- Between Disbarment Proceedings and Trump Indictment, John Eastman Finds Time to File Election Lawsuit in Colorado Democracy Docket
- Colorado Republican Party suing Secretary of State over unaffiliated voters CBS Colorado
- Colorado Republican Party sues Secretary of State to block nearly 2 million Coloradans from voting in primary elections CBS News
- Colorado GOP sues to close its primaries FOX31 Denver
- Colorado Republican Party files lawsuits against Secretary of State Jena Griswold, seeking to close primaries Greeley Tribune
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Tag Archives: Eastman
John Eastman: California bar unveils disciplinary charges against Trump lawyer
CNN
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The State Bar of California unveiled new disciplinary charges against John Eastman for his involvement in former President Donald Trump’s efforts to subvert the 2020 election results.
The state bar’s trial counsel is bringing 11 counts against Eastman, accusing him of violating a variety of attorney ethics rules in multiple episodes, court cases and other conduct.
Among the gambits the new disciplinary proceedings are targeting is Eastman court filings submitted in Georgia and with the Supreme Court, the pressure campaign on then-Vice President Mike Pence to disrupt Congress’ certification and Eastman’s promotion of false election fraud claims.
“There is nothing more sacrosanct to our American democracy than free and fair elections and the peaceful transfer of power,” said George Cardona, the state bar’s chief trial counsel, said in a statement. “The Notice of Disciplinary Charges alleges that Mr. Eastman violated this duty in furtherance of an attempt to usurp the will of the American people and overturn election results for the highest office in the land – an egregious and unprecedented attack on our democracy – for which he must be held accountable.”
A lawyer for Eastman did not immediately respond to CNN’s inquiry about the disciplinary charges.
The charges say he violated ethics rules by pushing voter fraud claims – in litigation, in public statements, and in other aspects of his legal work – “that he knew, or was grossly negligent in not knowing were false.” He is also accused of relying on legal theories he knew or should have known were “fundamentally flawed” to argue Pence could interfere with Congress’ certification of the 2020 results.
Eastman now faces a deadline to respond to the charges.
The proceedings will eventually move to a state bar court for adjudication, though the state supreme court has the final word on whether disciplinary proceedings should result if an attorney’s suspension or disbarment.
The bar’s counsel said in the new charges that Eastman knew or should have known the Pence scheme ran afoul of the Constitution, with the charging papers pointing to an October 2020 email from Eastman seeming to reject the idea that states could put forward alternate slates of electors – a key element of the proposals he advocated for after the election.
Eastman violated attorney ethics rules by failing to support the Constitution, the disciplinary filings allege. He is also charged with seeking to mislead courts and with moral turpitude, including with his alleged misrepresentations.
Citing the bevy of post-election litigation, as well as comments from members of the Trump administration, election officials and other “credible sources” that debunked the election fraud claims, the disciplinary filings argue that Eastman knew or should have known he was making false assertions about the election.
Eastman is the latest Trump-aligned attorney to face disciplinary proceedings for work on election reversal schemes. A disciplinary panel in DC recently made a preliminary finding that former Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani violated ethics rules with his Trump election litigation – though there will be additional rounds of proceedings before that finding is finalized and a penalty is determined.
Jeffrey Clark, a former Justice Department lawyer who boosted Trump’s election reversal efforts, is facing disciplinary proceedings, as is Sidney Powell, an attorney who represented Trump’s campaign in litigation challenging the 2020 results.
This story has been updated with additional information.
Trump knew voter fraud claims were wrong, federal judge says as he orders John Eastman emails turned over
CNN
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A federal judge on Wednesday ordered the release of emails from John Eastman, a former Donald Trump attorney, to House investigators, saying the communications were made in furtherance of a crime related to Trump’s efforts to subvert the 2020 election.
“The emails show that President Trump knew that the specific numbers of voter fraud were wrong but continued to tout those numbers, both in court and to the public,” Judge David O. Carter wrote.
“The Court finds that these emails are sufficiently related to and in furtherance of a conspiracy to defraud the United States,” he added.
