President Trump is eager to bring claims of voter fraud to the forefront in a second impeachment fight, according to a top aide.
White House trade adviser Peter Navarro previewed how Trump and his allies will respond to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s impeachment proceedings while also teeing up his third report documenting what he considers to be an effort to steal the 2020 election.
“The president is just itching to defend himself on this issue, and we have the receipts,” Navarro told former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon on his War Room podcast on Monday.
Democrats introduced an impeachment resolution on Monday that charges Trump with “incitement of insurrection,” tying his encouragement of supporters at a “Stop the Steal” rally on Wednesday to march on the U.S. Capitol to what became a deadly siege of Congress as lawmakers affirmed President-elect Joe Biden’s victory. On the defensive, Trump’s allies point out that the president at one point urged supporters to march to the U.S. Capitol “peacefully” at the rally that preceded the chaos.
Navarro said he believes Pelosi, a California Democrat, will try to snuff out an impeachment defense by making sure only members get to speak and putting the squeeze on pro-Trump “warriors” such as Reps. Matt Gaetz and Jim Jordan by severely limiting the time lawmakers can speak during the process.
After saying he was “disgusted” by one Republican lawmaker, Sen. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, for saying over the weekend that Trump should resign and could face “criminal liability,” Navarro suggested an alternative battleground as impeachment plays out.
“I’ll tell you what, as that impeachment trial is going on, Donald J. Trump is going to have his alternate TV station going on somehow and get out those receipts. If she wants to go after him by saying there was no election fraud and that was the problem, make my day, Nancy,” Navarro said in reference to Pelosi. He did not get into the specifics of how Trump, who has been widely barred from social media, might defend himself during the proceedings, which are coming together less than two weeks before Biden’s inauguration.
Navarro also talked about his plans for a third volume of the Navarro Report, which he said will contain a “matrix” that will help readers visualize in a table format how the presidential election was tilted in Biden’s favor.
“Report three, the giant matrix, is going to show category by category, vote by vote, how those votes turned what should have been a Trump landslide into a Biden narrow victory across these battleground states,” he said.
Claims of widespread fraud have been dismissed by federal and state officials, and legal cases have been rejected in court, but Navarro struck a defiant tone.
The new report might be called “The Receipts,” Navarro quipped.
