Criminalizing unresolved executive-privilege disputes doesn’t vindicate the law—it chills presidential candor and hands Congress a dangerous new lever over the presidency.
By Peter Navarro | American Greatness | February 14, 2026
A lazy, surface-level media habitually conflates the statutory duty of a private citizen to comply with a congressional subpoena with the constitutional duty of a senior White House adviser to resist one that implicates executive privilege.
The latest example comes from National Review’s Rich Lowry, who lumps me together with Bill Clinton in a single moral bucket.
That analogy gets the stakes exactly backward.
Lowry’s free trade antipathy to the Trump tariff agenda I have championed in the White House is no secret. Fair enough. Policy disputes are part of democratic life.
What is harder to accept is Lowry’s tariff animus spilling into applause for my imprisonment—and then repackaged as precedent for future subpoena fights involving former presidents.
In urging Clinton to “simply comply” with a congressional subpoena in the Epstein inquiry, Lowry argued that any former restraint against using criminal contempt in politically charged investigations has already been abandoned because Steve Bannon and I went to prison.
The symmetry is rhetorically convenient. It is also legally wrong.