White House Senior Counselor for Trade and Manufacturing Peter Navarro blasted the New York Times‘s “emotionally charged” canonization of disgraced former FBI agent Walter Giardina in his latest opinion shared with Breitbart News, renewing calls to investigate the ex-official. 

In the Times‘s January 22 piece criticizing the FBI’s past year under Director Kash Patel, authors Emily Bazelon and Rachel Poser offered a puff-piece profile of Giardina, who Patel fired in August. Giardina was the one who arrested Navarro with a “gaggle of armed agents” and perp walked him and his fiancée out of Reagan National Airport in 2022 — an oddly harsh move that even confused the judge overseeing the case against the Trump adviser. 

Navarro was facing two misdemeanor contempt of Congress charges for refusing to comply with a subpoena from the Democrat-led House committee investigating the events at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Following Navarro’s arrest, U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta agreed with him that his treatment was over-the-top. 

“It is curious…at a minimum why the government treated Mr. Navarro’s arrest in the way it did,” Mehta said, according to Politico. “It is a federal crime, but it is not a violent crime.”

Prior to his termination, Giardina worked on the FBI’s since-disbanded CR-15 squad that ran Arctic Frost, the investigation into President Donald Trump and other Republicans for alleged interference in the 2020 election.

Navarro has described Giardina as “the guy who basically orchestrated the whole thing,” referencing what he and other critics have characterized as politically motivated FBI operations spanning from the 2016 “Russia collusion” probe to the January 6 investigations.

The trade counselor has also alleged that Giardina played a key role in verifying the Clinton-funded debunked Steele dossier and advancing the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane probe, which led to the Mueller investigation, Breitbart News’s Jasmyn Jordan detailed of recent interviews with Navarro. 

“Whistleblowers cited in Senate Judiciary Committee records reportedly accused Giardina of wiping his FBI laptop, potentially destroying government records connected to those investigations,” Jordan wrote in October:

Navarro also tied Giardina to later FBI operations — including the Crimson River and Arctic Frost cases — alleging that these efforts extended a yearslong “weaponized” campaign against Trump and his associates. The White House adviser has maintained that Giardina personally supervised his 2022 arrest at Reagan National Airport, where Navarro claims agents failed to read him his Miranda rights or allow him to contact his attorney before he was placed in custody.

However, the Times‘s recent profile paints a completely different, more sympathetic picture — instead focusing on the angle of Giardina’s wife succumbing to cancer after Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) wrote a letter to Patel and U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi naming the agent as the person behind the Steele dossier.

“Grassley named Giardina in the letter despite the bureau’s standard practice of protecting case agents by asking Congress to redact their names from sensitive disclosures,” Bazelon and Poser wrote, noting that a spokesperson for Grassley stated that it is his “longstanding office policy to leave names unredacted in public document productions” because “Americans deserve to know how their tax dollars are being spent.”

Giardina complained that he attempted to meet with Marshall Yates, the head of the FBI’s office of congressional affairs, to deny that he had access to the Steele dossier. 

“When Senator Grassley wrote a letter naming me to the director as the person behind the Steele dossier, that was punching all the way down,” the former FBI agent told the Times. “I don’t know of any other time that a senator wrote a letter attacking an individual street-level agent. I’m begging my managers and the office of congressional affairs to meet with me to sort out this situation — for me personally, but also for the F.B.I. as a whole. It would take one second to look at the case access history and see that I never even had access to the Steele matter. I had nothing to do with that.”

He continued, “My wife was in and out of the hospital from June 5 to July 15, when she passed away. During that time, I kept trying to meet with the office of congressional affairs about responding to Grassley’s letter.”

The profile went on to focus more on how Giardina’s wife’s condition got worse, ultimately leading to her unfortunate passing. 

Despite eventually getting his interview with Yates, he complained that the FBI had “already decided” to fire him. 

Maria Ricci, former assistant special agent in charge of the FBI’s Washington field office, told the Times that “Walter was one of the most heartbreaking ones, because it was the week after he buried his wife. She had cancer, and then he gets hit with this.”

Another New York Times puff-piece on Giardina, published in September by authors Glenn Thrush and Alan Feuer, also mentioned the ex-agent’s wife’s illness and tragic death multiple times. 

“By the time Mr. Grassley went public with his claims, Colleen Giardina’s health was already deteriorating. At times, it seemed like her death and the end of his nearly two-decade career were racing each other on parallel tracks,” her husband said.

It is also worth noting that Thrush, one of that first Times piece’s co-authors, was accused in 2017 of “luring” young female journalists and subjecting them to “unwanted groping” and sexual advances. 