Carter, who sits on the federal district court in central California, already released many of Eastman’s emails from around January 2021 to the House select committee investigating the US Capitol attack, but the two sides were still arguing over 562 additional documents from Eastman’s Chapman University email account.
For eight of the 500-plus Eastman documents the judge was examining, the judge said that the materials could be released because they fit in the so-called crime-fraud exception, which allows disclosure of otherwise privileged materials if the communications were related to or in furtherance of illegal or fraudulent conduct.
Four of the documents were from email threads discussing prospective election litigation. In them, Carter wrote, “Dr. Eastman and other attorneys suggest that – irrespective of the merits – the primary goal of filing is to delay or otherwise disrupt the January 6 vote.”
Carter’s new order cited one email where Trump’s attorneys state that “merely having this case pending in the Supreme Court, and not ruled on, may be enough to delay consideration of Georgia.”
“This email, read in context with other documents in this review, make clear that President Trump filed certain lawsuits not to obtain legal relief, but to disrupt or delay the January 6 congressional proceedings through the courts,” the ruling stated.
“The Court finds that these four documents are sufficiently related to and in furtherance of the obstruction crime,” it adds.
CNN has reached out to representatives for Trump and Eastman for comment.
Four other emails that the judge is ordering disclosed “demonstrate an effort by President Trump and his attorneys to press false claims in federal court for the purpose of delaying the January 6 vote.” Carter pointed to litigation that Trump filed challenging the election results in Georgia. The judge went on to cite a December 2020 email where Eastman said that Trump had been made aware that some of the allegations made in a early December state court election challenge were inaccurate.
According to Carter, Eastman wrote in the December 30, 2020, email: “Although the President signed a verification for [the state court filing] back on Dec. 1, he has since been made aware that some of the allegations (and evidence proffered by the experts) has been inaccurate. For him to sign a new verification with that knowledge (and incorporation by reference) would not be accurate.”
Yet Trump and his attorneys went on to file a federal lawsuit referencing the same inaccurate numbers, Carter said. The federal lawsuit Trump’s attorneys filed did not incorporate the numbers in the body of the complaint, but rather, the lawsuit included as an attachment the state court election challenge. Trump filed it, as Carter noted, without “rectifying, clarifying, or otherwise changing” the bogus fraud numbers.
The federal lawsuit filed by Trump also included that a footnote that Carter characterized as a Trump “attempt to disclaim his responsibility over the misleading allegations.” Trump said in the footnote he was only relying on the figures that that had been presented to him. “But, by his attorneys’ own admissions, the information provided to him was that the alleged voter fraud numbers were inaccurate,” Carter said Wednesday.
Carter’s findings that Trump and Eastman “knowingly” misrepresented voter fraud numbers in federal court will bolster the committee’s investigation into the former President’s election reversal gambits.
The committee has repeatedly argued that a core tenet of Trump’s plan to overturn the 2020 election results was to file frivolous lawsuits intended to delay certification of the results in key swing states. The judge’s ruling echoes that sentiment. The revelation of the emails also comes as the Justice Department as well as the local prosecutor in Atlanta have launched their own criminal probes looking at the 2020 election schemes.
Eastman must also hand over portions of materials related to his proposal for then-Vice President Mike Pence to disrupt certification of the 2020 election on January 6, 2021, the judge ordered Wednesday. Thirty-three documents were ordered disclosed in total, under the new order, which set a deadline for doing so for October 28.
Earlier this month, the committee argued that Eastman has been “consistently unreliable” as he’s tried to protect his communications from the ongoing probe and that the investigators should now get access to more emails from one of his work email accounts.
This story has been updated with additional details.
TMNT Co-Creator Kevin Eastman Excited for Seth Rogen’s Vision
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles co-creator Kevin Eastman was on hand at San Diego Comic-Con this year as part of the promotion surrounding Konami’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Cowabunga Collection. IGN caught up with Eastman and asked about the next animated incarnation of the team headed up by Seth Rogen.
RELATED: Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Movie Gets Trailer
Calling himself a fan of Rogen’s work, Eastman said he was excited about the director’s vision but didn’t want to get in the way of the creative process.
