The Department of Justice is requesting that the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia command former Trump White House adviser Peter Navarro to provide all email records from his time in the White House under the Presidential Records Act.
The attorneys involved in the court case wrote in a motion filed Monday that Navarro “wrongfully continues to possess” emails he sent on an unofficial email account.
The document says Navarro was, as of July 25, in possession of 200 to 250 documents that fell under the Presidential Records Act and that, his counsel has admitted, he withheld from the government, according to the filing. Some emails were obtained by the House select subcommittee on the coronavirus crisis as part of an investigation into the government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic.
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“There is no genuine dispute of fact that Dr. Navarro used at least one unofficial email account to conduct official business, that those records are the property of the United States, and that Dr. Navarro has refused to return the records to the United States,” the motion states. “Indeed, his counsel has expressly admitted as much.”
The prosecutors wrote that while serving as a presidential adviser, Navarro used “at least one non-official email account, namely a ProtonMail account, to send and receive messages in the course of discharging his official duties.”
According to the motion, National Archives General Counsel Gary Stern wrote a letter to Navarro requesting the email records from his unofficial email that were not copied or forwarded to his official email but did not receive a response from Navarro despite numerous other voice messages.
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“There can be no genuine dispute that Dr. Navarro has wrongfully detained Presidential records, which, by statute, belong to the United States,” the motion states.
The document adds that in a letter sent July 29, Navarro’s counsel refused to produce any records to the National Archives in exchange for a grant of immunity upon returning such records, per the document.
However, Navarro’s lawyers told the Hill when the DOJ filed the lawsuit last month that he “never refused to provide records to the government” and had “instructed his lawyers to preserve all such records.”