“In addition to being accused of groping Vox Editor Laura McGann, Thrush followed a drunk 23-year-old intern on foot nearly a mile over the Key Bridge, across the river into D.C. while she frantically texted a friend asking for help. Then, he made her cry after she resisted his advances,” reported the Payday Report’s Mike Elk. 

Despite the allegations, Thrush returned to the New York Times after a two-month suspension.

Reacting to the “canonization by the Left of Walter Giardina” in an exclusive statement to Breitbart News, Navarro said the publication invited readers to see the former agent “not as a central actor in the lawfare campaign against Donald Trump, but as a martyr: a grieving widower, a ‘street-level agent,’ and a victim of cruel politics.”

“The emotional chords are unmistakable,” he explained. “We are taken to the hospital. We are reminded—repeatedly—of a wife dying of cancer. We are told of unanswered emails, missed meetings, and personal anguish layered atop professional jeopardy. The message is clear: scrutiny itself is indecent… This is not investigative journalism. It is reputational laundering.”

Navarro also pointed out that Giardina’s claim that Grassley was “punching down” to him “rather than what it is: a constitutional obligation,” was dishonest. 

The Trump adviser then expanded upon the actual contents of the senator’s letter, which the Times greatly narrowed down to just one allegation of Giardina backing the Steele dossier:

Two months before Giardina left the FBI, Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley sent a formal letter to the FBI and the Attorney General relaying whistleblower allegations involving Giardina’s conduct. That letter did not merely reference one stray claim. It raised multiple concerns tied to politically sensitive investigations, including Giardina’s work on the elite Washington public-corruption squad known as CR-15, which ran Arctic Frost—the investigation into Trump for alleged interference in the 2020 election. 

Rather than grapple with that record, the Times reduces the matter to a single point: an allegation that Giardina said the Steele dossier was “corroborated.” The article immediately hands him a denial. He says he “never had access,” despite whistleblower allegations to the contrary. 

That move is the whitewash.  End of the Times discussion. 

Contrary to the Times‘s framing, Navarro argued that Giardina was not merely a “powerless functionary” just “following orders.” In reality, he said the ex-agent’s track record of the Steele dossier, the Mueller investigation, Operation Red Maasari, Arctic Frost, and the politically-motivated arrests paint the real picture. 

The article also did not mention anything of the progressive and well-connected ecosystem that mobilized around Giardina “almost immediately after his removal.”

While Navarro said that the former agent is being portrayed as “isolated and defenseless,” he quickly joined Washington, D.C. law firm Bailey & Glasser after being fired by the FBI. 

One of the firm’s founding partners, Brian Glasser, brags about his work against Trump ally Mike Lindell on his biography page, where he won an initial judgment against his company in 2023 that was later reversed. 

Federal Election Commission (FEC) records also show that Glasser has donated tens of thousands of dollars to the Democrat machine. 

While acting like a victim of the machine, the White House adviser said Giardina is actually “well represented, lucratively employed, and publicly championed by the same political-legal complex that has driven lawfare against Trump and his allies for years.”

“There is also no mention of institutional lineage,” Navarro wrote of the Times article, highlighting that Giardina is notably the son-in-law of Larry Potts, the disgraced former FBI deputy director whose name is “inseparable” from the Ruby Ridge and Waco massacres.

Navarro continued, “This is not about inherited guilt. It is about inherited culture. The Times refuses to acknowledge that context at all.”

An X thread posted by Navarro back in September delves deeper into the connection between Giardina and Potts, who he referred to as a pair of “disgraced agents linked by blood who have forever stained the Bureau’s reputation.”

Navarro has repeatedly called for an investigation into Giardina and other “lawfare insurrectionists,” writing for Breitbart News in August that his firing was “not good enough.”

“And if any of these investigations find wrongdoing, the lawfare insurrectionists must be held accountable. Because if they are not, they will do it again,” he wrote at the time. 

In his latest statement to Breitbart News, Navarro added that Giardina should “welcome transparency” if he is, in fact, as innocent as the Times article suggests.

“He should welcome sworn testimony. He should welcome the release of documents that resolve these questions conclusively,” he wrote. “Instead, we are offered canonization by vignette.” 

“That is why the Senate Judiciary Committee should issue subpoenas and compel sworn testimony—and why the Department of Justice should review the full record to determine whether discipline, referral, or prosecution rather than retirement with a full pension is warranted,” Navarro continued. “Because the FBI will not regain public trust through sympathetic profiles, but only through facts, documents, and accountability. And the weaponization of our justice system will not end until alleged perpetrators like Giardina are unmasked and held accountable.”

Olivia Rondeau is a politics reporter for Breitbart News based in Washington, DC. Find her on X/Twitter and Instagram.