As U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon presides over Donald Trump’sclassified documents trial in Florida, a ruling emerged Monday from an appeals court in Washington, D.C., involving Trump’s onetime adviser — the now imprisoned Peter Navarro — that may warrant their attention.
he ruling is a 4-page per curiam judgment from the U.S. Court of Appeals in the District of Columbia. It affirms a lower court’s opinion that Navarro cannot argue, effectively, that he was permitted to flout rules for the return of documents. The Presidential Records Act, or PRA, dictates how he was to treat them and his argument to keep this case alive was rejected.
The documents in question are associated with a ProtonMail account Navarro used while he was working as an adviser at the Trump White House.
Under the PRA, Navarro was considered a “covered” employee, meaning under the law, he is forbidden from sending, receiving, forwarding or otherwise creating presidential records using nonofficial means. The exception would be if he sent an unofficial message and copied his official account or another official no later than 20 days later and then, still, return records at the end of tenure.
Though the opinion Monday is short, it explains that from 2017 to 2021, Navarro sent at least one message through an unofficial account that was ultimately considered a presidential record by a lower court. He did not, as the law compelled him, copy those messages over to any official accounts. Instead, by 2021 when the Archivist of the United States asked him to hand over records associated with the account, he didn’t respond.
In his defense, Navarro argued that the government’s use of the District of Columbia’s replevin statutes, or laws governing the taking back of property, were improper because “the PRA itself has no express cause of actions for the United States to seek the return of the Presidential records.”
For this logic to prevail, Navarro would have to show that the PRA itself totally sidesteps the federal government’s greater authority to pursue basic legal remedies for itself.
“Navarro cannot do so,” the per curiam order states.
Trump and his attorneys have argued at length in his classified documents case in Florida that the PRA affords him the right to keep records, no matter how classified or sensitive, at his Mar-a-Lago property, so long as he declares them his personally.
This amorphous yet de facto clawing back of records is just one premise Trump has tried to advance as he has sought to dismiss his indictment there despite the fact that the PRA does not have any language in it designating such authority.
In March, as Law&Crime reported, Cannon left legal analysts downright astonished with her decision to leave language in prospective jury instructions in the case stating that the PRA effectively entitled Trump to turn classified documents into his personal items.