Tucker Carlson: Peter Navarro arrest shows left is using judicial system for political revenge
Fox News host Tucker Carlson gives his take on Peter Navarro's arrest over dispute with January 6 committee on 'Tucker Carlson Tonight.'
Peter Navarro is the picture of a law-abiding American citizen. He's a 72-year-old retired business school professor. He's got a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University. His most recent job was extremely white collar. He served as the White House trade adviser in the last presidential administration, famous for his tough stance on China.
He's never been charged with a crime. He's never trafficked fentanyl, for example, from Mexico. In fact, his hobby is yoga and riding his bicycle. In short, Peter Navarro does not seem like a criminal, much less a danger to this nation. And yet last Friday, federal agents arrested Peter Navarro at Reagan National Airport in Washington. They did not call his lawyer, as is customary in cases like this. They didn't even come to his house, which, as it happens, is just feet from the FBI building, and they could have walked, but they didn't.
Instead, they took down Peter Navarro in public, as you would a fugitive terror mastermind so everyone could see it and learn the lesson they were sending. They handcuffed Peter Navarro. They put him in leg irons, and then they threw him in a cell. He's now facing years in prison. So, what did Peter Navarro do to deserve treatment like this? Well, he resisted a subpoena from the January 6 committee. The January 6 committee is Washington's latest partisan inquisition. It's run by Nancy Pelosi with help from obedient little quislings like Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger.
Navarro resisted that subpoena because he had nothing to do with January 6, nothing whatsoever. That's not disputed. Peter Navarro did not break into the Capitol. He didn't encourage anyone else to break into the Capitol. He wasn't even there that day. He had no idea it was going to happen. Again, that's beyond dispute and Nancy Pelosi and Liz Cheney know that.
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White House trade adviser Peter Navarro holds his notes after a television interview at the White House, Monday, Oct. 12, 2020, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File)
If you really wanted to figure out what happened on January 6, Peter Navarro would be the last person you would talk to. Instead, you'd be talking to Ray Epps and various FBI informants. But finding out what happened on January 6 and why is not the point of the exercise. The point of the exercise is preventing Donald Trump from running for president again. So, in the service of that goal, Pelosi and Liz Cheney demanded that Peter Navarro surrender records of his private conversations with his former boss, President Donald Trump, and when he refused to do that, Congress voted to hold him in contempt in a partisan vote and then Merrick Garland's Justice Department filed criminal charges against Peter Navarro.
This is not the way civilized countries operate. Just because you control the White House and both houses of Congress, does not mean you get to throw your political opponents behind bars. That's not what we do in America. That's what they do in Haiti, but that's what we're doing now and Peter Navarro was not the first. Biden's Justice Department also arrested former Trump adviser Steve Bannon for a similar fake crime. Steve Bannon is awaiting trial this summer.
So, this is not something we've seen before. It's a huge step toward the politics of the Third World, but the media whose job you thought of was to push back against power are not. They are, in fact, applauding because it turns out no punishment is too severe for those who disagree with the national news media. Watch them gloat.
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MSNBC'S JONATHAN CAPEHART: What happened to Peter Navarro is what should have happened to Peter Navarro. He was indicted and when you're indicted, you're arrested.
CNN'S ERROL LOUIS: What Peter Navarro did was so far out of bounds and so indefensible.
MSNBC PAUL BUTLER: This prosecution is really about punishing Navarro based on his blatant disrespect for the congressional subpoena.
So, they really are your enemies. They're not covering the news. They're plotting ways to hurt you. That's true. "Congressional subpoenas are not optional," they lecture you, "Comply with them or go to jail." That's the message the lawyers on television are sending. So, let's pretend for a moment that that was true, though it's in fact, not true. If there was, in fact, a law like that for that law to be legitimate, it would have to be like all laws applied equally across the board and no less than the attorney general himself has said that again and again and again.
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"I came to work here," he said, "because we're committed to the rule of law and to seeking equal justice under the law." That was Merrick Garland in January. "We conduct every investigation guided by the same norms."
Now, those are the norms under which this country has lived for 250 years. It's not justice unless it's applied equally to all adult American citizens, period. Anything less than that is, by definition, not justice, but we're getting much less than that and it's very obvious.
Here's just one example. Ten years ago this month, Congress voted overwhelmingly on a bipartisan vote, by the way, 17 Democrats to hold Eric Holder, then the attorney general, in criminal contempt of Congress. Holder had refused to turn over documents showing how the Obama administration had armed the Mexican drug cartels. Do you remember that? One of the firearms they sent to Mexico under the so-called "Fast and Furious" program was then used to murder a U.S. Border Patrol officer. It was a scandal at the time, in case you don't recall. Watch.
