JOHN EASTMAN UNBOWED AS PROBES PROLIFERATE
A legal reckoning awaits a chief architect of Donald Trump’s effort to reverse his 2020 election loss.
John C Eastman, a legal architect of Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss, invoked the Fifth Amendment more than 100 times under questioning by the House Jan 6 committee. But in recently released testimony from the committee’s investigation, other witnesses had plenty to say about him.
Many White House lawyers expressed contempt for Mr Eastman, portraying him as an academic with little grasp of the real world.
Greg Jacob, the legal counsel to former Vice President Mike Pence, characterised Mr Eastman’s legal advice as “gravely, gravely irresponsible”, calling him the “serpent in the ear” of Mr Trump.
Eric Herschmann, a Trump White House lawyer, recounted “chewing out” Mr Eastman. Pat Cipollone, the chief White House counsel, is described calling Mr Eastman’s ideas “nutty”.
In the coming months, Mr Eastman will face a legal reckoning. He has been drawn into the criminal investigation into election interference in Atlanta, which is nearing a decision on potential indictments. The FBI seized his iPhone.
And the Jan 6 committee, in one of its last acts, asked the Justice Department to investigate Mr Eastman on a range of criminal charges, including obstructing a congressional proceeding. For good measure, he faces a disciplinary bar proceeding in California.
A once-obscure scholar at the rightwing Claremont Institute, Mr Eastman joined the Trump camp shortly after the election and was soon among a group of lawyers who, with the president’s blessing, largely commandeered decision-making from lawyers at the White House and on the Trump campaign.
He championed a two-pronged strategy that the Jan 6 committee portrayed as a coup plot. The first was enlisting party officials to organise slates of bogus electors in swing states where Mr Trump lost, even after the results had been certified and recertified, as in Georgia. The second was pressuring Mr Pence to deviate from the vice president’s traditionally ceremonial role and decline to certify all the electoral votes on Jan 6, 2021.
While Mr Eastman refused to answer most of the committee’s questions, he has hardly been at a loss for words. At the “Stop the Steal” rally on Jan 6, 2021, held on the Ellipse moments before Trump supporters marched towards the Capitol, he spoke ominously of stolen elections, voting machine chicanery and ballots stuffed in a “secret folder”.
Over the past two years he has remained defiant in a string of public
appearances and interviews, and painted a picture sharply at odds with other accounts, most notably those of Mr Pence and two of his aides who cooperated with the House committee. In Mr Eastman’s telling of the lead-up to the Jan 6 attack on the Capitol, he was far from a criminal. In fact, in a recent interview — a fuller version of one he gave to The New York Times in the fall of 2021 — he says he was helping to head off a potentially more perilous outcome.
He claims that in an Oval Office meeting on Jan 4, he helped convince Mr Trump that Mr Pence did not have the power to pick whoever he wanted as president. And Mr Eastman said his advice was only that Mr Pence should pause the certification of the election,
giving legislatures more time to consider fraud allegations in certain states where Mr Trump had lost.
“I think my greatest contribution to this conversation is to have backed Trump away from the notion that Pence could just simply gavel him as re-elected,” Mr Eastman said. Few in the White House, however, saw him as anything close to a voice of moderation amid the riot that followed. And Mr Eastman’s account differs in significant ways from those provided by Mr Pence and his aides.
Perhaps Mr Eastman’s most immediate potential exposure comes in the criminal investigation into election interference in Fulton County, Georgia, which encompasses most of Atlanta.
Robert Sinners, the Trump campaign’s state director of Election Day operations in Georgia, testified to the Jan 6 committee that he later felt “ashamed” at having taken part in the plan orchestrated by Mr Eastman and Rudy Giuliani, Mr Trump’s personal lawyer, to assemble bogus slates of Trump electors in Georgia and other states that Mr Trump had lost.
“I don’t think Rudy Giuliani’s intent was ever about legal challenges,” he said. “He was working with folks like John Eastman and wanted to put pressure on the vice president to accept these slates of electors just regardless, without any approval from a governor, without any approval from the voters or a court, or anything like that.”
Clark D Cunningham, a professor at Georgia State University College of Law, said that “if Sinner’s testimony, or similar testimony, is deemed credible, then John Eastman faces considerable risk of prosecution.
“If Eastman was part of a conspiracy to trick Georgia citizens into signing false election documents, neither his role as an attorney nor a personal belief that election results were tainted by fraud could justify such criminal conduct,” he added. Norman Eisen, special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee during the first Trump impeachment, said Mr Eastman “was referred for prosecution by the Jan 6 committee with good reason”.
In Mr Eastman’s telling of the lead-up to the Jan 6 attack on the Capitol, he was far from a criminal.