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US

John Eastman: California bar unveils disciplinary charges against Trump lawyer

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CNN
 — 

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.

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Federal investigators have accessed emails of Rep. Scott Perry and Trump allies in 2020 efforts

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CNN
 — 

Federal investigators have obtained access to several email accounts, a draft autobiography and other writings in which Republican Rep. Scott Perry, Donald Trump elections attorney John Eastman, and former Justice Department officials Jeffrey Clark and Ken Klukowski discussed the 2020 election, according to a newly released order in the DC District Court.

The order unsealed Thursday indicates how broad a net federal prosecutors have cast for information from top Trump backers as part of the sprawling criminal investigation into January 6, 2021, and efforts to impede the transfer of presidential power.

Chief Judge Beryl Howell of the DC District Court allowed federal investigators to access email messages sent to and from Perry, who pushed false election fraud claims after the 2020 election and worked with Eastman, Clark and Klukowski as they tried to overturn Trump’s election loss.

The searches obtained more than 130,000 documents and a book outline Clark was writing about himself and his experience in 2020 and early 2021.

Among the documents were 331 drafts of Clark’s autobiography outline, which he had saved in his Google account, according to a court filing.

The order discloses several rounds of investigative steps by the Justice Department in May, June and again in September.

Court filings also show how carefully investigators treaded around attorney communications that could have been considered confidential – and how they used a filter team to catalogue what they collected in the searches, then ultimately went through the federal court to obtain access to some documents.

Earlier this year, Clark declined to answer questions to several investigative teams, citing his Fifth Amendment rights, and had marked on his autobiography drafts that they were attorney work-product, implying he wanted them to remain confidential.

However, the judge wrote, the Justice Department prosecutors told a judge, “Clark penned the autobiography outline in an atmosphere charged with news that congressional committees’ investigations into the January 6, 2021 Capitol attack and other efforts to overturn the 2020 election were increasingly focusing on his role,” one filing said. Six chapters were about the 2020 election, Howell’s opinion added.

The court order cited a snippet from Clark’s prologue that said after the 2000 election, he “never thought [he’d] have a bird’s eye view of a second deeply contested presidential election” but he’d “be wrong.”

In the Perry email cache, investigators found Eastman, Klukowski and Clark were in communication with the congressman a few dozen times after the election. A handful of email exchanges and attached documents were initially filtered out by the DOJ’s filter team, and Howell then allowed prosecutors to access the 37 records.

Among those records, about a week after the 2020 election, Klukowski acknowledges in an email that he and Perry spoke, then attaches a document about state legislatures being able to determine the presidential election.

Three emails showed Eastman discussing a phone call with Perry in mid-December 2021. “John, this is congressman Scott Perry from PA. Can you contact me ASAP?” one said around December 11.

Other emails from Clark’s account, from after the Trump administration ended in 2021, included him sending Perry his resume, a forwarded excerpt of a Vaclav Havel essay, a discussion of a Roger Stone interview and a comment about Pennsylvania’s voting system.

Eastman, Perry, Clark and Klukowski have been known to be subjects of the DOJ criminal investigation around January 6 since earlier this year, when federal investigators conducted searches of each man’s cell phones. CNN reported earlier this week the DOJ had a dispute with Perry over accessing the data on his phone because of constitutional protections around members of Congress, but it’s unclear if that has been resolved.

None of the four men have been charged criminally.

This story has been updated with additional details.

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US

Trump knew voter fraud claims were wrong, federal judge says as he orders John Eastman emails turned over

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CNN
 — 

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.

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