Former White House trade adviser Peter Navarro on Monday accused former vice president Mike Pence of having committed “treason” against former president Donald Trump by following the advice of his White House lawyers and other legal experts who said he had no ability to throw out electoral votes from swing states won by Joe Biden.
Mr Navarro, who is currently under indictment on two charges of contempt of Congress for disregarding a subpoena for documents and testimony issued by the House January 6 select committee, made the incendiary and bizarre comments during an appearance on Newsmax.
The ex-trade adviser’s grievance with Mr Pence stems from the then-vice-president’s decision to heed the counsel of Greg Jacob, his top White House lawyer, and constitutional experts such as former appellate judge J Michael Luttig, both of whom advised him that he could not simply disregard electoral votes from states where Mr Trump and his allies were claiming — falsely — that the 2020 election had been tainted by fraud.
“The reason why I think Pence is guilty of treason — at least against President Trump and perhaps his country — is that he acted on the basis of a flawed legal opinion concocted by his own general counsel that he did not share with either the president or with the president's White House legal counsel,” Mr Navarro said.
During an appearance before the select committee last month, Mr Jacob testified that he and his staff conducted a sweeping review of legal and constitutional scholarship regarding what powers the vice president would have while presiding over the 6 January 2021 joint session at which Congress was to certify Mr Biden’s 2020 election victory over Mr Trump.
“Our office was determined that no one would ever be able to say that the vice president’s conclusion about the limits of his constitutional authority was a result of a failure to examine relevant law, history or practice,” he said.
He also told the panel that his review found that US laws “were already clear that the vice president did not possess the extraordinary powers others” — meaning Mr Navarro and other Trump allies — “urged upon him”.
“The law is not a plaything for presidents or judges to use to remake the world in their preferred image”, Mr Jacob said. “Our Constitution and our laws form the strong edifice within which our heartfelt policy disagreements are to be debated and decided.”
Mr Luttig, a retired Fourth Circuit judge who was once considered a top contender for the Supreme Court, told the select committee that the legal theories underpinning what Mr Navarro had wanted Mr Pence to do, “were the product of the most reckless, insidious, and calamitous failures in both legal and political judgment in American history”.
“From their inception, the legal arguments that underlaid the efforts to overturn the 2020 election were, in that context, little more than beguiling and frivolous, perhaps appropriate for academic classroom debate, but singularly inappropriate as counsel to the President of the United States of America in his effort to overturn the presidential election — an election he had lost fair and square and as to which there was not then, and there is not to this day, evidence of fraud,” he said. “It is breathtaking that these arguments even were conceived, let alone entertained by the President of the United States at that perilous moment in history”.