“I don’t want him to feel intimidated or think that if he asks me a question, I tell him, ‘Well, you should do this,’ that he should do that. It’s his vision and his idea,” explained Eastman. “And I think that’s, what’s personally exciting to me and I think that’s what’s going to be exciting for the fans when they finally see the movie.”
Eastman said he’d loved almost every incarnation of his creation, even if he’s had creative differences a few times over. For Rogen’s upcoming work, he’s excited that Seth is emphasizing the teenage aspect of the team, which may have faded to the background in other versions.
Rogen’s as-of-yet untitled TMNT film, which Nickelodeon first discussed in February at Viacom CBS Investor Day, hits in 2023 and precedes a series of films focused on the team’s rogue’s gallery. All of these films will premiere on Paramount+, with Rogen’s project and the villain-themed spin-offs existing side by side but narratively unrelated.
MORE: TMNT: The Cowabunga Collection Release Date Revealed
As for Eastman, he’s still very much involved in the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles output. He’s currently hard at work at The Last Ronin with fellow TMNT co-creator Peter Laird. Described as a Dark Knight-esque story for the Turtles, it covers the team’s last days in a grim and gritty manner.
Giuliani, Eastman, Graham among those subpoenaed in Georgia election probe
The subpoenas also cover a handful of the Trump campaign’s other former legal advisers, including John Eastman, Jenna Ellis, Cleta Mitchell and Kenneth Chesebro.
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis has been leading the investigation digging into Trump’s actions in Georgia. Several state officials have already been subpoenaed and have appeared before the special grand jury.
But the latest raft of subpoenas marks a new phase, as the grand jury seeks testimony from witnesses who were members of Trump’s inner circle.
Willis has been investigating potential crimes including solicitation of election fraud, making false statements, conspiracy, racketeering and threats related to election administration. The special grand jury does not issue indictments but rather collects evidence and issues a report on whether Trump or any of his allies should face charges. If it recommends an indictment, Willis could then pursue an indictment from a regularly seated grand jury in Fulton County.
The special grand jury wants to hear from Graham because the Republican senator allegedly made two calls to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and his staff in the wake of the 2020 election. According to court filings, Graham “questioned Secretary Raffensperger and his staff about reexamining certain absentee ballots cast in Georgia in order to explore the possibility of a more favorable outcome for former President Donald Trump.”
The filing also states that Graham brought up allegations of widespread voter fraud, which have been widely debunked. A spokesperson for Graham did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Giuliani is one of a handful of witnesses who were subpoenaed related to their appearance before Georgia state lawmakers in December 2020. During his early December appearance, Giuliani provided testimony, witnesses and so-called evidence that demonstrated voter fraud, according to court filings. Even after those allegations were investigated and disproven, Giuliani “made additional statements, both to the public and in subsequent legislative hearings, claiming widespread voter fraud in Georgia during the November 2020 election,” by re-upping the same previously debunked evidence, according to court filings.
“There is evidence that the Witness’s appearance and testimony at the hearing was part of a multi-state coordinated plan by the Trump Campaign to influence the results of the November 2020 election in Georgia and elsewhere,” according to court filings.
Bob Costello, Giuliani’s attorney, said his client has not yet received a subpoena and declined to comment further.
The grand jury also wants to hear from Ellis about her appearance before Georgia lawmakers peddling debunked election fraud claims, according to court filings. She did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Similarly, Willis’ team subpoenaed Jacki Pick Deason, whom court filings described as an attorney for the Trump campaign’s legal efforts. Deason presented heavily edited video before Georgia lawmakers in that December 2020 hearing that purportedly showed election workers producing “suitcases” of illegal ballots, according to court filings. That allegation was investigated by state election officials and quickly proven to be false.
Deason “possesses unique knowledge concerning communications between herself, the Trump campaign, and other known and unknown individuals involved in the multi-state, coordinated efforts to influence the results of the 2020 election in Georgia and elsewhere,” according to the court filings.
Willis has also been scrutinizing the plot to try to put forth a fake slate of pro-Trump electors in Georgia. In the latest round of subpoenas, investigators signaled an interest in hearing from both Eastman and Chesebro for their alleged roles in pushing the fake elector plan.
