MSNBC host challenges Peter Navarro as he describes ‘coup’ plans to overturn election

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MSNBC host Ari Melber challenged the narrative of former Trump White House aide Peter Navarro as he spoke about the plans to overturn the 2020 election, with Mr Melber saying that he was “describing a coup”.

Mr Navarro has echoed former President Donald Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him.

Mr Melber asked Mr Navarro about the plans of Trump allies to nullify President Joe Biden’s victory. The former Trump staffer said the plans included more than 100 House representatives and senators challenging “the results of the election in the six battleground states” – Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Wisconsin, Arizona, and Nevada.

“These were the places where we believed that if the votes were sent back to those battleground states and looked at again that there would be enough concern amongst the legislatures that most or all of those states would decertify the election,” Mr Navarro said.

“That would throw the election to the House of Representatives. And I would say to you here, Ari, that all of this, again, was in the lanes legally. It was prescribed by the Constitution. There is a provision to go, rather than through the Electoral College, to the House of Representatives,” he added.

Mr Navarro said the plan was set into motion when legislators started challenging the Arizona results on 6 January 2021, the day of the insurrection at the Capitol. The former aide also criticised the media.

“You just described this plan as a way to take an election where the outcome was established by independent secretaries of state, by the voters of those states, and legal remedies had been exhausted with the Supreme Court never even taking, let alone siding with, any of the claims that you just referred to. So legally, they went nowhere,” Mr Melber said.

Describing the plan of action that Mr Navarro had detailed, Mr Melber asked: “Do you realize you are describing a coup?”

“No. I totally reject many of your premises there,” Mr Navarro said.

He said all the plan required “was peace and calm on Capitol Hill,” seemingly implying that the riot carried out by Trump supporters hindered their efforts.

Mr Navarro told The Daily Beast last month that the plan was “perfect” and that “we didn’t even need any protestors, because we had over 100 congressmen committed to it”.

While speaking to MSNBC on Tuesday, Mr Navarro falsely claimed that the “election was still in doubt and would be until it was certified”. Multiple reviews of the results had revealed Mr Biden as the winner and the states themselves had already certified their results ahead of the congressional count of the electoral votes.

Mr Navarro falsely told Mr Melber that some secretaries of states that certified the results had been “put in power by George Soros for the express purpose of shifting the playing field to the Democrats”.

A billionaire Hungarian-American investor and philanthropist, Mr Soros, 91, has often been the target of anti-semitic conspiracy theories.