On Wednesday, the Justice Department filed a civil lawsuit against former Trump adviser Peter Navarro over what essentially amounts to missing emails.
The lawsuit represents an attempt to obtain emails he sent while in government service that he never copied into an official account from the private email address he used for them or otherwise transferred to authorities. Per a court filing from federal authorities, Navarro utilized “at least one non-official email account… to send and receive messages constituting Presidential records.” It’s obviously just remarkable to reveal anyone close to Trump using a private email account for official business, considering the years of antagonism towards Hillary Clinton in which Trump and his goons engaged over her own email practices while in federal service. After an initial, failed attempt by the National Archives to get the messages at issue from Navarro, the Justice Department contacted him, and he again refused.
Navarro was evidently interested in immunity before providing anything from the sought after messages to federal authorities. Is he just paranoid? Or does he think there’s something potentially incriminating in the messages? As the Justice Department explained it in their court filing, Navarro refused to provide the emails at the department’s request “absent a grant of immunity for the act of returning such documents.” Navarro’s usage of a private email account was revealed in the course of the work of the House committee dealing with COVID-19 issues. The official name for that panel is the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis. Throughout the committee’s existence, it’s examined various, troubling facets of the Trump admin’s response — or perceptible lack thereof — to the dangerous, deadly spread of COVID-19. It’s also looking into issues like the intentional refusal by Florida state authorities to pre-order COVID-19 vaccines for children under five.
Florida kids can still obtain COVID-19 vaccines through their private healthcare providers, but some get their primary healthcare services from county health departments, meaning not all families are in a position to easily secure vaccines, since the state evidently isn’t offering them for that young age group. Meanwhile, it’s proving difficult to obtain other comms from figures in the Trump admin. Ken Cuccinelli, a former high-ranking official at the Department of Homeland Security, used a personal phone to conduct government business, and messages from that phone weren’t preserved. There are also evidently missing messages from around the time of the Capitol riot from Secret Service personnel, including agents who served on the team protecting Trump. Recently, Reps. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) and Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.), who lead the House homeland security and oversight committees, respectively, requested testimony from two top figures in the office of the inspector general overseeing the Department of Homeland Security over that official’s lax, faltering response to the missing texts.