Eastman testified before Georgia lawmakers in December 2020, during which “he advised lawmakers that they had both the lawful authority and a ‘duty’ to replace the Democratic Party’s slate of presidential electors,” and made unfounded claims of voter fraud, according to court filings. An attorney for Eastman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Chesebro allegedly coordinated with Georgia Republican Party and Trump campaign officials to help prepare the slate of fake electors. According to court documents, Chesebro provided a Microsoft Word template for Georgia Republicans to use in a December 2020 meeting where they cast their bogus Electoral College votes. Chesebro also did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Mitchell is of interest to the grand jury because she was on the now infamous call where Trump pressed Raffensperger to “find” the nearly 12,000 votes necessary for Trump to win in the Peach State, which he lost to Joe Biden. Mitchell also parroted claims of voter fraud on the call, the court filing noted. She did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
This story has been updated with additional details.
John Eastman searched and had phone seized by federal agents last week, he says
Eastman disclosed the search and seizure in federal court in a lawsuit that he filed in New Mexico on Monday, calling it improper.
The revelation highlights the aggressive steps the Justice Department has taken in recent weeks as part of its ongoing criminal probe.
Federal agents from the Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General, which is coordinating with the wider FBI and US attorney investigation into January 6, 2021, last week raided the home of former DOJ official Jeffrey Clark, a source familiar previously told CNN. That search — during which the Justice Department inspector general’s participation had not been previously reported — came the same day as Eastman’s.
The inspector general investigates accusations of legal violations by Justice Department employees and has the ability to conduct searches and seizures. After investigating, the inspector general can refer possible criminal matters to prosecutors.
Eastman’s lawyers cited a reference in the warrant to the inspector general’s office potentially analyzing the phone’s contents, though it remains unclear to what extent the watchdog may be involved in his case.
Neither Eastman nor Clark have been charged with any crime.
Attorneys for Clark haven’t responded to requests for comment. A spokesperson for the DOJ inspector general’s office declined to comment on Monday.
Last Wednesday, about six federal investigators approached Eastman in New Mexico when he was exiting a restaurant after dinner with his wife and a friend, according to the court filings. He was patted down, and “forced to provide [facial] biometric data to open” the phone, Eastman’s court filing said.
Agents were able to get access to Eastman’s email accounts on his iPhone 12 Pro, the filings said.
Eastman is the latest person whose communications have become part of extensive Justice Department investigations related to the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol.
Eastman contends the agents “forced” him to unlock his phone.
In court, he is asking a federal judge to force the Justice Department to return his property, destroy records they’ve obtained and put on hold investigators’ access to the phone.
This story has been updated with additional details.
Ginni Thomas corresponded with John Eastman, sources in Jan. 6 House investigation say
The emails show that Thomas’s efforts to overturn the election were more extensive than previously known, two of the people said. The three declined to provide details and spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.
The committee’s members and staffers are now discussing whether to spend time during their public hearings exploring Ginni Thomas’s role in the attempt to overturn the outcome of the 2020 election, the three people said. The Washington Post previously reported that the committee had not sought an interview with Thomas and was leaning against pursuing her cooperation with its investigation.
The two people said the emails were among documents obtained by the committee and reviewed recently. Last week, a federal judge ordered Eastman to turn more than 100 documents over to the committee. Eastman had tried to block the release of those and other documents by arguing that they were privileged communications and therefore should be protected.
Thomas also sent messages to President Donald Trump’s White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, and to Arizona lawmakers, pressing them to help overturn the election, The Post has previously reported.
While Thomas has maintained that she and her husband operate in separate professional lanes, her activities as a conservative political activist have long distinguished her from other spouses of Supreme Court justices. Any new revelations about Thomas’s actions after the 2020 presidential election are likely to further intensify questions about whether Clarence Thomas should recuse himself from cases related to the election and attempts to subvert it.
In January, the Supreme Court rejected a request by Trump to block the release of his White House records to the House committee investigating Jan. 6. Clarence Thomas was the only justice to dissent, siding with Trump.
