Last week was a very busy week for former White House advisor Peter Navarro.
On Monday, Navarro published a scathing article in something called the “American Greatness” entitled “The Clown Prince of Pennsylvania Avenue.” No prizes for guessing that it was about Jared Kushner. Navarro squarely blamed Kushner (as well as former Trump campaign chief Brad Parscale) for Trump’s 2020 election loss. Navarro claimed that, in regard to Kushner’s upcoming memoir Breaking History (which I covered earlier this month and about which I’ll have my own review shortly), “the work of fiction Jared is now readying for publication is just more self-serving manure to shovel over the past and obscure our view of the damage.”
On Wednesday, Navarro filed a motion with federal court in Washington, asking that the criminal contempt of Congress charge brought against him after his failure to comply with a House January 6 Committee subpoena be dismissed.
Two former White House colleagues of both Navarro and Kushner told me they found the apparent feud between the two men “ironic” because, as one remembered it, it was Kushner who brought Navarro into the White House, having looked on Amazon for books on trade with China and “discovered” Navarro and on-boarded him—“the sloppiest vetting imaginable,” according to this person. Now, Navarro says that this is absolutely not what happened. Kushner, he says, had nothing to do with his hiring. (See the full Q&A for Navarro’s version of events.)
Meanwhile, a second source from the White House says the irony here is that Kushner didn’t fight hard enough—if at all—against Navarro’s ideas or influence over Trump. “The president didn’t let us fire Navarro, but we all hated him,” says this person. “Every chief of staff tried to try to make Navarro disappear. Yet the president kept protecting him. Jared kept shrugging his shoulders. In typical Jared fashion, he didn’t get involved. And in the beginning, Jared defended Navarro’s hiring.”
Given all this, I asked Navarro to explain his reasons for his assault on Kushner and Kushner’s upcoming book, given that he’s dealing with what is presumably a time-consuming—not to mention very high-stakes—legal battle with Congress.
To read or listen to our Q&A, go to “Vicky Ward Investigates.”