reflected, in part, the fact that the case turned on a straightforward question: whether Mr. Navarro willfully defied lawmakers in flouting a subpoena. Even before the trial began, Judge Amit P. Mehta, who presided over the case, dealt a blow to Mr. Navarro by ruling that he could not use in court what he has publicly cast as his principle defense: that Mr. Trump personally directed him not to cooperate and that he was protected by his claims of executive privilege.
Mr. Navarro was of particular interest to the committee because of his frequent television appearances after the 2020 election in which he cast doubt on the results and peddled specious claims of voter fraud.
Three staff members on the committee, which dissolved in January, testified on Wednesday that Mr. Navarro had captured their attention because they were studying how those false narratives, perpetuated by members of Mr. Trump’s inner circle, may have inspired rioters to descend on Washington on Jan. 6.
“It became clear to members of the investigative staff that efforts to overturn the 2020 election directly fed into the unrest at the Capitol,” Marc Harris, a senior investigative counsel, testified.
Mr. Navarro also documented those assertions in a three-part report on purported election irregularities, as well as in a memoir he published after he left the White House. In the book, Mr. Navarro described a strategy he had devised with Mr. Bannon known as the Green Bay Sweep, aimed at overturning the results of the election in key swing states that had been called for Joseph R. Biden Jr.
But when the committee asked Mr. Navarro to testify last year, he repeatedly insisted that Mr. Trump had directed him not to cooperate. By asserting executive privilege, he argued, the former president had granted him immunity from needing to comply with Congress’s demands.
The verdict comes after more than a year of legal wrangling over whether Mr. Navarro could cite executive privilege at a time when Mr. Trump was no longer president. Ultimately, Judge Mehta ruled last week that Mr. Navarro could not lean on that claim as a pillar of his defense, saying that there was no compelling evidence that Mr. Trump had ever told him to ignore the committee.
In closing arguments on Thursday, prosecutors and defense lawyers largely agreed on the facts in the case: that Mr. Navarro balked when ordered to cooperate with the panel. But in contention was whether that act amounted to a willful defiance of Congress, or a simple misunderstanding between Mr. Navarro and the committee’s staff.
“The defendant, Peter Navarro, made a choice,” said Elizabeth Aloi, a prosecutor. “He didn’t want to comply and produce documents, and he didn’t want to testify, so he didn’t.”
Detailing the House committee’s correspondence with Mr. Navarro, Ms. Aloi said that even after the panel asked Mr. Navarro to explain any opposition he had to giving sworn testimony, he continued to stonewall.
“The defendant chose allegiance to President Trump over compliance with the subpoena,” she said. “That is contempt. That is a crime.”
Stanley Woodward Jr., a lawyer for Mr. Navarro, countered that the government had simply failed to show that Mr. Navarro’s decision not to comply was anything other than “inadvertence, accident or mistake.” Mr. Woodward presented next to no evidence in Mr. Navarro’s defense and instead sought to poke holes in the government’s case that Mr. Navarro deliberately disregarded the committee’s requests.
“Where was Dr. Navarro on March 2, 2022?” Mr. Woodward asked, referring to the date the committee instructed Mr. Navarro to appear for a deposition.
“We don’t know,” he said. “Why didn’t the government present evidence to you about where Dr. Navarro was or what he was doing?”
Evoking images of violence and chaos at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, prosecutors also emphasized the role that Mr. Navarro’s behavior after the 2020 election may have played in drawing scores of rioters to Washington that day to disrupt Congress’s certification of the results.
That caused Mr. Woodward to bristle, telling the jury repeatedly that the government was relying on emotional descriptions of Jan. 6 to tarnish Mr. Navarro’s image, rather than proving he ever intended to blow off lawmakers.
“This case is not about what happened on Jan. 6,” Mr. Woodward said. “What happened on Jan. 6 was abhorrent.”
Mr. Navarro and Mr. Bannon openly disregarded the Jan. 6 committee’s requests, but others in Mr. Trump’s inner circle cooperated with the panel in a more limited fashion and avoided criminal charges.
Two of Mr. Trump’s advisers, Roger J. Stone Jr. and Michael T. Flynn, appeared before the committee but declined to answer most of its questions by citing their Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination. Mr. Trump’s final chief of staff, Mark Meadows, and his deputy, Dan Scavino, each negotiated terms with the committee to provide documents but not testimony.
During the trial, prosecutors emphasized that Mr. Navarro could have taken a similar approach. In the committee’s subpoena, the panel informed Mr. Navarro that if he sought to invoke privilege, he should do so in person in response to individual questions, as well as provide a log of any documents he felt he could not provide.
“Even if he believed he had an excuse, it does not matter,” Ms. Aloi told members of the jury moments before they left to deliberate. “He had to comply with the subpoena no matter what, and assert any privileges in the way Congress set forth.”
Zach Montague
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