Ginni Thomas did not immediately respond to requests for comment, nor did Eastman or his lawyer. A spokeswoman for the Supreme Court did not respond to questions for Clarence Thomas.
A Jan. 6 committee spokesman declined to comment.
Eastman, who once served as clerk for Clarence Thomas at the Supreme Court, outlined scenarios for denying Biden the presidency in legal memos and in an Oval Office meeting on Jan. 4 with Trump and Pence, The Post and other outlets have previously reported. Eastman has said that Trump was his client at the time.
Earlier this year, U.S. District Judge David O. Carter ordered Eastman to release numerous documents to the committee, rejecting privilege claims Eastman had asserted. In April and May, Eastman turned over more than 1,000 documents to the committee.
In a 26-page ruling last week, Carter addressed another 599 documents that Eastman sought to shield. Carter ruled that more than 400 of those documents were protected by attorney-client or other privilege and should not be released.
But he ordered the remainder, including correspondence with state legislators and documents related to alleged election fraud and the plan to disrupt the joint session of Congress on Jan. 6, be turned over to the committee last week and early this week.
Carter described some of the documents in more detail than others.
He ordered Eastman to turn over documents regarding three December 2020 meetings of a group that Eastman described as “civic minded citizens of a conservative viewpoint,” including messages from a person Carter described as the group’s “high-profile leader” inviting Eastman to speak at a meeting on Dec. 8, 2020. The meeting agenda indicates that Eastman discussed “State legislative actions that can reverse the media-called election for Joe Biden.”
“The Select Committee has a substantial interest in these three meetings because the presentations furthered a critical objective of the January 6 plan: to have contested states certify alternate slates of electors for President Trump,” Carter wrote.
It is not clear what the group is or who its high-profile leader is.
Carter also ordered the release of part of a Dec. 22 email written by an attorney he did not identify. The attorney encouraged Trump’s legal team not to pursue litigation that might “tank the January 6 strategy” by making clear that Pence did not have the ability to intervene in the counting of electoral votes. “Lawyers are free not to bring cases; they are not free to evade judicial review to overturn a democratic election,” Carter wrote.
And the judge ordered the release of several communications that shared news stories or tweets.
In the weeks after the 2020 election, Ginni Thomas repeatedly pressed Meadows to overturn the outcome, according to text messages obtained by The Post and CBS News. After Jan. 6, she told Meadows in a text that she was “disgusted” with Pence, who had refused to help block the certification of Biden’s electoral college victory. She wrote, “We are living through what feels like the end of America.”
During that same post-election period, Thomas also pressed Republican lawmakers in Arizona to help keep Trump in office by setting aside Biden’s popular-vote win and to “choose” their own electors, The Post has reported, based on documents obtained via a public records request. Thomas sent the emails via FreeRoots, an online platform designed to facilitate sending pre-written messages to multiple elected officials.
In an email on Nov. 9, just days after media organizations called the race in Arizona and nationally for Biden, Thomas sent identical emails to 27 lawmakers in the Arizona House and Senate urging them to “stand strong in the face of political and media pressure.” The email claimed that the responsibility to choose electors — which belongs to voters under Arizona state law — was “yours and yours alone,” and claimed that the legislature had the “power to fight back against fraud” and “ensure that a clean slate of Electors is chosen.”
In a follow-up email to one of the recipients, state Rep. Shawnna Bolick, Thomas described the email as “part of our campaign to help states feel America’s eyes.”
Bolick (R), who provided Thomas with links she could use to report any fraud she had experienced in Arizona, previously told The Post that she received tens of thousands of emails after the election and that she responded to Thomas in the same way she responded to everyone else.
On Dec. 13, the day before presidential electors were scheduled to cast their votes and seal Biden’s victory, Thomas emailed 21 of those lawmakers plus two others. “Before you choose your state’s Electors … consider what will happen to the nation we all love if you don’t stand up and lead,” the email said. It linked to a video of a man urging swing-state lawmakers to “put things right” and “not give in to cowardice.”
