By Tierney Sneed, CNN
A federal judge has ordered former Donald Trump adviser Peter Navarro to turn over certain emails from his time in the White House to the US government, handing the Justice Department a victory. in a civil trial the department filed against the former business adviser.
US District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly said the emails in question, from an unofficial email account Navarro used at the time, were covered by the Presidential Records Act.
“It should be noted that, under the PRA, Dr. Navarro’s obligation to copy or forward from his personal account to the official account was ‘no later than’ twenty (20) days after the original creation or transmission,” he wrote. “Clearly, he did not do so during his tenure in the White House, nor has he ever forwarded presidential registration emails in the years since.”
She rejected Navarro’s arguments that producing the emails would jeopardize his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, as well as other arguments Navarro made in the case.
The judge ordered Navarro to immediately produce between 200 and 250 emails that his lawyers had found when they conducted a search, using search terms provided by the National Archives and Records Administration, of his emails last summer. The Archives had asked him to prioritize emails that had come up with those search terms.
The judge also ordered that Navarro and the government meet within 30 days to come up with a plan to identify and deliver the other emails that must be produced under the PRA. She requests that a status report be filed seven days after the parties meet.
When it filed the lawsuit, the Justice Department said the National Archives had learned of the emails in Navarro’s private account because of a House investigation into the Trump administration’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic.
The CNN Wire
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