Peter Navarro, an ex-adviser to Donald Trump, privately criticized the former president’s attorney Sidney Powell in 2021 for her “far out” conspiracy theories around the 2020 election. (Check out the clip below.)
In audio aired Friday on MSNBC, Navarro is heard complaining to former Fox News producer Abby Grossberg about the harm that Powell did to the Trump team’s wider election fraud claims, which Navarro helped spread.
“You have no idea how much damage she did to our efforts,” Navarro told Grossberg.
“She was the turning point in our inability to prove the case because she was so far out there that people pulled back. We were on the verge of some breakthroughs in the states and state-legislature level, and then that shit happened. And I was like … ‘Damn, this is not good.’”
In a statement to MSNBC this week, Navarro continued to bash Powell.
“Sidney Powell is basically the worst thing that ever happened to the election integrity issue,” he said. “As always I’m being candid with Abby Grossberg just as I am being candid with the American people.”
The audio clip’s release comes after MSNBC this week aired a separate private recording related to Trump allies’ apparent misgivings about the election fraud claims. In that November 2020 recording from Grossberg, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) is heard calling for “actual evidence” to support the Trump team’s allegations, which were made without proof.
The possibility that Grossberg, who made multiple secret recordings with Fox News hosts and guests, could play such clips in court helped spur the network to reach a $787.5 million settlement with Dominion Voting Systems earlier this week in a defamation suit related to election fraud claims, Bloomberg reported.
Appearing on MSNBC, an attorney for Grossberg detailed the former producer’s own litigation involving Fox News: a lawsuit in Delaware that alleges “a civil conspiracy … to get her to testify falsely to cover up Fox’s misdoings,” and a case in New York alleging “gender discrimination, glass ceiling discrimination, [and a] failure to promote.”
The attorney, Gerry Filippatos, went on to name-drop Tucker Carson’s show, saying Grossberg experienced “one of the most vile, toxic work environments” on his Fox News program.