The next day, Democratic electors in Arizona cast their votes for Biden. Republican electors met separately and signed a document declaring themselves to be the state’s “duly elected and qualified Electors.” More than a dozen Arizona lawmakers signed on to a letter to Congress for the state’s electoral votes to go to Trump or “be nullified completely until a full forensic audit can be conducted.”
Opinion | Decoding Liz Cheney’s big hint about the Jan. 6 hearings, John Eastman, and Donald Trump
The suggestion, of course, is that Eastman’s activities were criminal. And the release of that video, which largely featured Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) previewing Thursday’s hearing as committee vice chair, had its desired effect: It built media anticipation for a new set of revelations.
But to really grasp the importance of this, focus on a different quote — one from Cheney. In the video, Cheney reminded us the committee has convincingly demonstrated that Trump was extensively informed he’d lost. Cheney then said Thursday’s hearing will focus on Trump’s relentless pressure on Pence to subvert the electoral count in Congress.
“President Trump had no factual basis for what he was doing, and he had been told it was illegal,” Cheney continued. Despite this, she added, Trump “plotted” with Eastman and others to overturn the election on Jan. 6, 2021.
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A crucial hint there is that Trump had been told this was illegal. This suggests the committee might furnish new evidence that Trump had been warned that such pressure — which constituted an effort to push Pence into violating his official duty — could violate the law.
A source close to Cheney tells me the committee is very likely to present such evidence. When Cheney says such things, the source says, it’s “based on information the committee knows.”
Trump’s pressure on Pence to abuse his role as president of the Senate by delaying the election’s conclusion is the key that unlocks this whole scandal. Eastman concocted a bogus legal justification for Pence to secure this delay, which would allow states to revisit the voting, find it fraudulent and certify sham electors for Trump, overturning his loss.
But also critical is that Trump was told this would be illegal on Pence’s part. What’s more, Trump appears to have been told his pressure on Pence to do that might also be illegal.
What do we know about this part of the story? We know Pence’s counsel drafted a memo forcefully informing Trump that if Pence carried out his scheme, he’d be in violation of the Electoral Count Act of 1887, which governs how Congress counts presidential electors.
Which means Trump was told he was pressing Pence to violate his official duty and to break the law. Yet Trump kept doing so, including on Jan. 6, when he hammered Pence again in a phone call and then whipped up the mob to put still more pressure on Pence to carry out the dirty deed.
On whether Trump was told his act of bringing that pressure might also be illegal, recall that the select committee has obtained relevant texts between Fox News’s Sean Hannity and Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows. In them, Hannity suggested he had inside knowledge of White House conversations about whether Trump’s pressure on Pence was legal.
Hannity even seemed to suggest the whole White House counsel’s office might quit over this. So does the committee have more evidence that Trump or his top advisers were informed pressuring Pence violated the law?
Cheney sure seemed to hint as much. So what laws might be implicated here?
A federal judge recently declared that Trump’s pressure on Pence might have violated two laws. One prohibits obstruction of an official proceeding (the count of electors). The other bars conspiracy to defraud the United States (Trump and Eastman may have conspired to disrupt that count).
If Trump had been told pressuring Pence was illegal, it could buttress the case that Trump violated either of these statutes. It could constitute more evidence that Trump did one or both those things corruptly, says Randall Eliason, a white collar crime specialist.
“Conspiracy to defraud the U.S. and conspiracy to obstruct a congressional proceeding require the government to prove corrupt or wrongful intent,” Eliason told me. “This is one more piece.”
In other words, if Trump were informed pressuring Pence had put him on shaky legal ground, yet he continued doing so anyway, it could disarm the argument that Trump simply believed he’d won the election and that he was merely exercising his legal options in response.
Eliason cautioned that this would represent one piece of a broader effort to prove Trump’s corrupt intent throughout. Other pieces include strong evidence that Trump knew he’d lost yet tried to overturn the results anyway, and that Trump pressured the Justice Department to manufacture fake evidence of widespread voter fraud, to create a pretext for the whole scheme.
In this narrative, Eliason said, Trump pressuring Pence would constitute “one of a number of incidents that tend to show his state of mind.”
