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Former First Lady Jill Biden’s factotum Anthony Bernal refused to testify before Congress last week for a scheduled interview about the Joe Biden autopen scandal.
Now Bernal will be subpoenaed by the House Oversight Committee to compel his testimony about who was really running the White House during Biden’s term — or face potential criminal charges of contempt.
That’s a real possibility for Bernal and other former White House officials implicated in the coverup of Biden’s cognitive decline, considering that the Biden administration broke all norms when they jailed Trump White House adviser Peter Navarro and former adviser Steve Bannon last year for failing to comply with congressional subpoenas to testify before Nancy Pelosi’s star chamber investigation of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot.
Peter Navarro, Senior Counselor to the President for Trade and Manufacturing walks to speak to the media at the White House in Washington, DC, May 29, 2025. Chris Kleponis – CNP / MEGAWhat goes around comes around.
Navarro, 75, was the first White House official in history to be imprisoned for a contempt of Congress conviction.
He served a four-month sentence in a federal prison in Miami last year.
Dem DOJ’s precedent
By contrast, the very Department of Justice that set a chilling precedent with its prosecutions of Navarro and Bannon (who also served four months in a federal prison in Connecticut last year) gave itself a pass when then-Attorney General Merrick Garland similarly was held in contempt for defying a congressional subpoena to hand over embarrassing audio recordings of Biden’s interview with special counsel Robert Hur.
As a senior White House adviser on Jan. 6, 2021, Navarro’s conviction should have had a higher bar than Bernal’s or any other former adviser’s.
But the Biden DOJ and one of their pet DC judges, Obama-appointed District Judge Amit Mehta, ignored Navarro’s legitimate concerns about executive privilege and punished him for his loyalty to his boss, President Trump.
It was just one egregious aspect of the weaponized justice system ushered in by Democrats during the last administration, which targeted Trump and his allies as “domestic terrorists,” and censored and demonized political dissent.
The good news for Navarro is that Trump won back the White House last November and immediately rehired the former political prisoner as a senior adviser.
In his upcoming book “I Went to Prison So You Won’t Have To: A Love and Lawfare Story in Trump Land,” Navarro recounts how he was arrested by five armed FBI agents on June 3, 2022 when he was on the gangway about to board a flight from Reagan National Airport to Nashville, where he was scheduled to appear on Mike Huckabee’s TV show.
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The diminutive 72-year-old was handcuffed, placed in leg irons, strip-searched and thrown in a jail cell which once housed John Hinckley Jr., the would-be assassin of Ronald Reagan.
Navarro’s fiancée, Bonnie “Pixie” Brenner, who was with him when he was arrested, found the experience “very traumatic,” he says. “They perp walked her out.”
He said he was treated as if he were “an Al Qaeda terrorist,” and even Mehta later agreed that the arrest was excessively heavy handed.
“It is curious . . . at a minimum why the government treated Mr. Navarro’s arrest in the way it did,” Mehta told the court. “It is a federal crime, but it is not a violent crime.”
The lead FBI agent who arrested Navarro was Walter Giardina, who is now a target of Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley’s investigation into the weaponization of the FBI and DOJ against Trump and his allies.
Whistleblowers have told Grassley that Giardina “openly stated his desire to investigate Trump, even if it meant false predication” because of his hostility to the then-former president.
‘Black swan event’
A few weeks before Navarro was arrested, Giardina had showed up at his door at the crack of dawn to deliver a subpoena.
Navarro said he then contacted the FBI and offered to come in for a voluntary interview.
“I literally reached out [and said] here’s my position, can we talk. That should have been enough for them to say, ‘come in and talk’ or ‘come in, you’re indicted.’ That’s what they usually do with white collar offenses,” he said. “For the Biden DOJ [prosecuting him] was a black swan event that went against a 50-year policy of immunity for senior White House advisers. It was a real violation of the constitution.”
Navarro is still appealing his conviction.
Giardina, who is believed to be on suspension at the FBI, was also involved in the debunked Russia collusion investigation against Trump, special counsel Robert Mueller’s subsequent investigation, and other cases involving Trump allies Dan Scavino and Roger Stone, as well as the Hillary Clinton emails case.
Giardina was an “initial recipient of the Steele Dossier,” according to Grassley, and falsely claimed that the bogus Clinton campaign-originated smear sheet against Trump was corroborated as “true.”
Giardina also “electronically wiped the laptop he was assigned while working for Mueller outside of established protocol for record preservation, raising the possibility that he destroyed government records.” Another FBI agent, former FBI Washington Field Office assistant boss Timothy Thibault, is one of several G-men implicated in the FBI’s Get-Trump operation.
In an email obtained by Grassley from May 19, 2022, Giardina tells Thibault and colleagues that the DC US Attorney’s Office “after consultation with main Justice . . . would like to charge Navarro in the next two weeks.”
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“Wow. Great,” replied Thibault.
Thibault was the FBI’s “point man” to manage whistleblower Tony Bobulinski, Hunter Biden’s former business partner, who came forward with damning revelations before the 2020 election about then-presidential candidate Joe Biden’s involvement in his son’s multimillion-dollar influence peddling deals with China.
Bobulinski spent over five hours secretly being interviewed at the FBI Washington Field office on Oct. 23, 2020, and handed over the contents of three cellphones containing messages between Hunter and his business partners, along with emails and financial documents, including the “10 percent for the Big Guy” email that was also found on Hunter’s abandoned laptop.
He and his lawyer were told Thibault would contact them, but they never heard from him — or anyone at the FBI — again.
Whistleblowers have told Grassley that Thibault, who has resigned from the FBI, had allegedly been involved in “a scheme” to “undermine derogatory information connected to Hunter Biden by falsely suggesting it was disinformation.”
Newly ruthless
More evidence is expected to emerge about the scheme to target Trump and his allies while covering up for Joe Biden. Internal FBI emails and documents continue to surface now that the Trump administration has access to hidden troves of information, and Republicans have control of Congress, with a newfound ruthless determination to hold wrongdoers to account.
“My hope is that they’ll find what we believe exists which is improper communications between the department of justice, the FBI, the White House and J6 committee relating to our [Navarro and Bannon’s] prosecution,” says Navarro. True to form, while he was in prison, Navarro also uncovered what he says is a hidden multibillion-dollar scandal within the prison system, which he will reveal in his new book.
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