Federal officials have asked a court to throw out a case against Peter Navarro, an adviser to President Donald Trump. The government in 2022 sued Navarro, at the time a former Trump adviser, over his refusal to turn over private emails he sent during Trump’s first term.
In a notice of dismissal filed on June 3, Department of Justice officials and lawyers for Navarro said that they had agreed to dismiss the case with prejudice, meaning the case cannot be refiled at a later time.
The one-page filing did not outline why the parties are asking the court to dismiss the case.
U.S. Magistrate Judge G. Michael Harvey, after the notice was filed, canceled a status conference that had been scheduled for June 4. Navarro advised Trump on trade and the COVID-19 pandemic response during the president’s first term and currently serves as a White House counselor for trade and manufacturing.
In the lawsuit, the government said that Navarro used at least one non-official email account, hosted by Proton Mail, to send and receive messages while he was advising the president from 2017 through 2021.
After Trump left office, the National Archives and Records Administration, which gathers presidential records, tried to contact Navarro to secure the emails, but Navarro did not respond, according to the government.
Officials later reached Navarro, but pre-litigation negotiations “ultimately proved unsuccessful,” the suit stated. “Mr. Navarro has refused to return any Presidential records that he retained absent a grant of immunity for the act of returning such documents,” it reads.
The Department of Justice asked the court to compel Navarro to hand over the records.
His lawyers said in response that Navarro had asserted executive privilege “validly delaying the time within which he must produce the records sought by the Archivist.”
The federal judge overseeing the case later ordered Navarro to turn over hundreds of emails from the Proton Mail account, finding that they may be covered by the Presidential Records Act. Navarro’s counsel said that he produced the records for the government.
Harvey reviewed a sample of the emails and said that some were presidential records, while some were not.
In a separate case, Navarro was charged and convicted of contempt of Congress for declining to cooperate with a U.S. House of Representatives panel investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, breach of the U.S. Capitol.
He served four months in prison and was released in July 2024.
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