We still don’t know if Trump or his co-conspirators will ever face a criminal investigation relating to Jan. 6. But Cheney just dropped a big hint about the case the committee will make against both Eastman and Trump. “Get a great effing criminal defense lawyer,” indeed.
John Eastman: Trump lawyer ordered to respond to January 6 committee subpoena for his Chapman University emails
Federal Judge David Carter in Santa Ana, California, on Monday pinned down exactly when law professor John Eastman was at work for his client, Trump, as he devised a plan to overturn the 2020 election result.
A lawyer for Eastman told the judge during a court hearing Monday that his client had been working for Trump during a number of major controversial moments leading up to January 6: When he told state legislators on January 2 they needed to “fix this, this egregious conduct” that would put Joe Biden in the White House, when he was in the Willard Hotel with other Trump contacts, and when he met with Trump and Vice President Mike Pence on January 3 about blocking the congressional certification of the 2020 vote.
The admissions from Eastman’s lawyer, Charles Burnham, are the clearest statements yet on how much Eastman was doing on Trump’s behalf — rather than on his own initiative — in the days leading up to January 6, 2021.
“That work was done pursuant to representation of the president,” Burnham said, when asked specifically about Eastman briefing hundreds of state legislators.
The judge then asked Eastman’s team who his client was during each of the moments the House sought information about in their letter to Eastman announcing his subpoena. Eastman had been working for his client, Trump, his lawyer said in court to nearly every question.
Eastman previously refused to provide information to the House when it subpoenaed him directly for testimony and documents. He had claimed his Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination as a response to nearly 150 questions and to his document subpoena, a lawyer for the House said on Monday.
The House committee then went to his former employer, Chapman University, to seek his records. The university received a House subpoena last week, and Eastman sued to block it, pulling the dispute into the California federal court.
But by the end of Monday’s hearing, the judge had set a plan for Eastman to make even more disclosures to the House in the coming days.
His former employer, Chapman University, will give Eastman’s legal team access to his nearly 19,000 emails by midday on Tuesday, so they can sort through and identify which emails they believe should stay confidential as legal advice between Eastman and Trump, who was Eastman’s client as he shopped a legal theory to overturn the 2020 election on January 6.
A third party — potentially the judge or a team of reviewers — will then decide whether the emails can stay secret, as attorney-client privileged records.
Carter indicated at a court hearing on Monday that he wanted the email reviews to happen fast, having the parties work over the weekend and telling Eastman to hand over emails to the House as they are sorted through.
“The Court expects that the parties will work together with the urgency that this case requires,” Carter wrote in a short order following the hearing. The House, Eastman’s team and Chapman University will provide updates to the court in the coming days and appear before Carter again in a week.
It’s unclear how long the attorney-client privilege review ultimately will take.
Carter also said Eastman would lose his broader challenge of the House’s authority, and on his claims that his constitutional rights of free speech and protection from illegal search were being violated.
The judge’s quick resolution is a notable step forward for the House, as more than a dozen January 6-related witnesses challenge the select committee’s authority in court. It also sets up the likelihood that the House will be able to obtain communications that Eastman and Trump shared with others about the election, as well as other documents that may not be protected by attorney-client confidentiality.
This story has been updated with additional details from the hearing.
Trump lawyer John Eastman said ‘courage and a spine’ would help Pence send election to the House in comments before January 6
Eastman made the comments, unearthed by CNN’s KFile, on the radio show of former Trump White House senior adviser Stephen Bannon on January 2 — just two days before Eastman briefed both Pence and Trump on his controversial memo about how Pence could overturn the election and just four days before January 6, when he spoke at the rally that preceded the attack on the US Capitol.
CNN reported Tuesday that the House select committee investigating January 6 plans to subpoena Eastman if he chooses not to cooperate with its inquiry.
Eastman’s memo outlines a scenario in which Pence would disregard seven states’ Electoral College votes — making sure no candidate received the 270 Electoral College votes required to be declared the winner — thereby throwing the election to the House. Each state delegation would then have had one vote to cast for president, and since Republicans controlled 26 state delegations, a majority could have voted for Trump to win the election.
