Peter Navarro Is Very Mad

Hello! It’s the weekend, this is The Weekender. ☕

It was a big week for Peter Navarro. The former Trump White House economic adviser began it by circulating a lawsuit seeking to defy not only a House subpoena from the Jan. 6 Committee, but a federal criminal subpoena issued last week by a grand jury. On Tuesday, Navarro filed it. By Thursday – the day he was supposed to cooperate with the grand jury subpoena – Navarro was suggesting that he would “lead the charge” to impeach President Biden, should Republicans take Congress in November.

Known or unknown to Navarro, a federal grand jury returned a two-count indictment against him on Thursday – the same day he was set to appear before the grand jury, and the same day he sounded off about impeachment. The FBI’s D.C. field office told me – and the D.C. U.S. Attorney’s Office confirmed – that Navarro was arrested Friday morning by federal agents. It’s the first example of a Trump White House official being arrested in connection with Jan. 6. Even Steve Bannon was allowed to surrender of his own volition.

Navarro then took things further, representing himself in court while bemoaning his arrest at an airport and the charges against him as “despicable.” After the hearing, Navarro continued the rant outdoors, decrying the “Stalinism” that led him to the inside of an American courtroom.

Perhaps more intriguingly, I obtained a copy of the grand jury subpoena that Navarro received which offers some detail about the investigation. It notes that the feds wanted Navarro to provide not only information about the House subpoena that he defied, but “any communications with former President Trump and/or his counsel or representatives.” It’s not clear what role Trump might have had in Navarro’s decision to refuse to comply with the House investigation.

More on other news below. Let’s dig in. 

— Josh Kovensky

GOP B-Listers For Michigan Guv Now Lead Pack After Signature Forgery Dooms Other Candidates

On Friday, the Michigan Supreme Court rejected appeals from former Republican gubernatorial frontrunners James Craig and Perry Johnson. The pair – and a long list of other candidates – have been rejected for ballot placement because their list of required petition signatures includes thousands upon thousands of forgeries. The candidates protested that they wanted documented evidence of every single forgery — a logistical impossibility, the state’s election bureau said – and the courts sided with the state.

With the former frontrunners now off the primary ballot, the Michigan GOP’s former b-listers are now battling for the nomination to run against Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D). They include a literal Capitol rioter as well as a former right-wing television host who’s been backed by the ultra-wealthy DeVos family, presumably for her support for effectively draining public schools of funding.

— Matt Shuham

Biden’s Other Priority 

Before the country was roiled by the elementary school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, President Joe Biden was reportedly inching closer to announcing his targeted student debt forgiveness plan.

The White House has been less leaking and more firehosing the proposed details of the plan, clearly trying to gauge reaction before making it official. As it’s been reported, the plan would wipe out $10,000 in debt for individuals making somewhere under $125,000 to $150,000 annually or couples filing jointly under $300,000 a year.

Biden has never supported universal student debt forgiveness; he’s been candid since the campaign trail about his discomfort in helping students who attended elite universities, which he seems to be using as shorthand for wealth.

If you want to exclude the wealthy, a targeted program makes sense. But it’s infinitely harder to set up and administer.

The Education Department doesn’t have access to the income information that the IRS has. So it’ll have to set up some system to figure out who qualifies, and to do it extraordinarily quickly, if the relief is to be felt before the midterms for maximal political boon. The administration will also have to beef up support structures, filling out staff at the department and contracted servicers to field calls and questions.

If the administration can pull it off, it could give Biden a win unfettered by the filibuster or Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV). It would also better the lives of millions of Americans buried under their loans (though progressives say $10,000 in relief is far too little). But it’ll require an immense logistical heave to get it off the ground, and to avoid the nightmare of another healthcare.gov.

— Kate Riga

• We learned a good deal more this week about the Jan. 6 pressure-campaign on Mike Pence. First: What MAGA Had Planned For Pence On Jan. 6. And then: Warnings To Pence About Jan. 6 Included Another Trumpian Quid Pro Quo.
• Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) on Thursday testified before a special grand jury investigating former President Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results in the battleground state. Here are the deets.
• The latest in TPM Cafe: “This is the tale of a fake news story, widely shared by a lot of smart people who so badly wanted it to be true that they didn’t care that it wasn’t. It is also the tale of the decline of local news in America, the wave of pink slime that is replacing it, feeding destructive partisan narratives about public institutions.” Read the rest here. 
• Ex-Attorney General Bill Barr baldly confirmed on Wednesday what we knew: The John Durham investigation into the origins of the FBI’s Trump-Russia probe, which is turning into a total bust, was nothing more than political theater — and Barr is “very proud” of Durham’s performance despite the one of the cases he brought ending this week in a speedy acquittal. After all, the former Trump crony got what he wanted.
• Right-Wing Activists Are Poised To Turn Election Jobs Into Propaganda: Conservative true believers are working their way into jobs at all levels of election administration.
• Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito managed to barge his way into the Pennsylvania Senate race. 
• The latest on abortion access, from Kate Riga: Inside The Anti-Abortion Movement’s Uber Successful Messaging Campaign.
• Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp’s (R) campaign is reportedly looking to smooth things over with former President Trump ahead of the gubernatorial election in November. It seems, however, that the former president might not yet be ready to mend fences.

“They want to know if you’re eating a cheeseburger, which is very bad because Bill Gates wants you to eat his fake meat, which grows in a peach tree dish.”

– Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) on Sunday blowing the lid off a government conspiracy to monitor what people are eating and force red-blooded Americans to eat fake meat that Microsoft founder Bill Gates is harvesting in peach orchards.

Oops, wait, that’s Greene blowing the lid off the government conspiracy while also struggling to pronounce “petri dish.” It’s unclear if the cheeseburger spying program is being run by the gazpacho police.

— Cristina Cabrera