Clinton Is Not Navarro: A Constitutional Distinction That Matters › American Greatness
Peter Navarro
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.
Clinton was subpoenaed as a private citizen regarding private conduct. However controversial the subject matter, a deposition about Jeffrey Epstein does not implicate confidential presidential deliberations or core Article II communications.
If Clinton has Fifth Amendment concerns, he may assert them question by question. But there is no meaningful executive-privilege issue at stake.
In my case, the January 6 Committee subpoena demanded testimony and documents concerning my work as a senior White House adviser, including communications and deliberations involving the president. That is precisely where Congress’s investigative power collides with the constitutional need for presidential independence and confidentiality.
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https://amgreatness.com/2026/02/14/clinton-is-not-navarro-a-constitutional-distinction-that-matters/