Eastman claims the memo does not reflect his own views and called the scenario to have Pence reject electoral votes and therefore throw the election to the House not “viable” and “crazy” to pursue in comments to the National Review. He also told CNN the memo was a draft.
In a conversation with CNN, Eastman said that his statements have been consistent and that he told Pence during their January 4 meeting that throwing the election to the House was “the weaker argument” and ultimately did not advise it.
“My statement on Bannon on January 2 acknowledges that that was one of the scenarios that was being discussed. But the issue that I presented to the vice president, when he asked me point blank, I told him, I said, ‘It’s an open question,’ which is true. And I said, ‘I happen to think it’s the weaker argument,’ which is true. And that’s why I recommended that he delay rather than taking that step,” Eastman said.
After CNN pointed out that on Bannon’s radio show, Eastman did not specify that the option to throw the election to the House was the “weaker” option, Eastman responded, “That’s right. Because it was a radio show.”
“I didn’t go into a whole legal treatise about the weights and the demerits. I said, ‘These are the things, these are a couple of things that have been suggested.’ That was certainly one of the paths that had been suggested by a lot of people. Was that the advice I ultimately gave to Pence? No, because I told him I thought it would be foolish to exercise that even if he had that authority.”
After the attack on the Capitol and before the memo was first reported last month, Eastman maintained that he encouraged delaying or pausing the certification of the election, notably after the vice president released a letter on January 6 saying he could not submit to demands to delay or even overthrow the election.
But days before the election certification on January 6, Eastman suggested Pence could do just what his memo outlined.
In the interview with Bannon, Eastman was pressed on whether a contingent election — a procedure used to elect the president if neither candidate secures 270 Electoral College votes — or another “alternative way” was possible to convince Pence to throw the election.
Eastman argued that a contingent election was one of two possible routes to take.
“I think if the vice president, as presiding over the joint session, would at least agree that because those ongoing contests have not been resolved, we can’t count those electors. That, that, that means that nobody has a majority of the electors,” he said. “And either they delay things — so those constitutional challenges are resolved — or they say, ‘OK, well, we don’t have electors from those states, that nobody has a majority. This is going to the House.'”
“Either route requires that we look at what actually happened here and get to the bottom of it,” said Eastman.
The recently unearthed comments come on the heels of a video posted by Democratic activist Laura Windsor, who posed as a supporter and fan of Eastman’s in order to get him to talk with her. In the video, Eastman boasted of the importance of the memo he recently tried to downplay as a draft, and blamed Pence for not carrying it through because he is an “establishment guy.”
‘Courage and the spine’
In the interview with Bannon from January 2, Eastman implied that if Pence had enough “courage and the spine,” he could overthrow the election.
“Are we to assume that this is going to be a climactic battle?” Bannon asked.
“Well, I think a lot of that depends on the courage and the spine of the individuals involved,” Eastman responded.
“When you just said the courage and the spine,” Bannon said, “are you talking on the other side of the football? Would you be, would you be, that’d be a nice way to say a guy named Mike, Vice President, Mike Pence?” asked Bannon.
“Yes,” Eastman answered.
Trump echoed Eastman’s rhetoric about courage when speaking at the rally on January 6. “I hope Mike has the courage to do what he has to do,” Trump said.
In another radio interview from January 4 — the same day that Eastman met with Pence to present options on how to overthrow the election — Eastman said there’s a “very compelling” view that the vice president can throw out the votes, though he doesn’t make clear what he wants — delaying or sending to the House.
“So if somebody were just to say, I don’t like the results, even though they were properly conducted and there’s no evidence of fraud, I don’t like the results as I’m going to certify my favorite slate of electors. The political reaction to that would be so severe and so swift, and nobody would do that. And nobody has done it in 150 years. But what we have here is a systematic violation of state laws by election officials,” said Eastman.
“This level of corruption just can’t be allowed to stand. And I think that makes, I think that makes the exercise of the vice president’s power here very compelling,” he said.
In the interview with CNN, Eastman said he could not recall what he meant by the vice president’s power being “very compelling,” but reiterated he believed the vice president had the power to delay the election and that throwing the election to the House was the weaker of two arguments.