WILLIAM LA JEUNESSE: Border Patrol agent Brian Terry died in December 2010, killed by guns tied to an Obama administration plan that armed Mexicans, a scandal officials tried to hide by wrongly claiming executive privilege. Emails contained in the House Oversight Committee's report show top officials knew the ATF sent guns to Mexico even before Terry's death. Even the Border Patrol, which sent Terry's team into the desert, didn't know about the operation.
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So, that was a legitimate scandal that implicated the entire U.S. government, people who actually have power, not the retirees sitting in jail because of what they did on January 6, but people with actual power, and Eric Holder was the very center of it, but Holder refused to comply with a subpoena from the Congress. Did the FBI arrest Eric Holder for that, please? It was never even seriously considered.
Holder asserted executive privilege, the right to have conversations with the executive, the president that are private. He cited the long-standing policy of respecting executive privilege and he got away with it. So, a week ago, Peter Navarro made this exact point. He sued the Justice Department, pushing back against the subpoena, four days before he was arrested and in that suit, Navarro cited policy written by the DOJ's Office of Legal Counsel. That policy reads this way, "Since the 1970s, this office has consistently advised that the president and his immediate advisers are absolutely immune from testimonial compulsion by congressional committee on matters related to their official duties."
In other words, if somebody asserts executive privilege, at the very least, Congress doesn't get to arrest them. Before anyone is arrested, they have to go to a judge to rule on whether or not executive privilege is valid in this case and that's exactly what happened in Eric Holder's case. And by the way, the federal judge rejected Eric Holder's executive privilege claim and still, he was not arrested. Why? You know why – ecause he's a leading Democrat. But in Peter Navarro's case, Merrick Garland's DOJ did not even bother to ask a judge. They just arrested Peter Navarro at National Airport.
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So, what we're seeing here isn't really about Peter Navarro or Steve Bannon. What we're seeing is a massive escalation in the use by the Democratic Party of our justice system for partisan revenge. That's exactly what that was. Peter Navarro wouldn't shut up, so they threw him in handcuffs and in fact, at the same moment Peter Navarro was thrown in jail for asserting executive privilege, a Clinton lawyer called Michael Sussman was acquitted by a jury seated by an Obama-appointed judge. Three of the jurors in that case gave money to Hillary Clinton's campaign and not surprisingly, those same jurors declined to punish Michael Sussmann for lying to the FBI to advance the Russia collusion myth that helped Hillary Clinton's campaign. Following all of this?
How did those jurors get on the jury? How did they stay there?
Now, the FBI pretended to be outraged by the fact that Michael Sussman had lied to them, but then we learned actually the FBI was working with Michael Sussman and his law firm, Perkins Coie. Perkins Coie had an FBI workspace in its offices in Washington for a decade and Michael Sussman was so close to the FBI, he had a key card to FBI headquarters.
We know this from a recently released text exchange. We're quoting. "Do you have a badge or do you need help getting into the building?" the FBI's general counsel, James Baker asked Sussmann.
We're quoting now, "I have a badge," Sussmann replied. Sussmann had a badge to the FBI building? How do we get one of those? Oh, we're not leading Democratic lawyers, so we can't have them. Michael Sussmann knew he'd never be punished. Take three steps back. What's going on here? In a fantastic piece at The Federalist, Ben Weingarten explained how we should understand these two prosecutions, "They send an unmistakable message: We can get you any time, anywhere, on any grounds we choose. You can't touch even a single one of ours."
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That's it right there. This is a partisan play by a political party that has somehow completely taken over our largest law enforcement agency and ... Michael Sussman is not even the biggest example of this. Andrew McCabe, Lisa Page, Peter Strzok —all of them lied to the feds as well. That's a crime. None of them were ever hauled off in leg irons. In fact, they're now at CNN, MSNBC and Georgetown, respectively. They were rewarded with better jobs for what they did... they always are.
Jim Clapper and John Brennan committed perjury on television before Congress. There's no dispute about that. What do they do? Oh, they're on TV now, too. Hunter Biden lied on a federal gun form. That's a felony. How was he punished? Oh, a mild probing on CBS that he just shrugged off as if it were nothing. Watch.
ANTHONY MASON: Why did you have a gun?
HUNTER BIDEN: Well, I did. Again, you know, the period in my life that was difficult. It was, but, you know, I, I don't know.
MASON: According to the reporting, at one point, the Secret Service went looking for the record of sale. Do you know anything about that?
HUNTER: Nothing. No.
MASON: But you know about the Secret Service being involved.
HUNTER: No, I had no idea. I don't know whether the Secret Service were or why they would be or I don't think that that's true.
