It is an interesting thing to suddenly lose one’s freedom. It would be very interesting on this day, June 3, 2022.
The first thing FBI agents do when they grab you is pull your arms behind you and put you in handcuffs.
No matter how gently they might try to do it, it’s still going to take a pretty good pull on your shoulder sockets. And in this case, they weren’t particularly gentle.
I no doubt appeared to these five armed FBI agents to be a very dangerous hombre. After all, I was 74 years old, I weigh 145 pounds soaking wet and top out at a gargantuan 5’7″.
Once I was handcuffed, they walked me out the back door of the gangway at Reagan National Airport and down some portable steps onto the tarmac, where they had a tiny car waiting to transport me first back to the FBI headquarters — it’s across the street from my apartment — and then eventually to the courthouse.
At the time, Walt Giardina seemed to actually be a kind of pleasant fellow when not armed to the teeth. He presented as the quintessential “Good Nazi” just “doing his duty” without the courage to stand up to the FBI and Department of Justice.
I would subsequently learn, however, from internal DOJ and FBI documents that Giardina was every bit a bad FBI seed who would willingly and willfully abuse power to advance partisan interests — think James Comey, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page. Giardina belongs right with them.
Such behavior is in all likelihood an enduring vestige of an organizational culture of fear and intimidation that dates back to the days of J. Edgar Hoover.
Let’s remember that when Hoover wasn’t crossdressing and putting on lipstick for his own private cameras, he was abusing the FBI to spy on American icons like Martin Luther King and John and Bobby Kennedy and to gather dirt on as many congressmen as possible to make sure he would never get fired.
Power has always corrupted, and the absolute power the FBI wields has always corrupted that anything-but-heroic agency.
Once I arrived at the HQ, I got my first taste of a truly evil FBI pr-ck. Big bald dude with bulging biceps who told me to keep my mouth shut and do exactly what I was told.
At least this dumb brute gave me my first of what would be three good laughs of my FBI day. It was indeed at least semi-hilarious, as said brute couldn’t work his machine well enough to actually take my fingerprints.
My second laugh would quickly follow as Walt and his partner, who I nicknamed Clouseau, put me back in their Keystone Cops car and off we went to the District Court a few blocks away, where I would be arraigned.
It would have been the simplest thing in the world for me to walk the few blocks down that morning from my apartment and simply report to the court and thereby avoid all the guns, terrorism of my fiancée and CNN theatrics.
But of course that would miss the Biden regime’s weaponized point — perp walk and punish a Trump official to boost its reputation in the eyes of this country’s adoring left wing.
The laugh came when these two clowns couldn’t figure out just how to get into the building.
They had to circle it a couple of times while they made some frantic phone calls. Finally, they found the magic engine at the back of the building that opens up into a big freight elevator that swallows up your car and takes you down to the dungeon.
Let the humiliating strip search begin.
First, it was off with my tie and belt so I wouldn’t hang myself in the cell. Don’t worry, I certainly wasn’t that desperate yet.
Second, there was the bend over and strip search. Hardly necessary unless you wanted to intimidate the prisoner, but hey, I was just along for their rough ride.
Third, and this is where the fun really began, they put me in a pair of 15-pound leg irons. They assured me this was just “procedure” that everybody got; how could they treat me any differently?
Fair enough. Why should I, a former White House official and senior adviser to the president, who had saved hundreds of thousands of lives and created hundreds of thousands of jobs and who had now been charged with a misdemeanor, be treated any better than the usual felonious parade of rapists, thieves, murderers, drug addicts, burglars, pimps and hookers they usually get to process in the court’s dungeon?
All I could wonder at the time is whether this was what they were going to do to Donald Trump if they ever got their hands and handcuffs on him.
My last comic moment of the day would come when they walked me out of the strip-search area towards my cell.
Here I am in leg irons, having been told to follow this big 6’2″ guard with a long and brisk stride down a long and dimly lit hallway; and at best, all I could do is shuffle off to Buffalo to the cell awaiting me at a snail’s pace.
When I finally catch up with the guy after almost pulling a hamstring — nice-enough fellow I thanked for his service sincerely — he leads me into what would be my jail cell for the next several hours.
For whatever reason, he then goes out of his way to tell me this was the same jail cell John Hinckley sat in after he shot Ronald Reagan.
For the life of me, I couldn’t find the moral equivalence there — a senior White House adviser who had failed to comply with a congressional subpoena out of duty to my country and my oath of office versus a deranged dude with a hard-on for Jodie Foster who thought trying to take out one of the best presidents in modern history would get him laid.
I literally laughed out loud to the silence that now engulfed me.
I got my first taste of prison life. Cold draft. Hard bench without padding. A crapper without a seat or toilet paper. Dim light and not a window in sight. No food at your fingertips. The total absence of any real colors of the rainbow.
Just a drab, dismal world without clocks, where you are free — and I use the term as ironically and cynically as possible — to contemplate your navel or the cosmos.
If it doesn’t kill you or bore you to death, it makes you stronger. Well F these Bidenites and jackboots, I thought, I choose stronger. So take your best shot. And that’s exactly what they did.
It would take more than 600 days. But eventually the bastards did indeed put me in a federal prison.
Copyright 2025 Peter Navarro and Bonnie Brenner. Excerpted with permission from Skyhorse Publishing from “I Went to Prison So You Won’t Have To: A Love and Lawfare Story in Trump Land.”
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