Former Donald Trump adviser Peter Navarro appeared to confess to treason when he told a reporter that he and Steve Bannon plotted an attempted coup to keep Donald Trump in the White House and implicated several Republican senators in the plot.
The stunning admission from Navarro came during an interview with The Daily Beast, where he detailed how he and Bannon coordinated an effort with Republican lawmakers to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s election win, which spun into the violent Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
Navarro told the news outlet that they had lined up 100 lawmakers, including some senators —Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley among them—, to complete their coup, Daily Beast reporter Joe Pagliery told MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Wednesday.
“This House select committee that’s investigating the events of Jan. 6 aren’t just looking at the mob that attacked the Capitol. They’re also looking at the attempt to rip apart the fabric of our republic using the legislative branch, and what we’ve got here is Peter Navarro saying, ‘Look, we had nothing to do with the violence, it didn’t work in our favor because it stopped us from what doing what we really wanted to do, which was stop the certification of President Biden’s win,” Pagliery said.
“But here’s the thing,” Pagliery added. “The way to think about this is, there was an attempted coup, but that’s the hard coup. Someone called this, on the record, the soft coup. We have a former active White House official saying while he was in the administration was using his power there to put this into play, which I think is absolutely fascinating.”
Following the attack on the U.S. Capitol, 147 Republican lawmakers voted against certifying Biden’s election win, but Pagliery said Navarro became cagey when he asked which ones conspired with him and Bannon to halt the process.
“When I asked Mr. Navarro to talk to me about who he spoke with, he seemed reticent to do so. I think at that point he may have been realizing, ‘Oh no, I’ve said too much.’ The book and the conversation with me he details how he got text messages from Steve Bannon, he woke up to messages from people who were on board with this plan and he was in communication with them that morning, before a morning run around the National Mall.”
“It’s right there,” he added. “If the committee investigators want to look into this, the guy is saying he’s got communications and, as far as we know, he hasn’t been subpoenaed yet or asked to turn over documents. That might change after this reporting.”
Watch the segment below, from MSNBC.