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Hunter Biden, left, arrives in the Crypt of the US Capitol for President-elect Joe Biden's inauguration ceremony on Wednesday, Jan. 20, 2021 in Washington. (Jim Lo Scalzo/Pool Photo via AP)
"I don't know why the Secret Service are involved." Really? You had no idea because they were with you. They helped you. You committed a gun felony. It's all out there, but Hunter Biden is the president's son and more importantly, he's a faithful party loyalist. So, you know as well as he does, he doesn't have a thing to worry about. In fact, he can flaunt his crimes. RadarOnline.com just got pictures of Hunter Biden casually waving his illegal firearm around as he cavorted with a prostitute several years ago.
The pictures show Hunter Biden's finger on the trigger of the gun, as well as crack cocaine and drug paraphernalia. Hmm, a weapon of war in the hands of a drug addict. Is the Justice Department bothered by this? No, of course not.
You know what bothers the Justice Department quite a bit? Defying the Democratic Party. Do that and your house gets raided by a SWAT team that tips off CNN before it happens. Roger Stone discovered that the hard way.
JON BERMAN: Exclusive footage you're looking at right now from CNN as the FBI arrives at Roger Stone's residence in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, taking him into custody. They arrived before dawn there, before 6 a.m. or just after 6 a.m— a dozen officers we're told.
FBI AGENT: FBI, open the door.
So that's the actual norm. If you were Tony Podesta and you work for the Democratic Party, you're totally fine. Nothing you do is going to get you in trouble, and you know it. If you're Roger Stone, you've done nothing wrong at all, but you've given the finger to the Democratic Party, they show up at your house with guns. That's the norm the attorney general is upholding. Serve the Democratic Party, and you'll be rewarded even if you're a felon.
At almost exactly the moment the DOJ was putting Peter Navarro in shackles, the DOJ was also dropping the most serious charges against the two left-wing lawyers who tried to incinerate cops, burn them to death in their patrol cars during the BLM riots.
Now, this pair had faced 30 years in jail on terrorism charges, but that was too tough for the Biden DOJ. They'll be out in a couple, max. Why? Because they've got the right politics. And Liz Cheney is not giving you a lecture about. People who try to burn police officers to death are a threat to our democracy. No, they're fine. We're just going to ignore them. It never happened. This happens all the time.
In California, at the height of the BLM riots, a career felon called Tony Walker executed a 19-year-old Berkeley student called Seth Smith, walked up for no reason, never seen him before in his life and executed him, fired a gun into the back of his head. Why did he do this? Because of his skin color. It was a racially motivated attack. "F that White MF-er," Walker said. No one denies that. He said that, but here's the interesting thing, a guy is just executed on the street because he's got the wrong skin color.
Sounds like a hate crime, right? No. Merrick Garland's DOJ did not pursue hate crime charges. In fact, a month ago, prosecutors called an unbelievable deal with Walker. They sentenced him on a single charge of (brace yourself) voluntary manslaughter.
"F that White MF-er," he said as he executed a college student. It sounds like voluntary manslaughter.
This is a dangerous trend and not just because people are dying. Nothing destroys the legitimacy of our institutions more than politicized law enforcement. You can't have that. Justice must be blind. If there is a single institution we have to preserve for the sake of our children and grandchildren, it's our justice system and the law enforcement agencies that serve it. They can't be corrupt. If they're corrupt, it's going to be pretty hard to live here.
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Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY), vice-chair of the select committee investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol, speaks during a business meeting on Capitol Hill on Capitol Hill on December 13, 2021 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
Liz Cheney and Nancy Pelosi and the rest of the lunatics on the January 6 committee have done far more damage to this democracy than the rioters ever did, far more. And now they're trying to make it worse. Axios is reporting that some members of the committee "want big changes on voting rights and even to abolish the Electoral College."
Abolishing the Electoral College? And if you're against that, of course, you're undermining democracy.
BOB COSTA: Was it a conspiracy?
CHENEY: I think certainly. I mean, look, if you look at the court filings.
BOB COSTA: You do believe that it was a conspiracy?
CHENEY: I do. It is extremely broad. It's extremely well-organized. It's really chilling.
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Oh, it's really chilling? What's really chilling is when the committee gets to arrest people, not because they violated meaningful laws or pose a threat to the United States, but because their politics are unacceptable, because they have given the finger to people like Liz Cheney. Is Liz Cheney okay with that? The upholder of democracy?
We texted Liz Cheney on Friday and said, "Are you okay? They just arrested a 72-year-old man who did nothing wrong. Doesn't that cross some kind of line? Are you going to stand up and say something about it?" She didn't respond.
The January 6 committee has just hired a former producer of Good Morning America called James Goldston. He'll be overseeing the committee's primetime hearings on Thursday night. So, the show trial now has a production and of course, we'll be covering that in great detail on Thursday. By arresting Peter Navarro, they're hoping to shut up one of the most vocal critics before it begins.