(Credit: Pete Marovich/NYT/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
They call Walter Giardina a Marine hero. The media portrayed him as a martyr in FBI Director Kash Patel’s recent “purge” of politicized FBI agents.
In my new book, I Went to Prison So You Won’t Have To, I call Giardina something else: the tip of the spear in a weaponized FBI campaign to destroy Donald Trump — and a disgraced FBI agent who personally targeted me and my fiancée.
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Target: Navarro
In early 2022, the Democrat-controlled January 6 Committee subpoenaed me. I refused their witch hunt, citing executive privilege — not as a tactic, but because it has long been the Department of Justice’s settled policy that senior White House advisers to the president have absolute testimonial immunity from compelled congressional testimony about their official duties.
This protection exists to preserve what the Supreme Court calls candor and confidentiality in presidential communications. This is the very essence of George Washington’s doctrine of executive privilege, first asserted in 1796 to protect sensitive deliberations from legislative intrusion.
But in my case, a partisan and weaponized Biden DOJ turned its own policy on its head and indicted me anyway. I was Giardina’s huckleberry, and he went after me like a jackal — discarding over two centuries of Constitutional separation of powers protection to score a political hit.
On May 19, 2022, at 4:50 PM, Giardina emailed a group of FBI agents with the news: DOJ wanted to indict me within two weeks. His email read like a military op order: find my location, get my phone and iCloud data, plan the “knock-and-talk,” time the arrest. Every detail accounted for.
By May 24, the plan was locked: indictment on June 2, arrest on June 3 or June 7. “Media attention is anticipated,” one of the emails noted. They weren’t just planning an arrest — they were scripting a Perp Walk Media Circus.
Internal FBI emails later released by Sen. Grassley would show that after Walter Giardina updated everyone on the DOJ’s indictment plan, Assistant Special Agent in Charge Timothy Thibault replied, “Wow. Great” — a revealing glimpse of the partisan enthusiasm behind the operation. (Read more: Breitbart, 8/20/2025) (Archive)