Jan. 6 committee subpoenas former Trump aide Peter Navarro

The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol subpoenaed Peter Navarro, a top aide in former President Donald Trump's White House, on Wednesday.

Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., the committee chairman, announced the subpoena, which seeks records and testimony from Navarro.

"Mr. Navarro appears to have information directly relevant to the Select Committee’s investigation into the causes of the January 6th attack on the Capitol," Thompson said in a statement. "He hasn’t been shy about his role in efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election and has even discussed the former President’s support for those plans. More than 500 witnesses have provided information in our investigation, and we expect Mr. Navarro to do so as well."

Navarro did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The committee Wednesday referred to Navarro's efforts to delay congressional ascertainment of President Joe Biden's victory and ultimately overturn the election results. Navarro, who has worked closely with former White House aide and current pro-Trump podcaster Steve Bannon, detailed in his recent book what he described as the "Green Bay Sweep," an effort to overturn the election on Jan. 6.

The plan, as he described it, was to have members of Congress debate the electoral results from six contested swing states for four hours each, after which Congress would declare the results to be disputed, leading to the House to select the president based on each congressional delegation getting one vote. Since Republicans controlled more delegations than Democrats, Navarro assumed this would probably lead to Trump's re-election.

In an MSNBC interview last month, Navarro said Trump was in favor of his plan and that they had "more than 100" members of Congress on board.

"We believed that if the votes were sent back to those battleground states and looked at again, that there would be enough concern amongst the legislatures that most or all of those states would decertify the election," Navarro said. "That would throw the election to the House of Representatives."

MSNBC host Ari Melber responded during the interview that Trump and his allies had exhausted all of their legal remedies to challenge the results, and that what Navarro was describing amounted to a coup.

"Your presumption is the remedies were exhausted — my presumption is the remedies weren’t exhausted at all," Navarro said. "The remedy was for Vice President [Mike] Pence, as the quarterback in the Green Bay Sweep, to remand those votes back to the six battleground states."

During a speech last week, Pence said "President Trump is wrong," rejecting the former president's claims that the vice president can overturn an election.

Navarro is a frequent co-host on Bannon's "War Room," a podcast at the center of the election denial movement. Last year, Navarro told NBC News: "The traditional conservative media has been cowed by lawsuits and the like, and they haven’t really been willing to talk about some of the things that really are important."

Bannon was subpoenaed by the committee last year and later indicted by a federal grand jury for contempt of Congress when he refused to comply with the committee's demands.

Prior to his efforts to reverse Biden's victory, Navarro worked as a top trade adviser to Trump and expanded his portfolio amid the pandemic. In December, he refused to comply with a congressional subpoena for documents issued by a panel investigating the Trump administration’s pandemic response.