I Went to Prison So You Won’t Have To
By Peter Navarro
Skyhorse Publishing, 384 pages, $32.99
It’s absurd, bordering on hilarious, to watch the Left, personified by morons like Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson or temporary Texas congresswoman Jasmine Crockett, screech about the efforts by the Trump administration to return law and order to city streets their party wilfully abandoned to criminals.
Even the “intellectual” set among the Democrat Party is in on the action, caterwauling about supposed “fascism” as President Trump mulls the use of National Guardsmen to enforce the rule of law on cities like Chicago and New Orleans, following a wildly successful application of force to put a stop to the pre-existing mayhem in Washington, D.C. (RELATED: ‘Fascist’ Is the Dumbest Political Insult in the World Today)
These people don’t have a leg to stand on. And we don’t have to listen to their bad-faith preenings about Trump’s executive overreach. (RELATED: The Eisenhower Precedent: Is Trump Justified in Deploying the National Guard to Chicago?)
Not after what they put us through for the four years of the Biden administration.
Case in point: Peter Navarro, and what he had to endure at the hands of these rotten bastards.
Navarro’s new book, I Went To Prison So You Won’t Have To, isn’t just a prison diary; it’s a constitutional brief wrapped in a love story and a battle plan. Above all, it’s a case study in how “lawfare” erodes the separation of powers by hollowing out executive privilege — which is one of the safeguards we at The American Spectator have defended since the founding of this august publication. (RELATED: James Comey Warns GOP — For Something Dems Did?)
Navarro’s narrative, complete with a foreword from Stephen K. Bannon, traces the arc he experienced from subpoena to strip search to a razor-wired yard — while arguing that if the Bennie Thompsons and Adam Schiffs of Capitol Hill can force senior presidential advisers to testify about their work for a president, the presidency itself is diminished. (RELATED: Leaking From Anti-Trumpers, It’s as Shocking as Gambling in Casablanca)
As is the very law and order, they’re not-so-quietly insulting as they whine about its imposition in the cities they control.
The book’s first contribution is evidentiary.
In an on-the-record press conference delivered before he reported to FCI Miami recounted in I Went To Prison So You Won’t Have To, Navarro lays out the constitutional issues: the historic treatment of senior White House advisers as the president’s “alter egos,” the presumptive protection of presidential decision-making, and the need for candid deliberation unchilled by compulsory congressional interrogation.
Navarro casts his prosecution as a first-of-its-kind break with longstanding Department of Justice practice. Whether readers agree with every inference, the record he recites — and includes at length — matters.
His second contribution is doctrinal.
Congress, he contends, sought to punish where it is only empowered to legislate.
In fighting his battle, Navarro marshaled Office of Legal Counsel opinions, the Kellyanne Conway testimonial-immunity episode, and the long history of executive communications privilege — from Washington’s Jay Treaty letter to modern OLC analyses — to argue Congress cannot compel senior advisers to testify about their official duties without obliterating the executive function.
Navarro’s account of the J6 Committee’s composition, mandate, and methods strongly carries an important theme: Congress, he contends, sought to punish where it is only empowered to legislate. Again, readers can test the argument against primary sources — Navarro quotes them, footnotes them, and stitches them into a coherent legal theory. (RELATED: Jack Smith Shamelessly Withholds Evidence)
Which Democrats perhaps should read and memorize, in the event that the current Republican majority on the Hill decides to play the same game the former majority did with Navarro and Bannon.
What makes I Went To Prison So You Won’t Have To distinctive for readers of this column is its insistence that process is substance. Navarro is most persuasive when he exposes the unintended consequences of procedural shortcuts: an appeals panel drawing that raises eyebrows; the refusal, in his telling, to pursue the “less burdensome alternative” of negotiating privilege questions with the former president; and the now-familiar practice of criminalizing interbranch disputes rather than resolving them in the “hurly-burly” of politics.
Mar-A-Lago raid, anyone?
Whether you view these as cumulative irregularities or as routine D.C. hardball, the episode is a warning: executive privilege atrophies not in grand precedents but in a thousand skirmishes.
The prison chapters — often funny, sometimes harrowing — are not digressions. They translate abstract constitutional stakes into lived consequences. Navarro describes the Potemkin cleanup before his arrival, commissary price gouging he says functions as an inmate tax, and the Special Investigative Squad raids that smashed fixtures and morale.
You do not have to share his politics to feel the absurdity when a prison dentist recommends Walgreens for sunscreen — “Yeah, Doc, but how do I do that? I’m in prison.” The tonal shift — from theory to gallows humor — keeps the book readable and human.
For American Spectator readers familiar with Humphrey’s Executor and separation-of-powers jurisprudence, the book raises three questions you’ll want to debate: (1) Is testimonial immunity for senior aides constitutionally required — or a prudential executive construction? (2) When Congress wields subpoenas against executive officials, where is the line between oversight and punishment? (3) If a sitting president can nullify a predecessor’s privilege assertion, what remains of confidential presidential deliberation?
Navarro answers all three in the direction of robust executive privilege; critics will counter with oversight necessity. The book’s merit is that it gives you the record and the vocabulary to argue either side.
I Went To Prison So You Won’t Have To is thus not only a gripping memoir, but also a constitutional warning shot. It chronicles not just one man’s prosecution but a structural temptation: use criminal process to replay political fights.
In an age when “checks and balances” are invoked reflexively, Navarro reminds readers that checks without boundaries are not balances at all. However you assess his case, you’ll close the book convinced that the healthier path runs through negotiated accommodations, not indictments — and that the doctrine of executive privilege, rightly understood, protects not a man but a branch.
Of course, this might not be a very persuasive argument in modern times. After all, we now have a Democrat Party that prefers to be solicitous of street criminals and Venezuelan dope dealers rather than calm negotiation with Donald Trump or any activist Republicans at all. The book nonetheless makes an argument for sanity along these lines, and a cogent one.
For those reasons, I Went To Prison So You Won’t Have To deserves an engaged, if sometimes even skeptical, reading by anyone who cares about the presidency as an institution.
Or law and order as a concept.
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