Judge rules ex-Trump attorney Eastman should lose law license
LOS ANGELES — John Eastman, the former California law school dean who helped forge Donald Trump’s legal strategy for retaining power after losing his 2020 presidential bid, should be disbarred, a State Bar Court judge ruled Wednesday.
Judge Yvette Roland’s recommendation to yank the 63-year-old Eastman’s license to practice law in California will go to the state Supreme Court, which has the power to approve it.
In a marathon trial that lasted off-and-on from June to November, the State Bar, the agency that regulates lawyers, argued that Eastman was unfit to practice law for peddling bogus claims that fraud cost Trump the election and for promoting a fake-elector scheme to block the electoral count.
Eastman fomented “predictable and destructive chaos” when he stood beside fellow Trump adviser Rudy Giuliani on Jan. 6, 2021 and told an enormous crowd the election had been fraudulent, the bar argued.
Eastman claimed he was acting in good faith, and as a vigorous champion of his client. But state bar attorneys argued “the evidence, including his often not-credible trial testimony, shows that he held — and still holds — truth and democracy in contempt, deliberately disregarding facts that demonstrate the validity of Biden’s victory to further a false narrative that would ignore the Constitution, disenfranchise millions of voters, and undermine a democratic election for president of the United States in favor of his allegiance to Trump.”
Rather than conduct honest research, Eastman “purposely parroted the misguided opinions and narratives of demonstrably unqualified, unvetted and unreliable ‘experts,’” bar attorneys argued.
When Eastman urged the Georgia senate to scuttle the popular vote for Joe Biden and pick Donald Trump electors, he claimed there had been rampant fraud in the state, including evidence of illegal votes from “as many as 2,500” incarcerated felons. The state would determine that only up to 74 potential felons had voted. The bar argued that Eastman knew or “was willfully blind” to the falsity of the numbers he peddled, and relied on an affidavit from a CPA with no expertise in statistics or elections.
Eastman sought “to fabricate an illusion of legality to an illegal effort to delay the formal recognition of Trump’s obvious defeat by any means possible.”
In the months after Biden won the presidency, courts repeatedly threw out Trump’s election challenges, the attorney general dismissed election-tilting fraud, and Eastman’s own emails, as late as Jan. 2, 2021, showed his awareness that “hard documented evidence of the fraud” was lacking.
Yet Eastman’s memos, presented at the bar trial, laid out a strategy in which Vice President Mike Pence would block the certification of Biden’s victory on Jan. 6 by refusing to count electoral votes in swing states.
Eastman knew that his plan was illegal, the bar argued, as shown by his opposition in Dec. 2020 to filing a federal lawsuit testing his theory of Pence’s power to reject electors.