“. . . whoever is the cause of someone becoming powerful is ruined . . .“
– Machiavelli, The Prince
2021:
On January 2, 2021, Trump held a one-hour phone call with Raffensperger. Trump was joined by chief of staff Mark Meadows, trade adviser Peter Navarro, Justice Department official John Lott, law professor John C. Eastman, and attorneys Rudy Giuliani, Cleta Mitchell, Alex Kaufman, and Kurt Hilbert. [Boldface added]
The infamous call that Trump placed to Raffensperger was in part focused on having Raffensperger re-certify the result. Instead of the Biden electors, Raffensperger would re-certify the Trump electors, sending them to Congress on Jan. 6.
“Under the law you’re not allowed to give faulty election results, OK? You’re not allowed to do that. And that’s what you done,” Trump told Raffensperger on the infamous Jan. 2 phone call. “This is a faulty election result. And honestly, this should go very fast. You should meet tomorrow because you have a big election coming up and because of what you’ve done to the president.”
On December 9, 2021, in a deposition taken by the staff of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol, Eastman invoked the Fifth Amendment roughly 100 times. He invoked the Fifth again in an [August 31, 2022] appearance in front of a Georgia grand jury investigating the Trump team’s efforts to pressure Georgia authorities into reversing the result in that state and awarding its electors to Trump.
2022:
On March 28, 2022, Judge David O. Carter of the Central District of California wrote in a published opinion that “it is more likely than not that President Trump and Dr. Eastman dishonestly conspired to obstruct the Joint Session of Congress on January 6, 2021”—that is, the official certification of the electoral vote totals that made Joe Biden president.
In December 2022, the January 6th Committee, in its final report, issued a “criminal referral” against Eastman by name, proposing a federal indictment for violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1512(c). That statute forbids “corruptly” obstructing, influencing, or impeding “any official proceeding.”
2023:
The State Bar of California’s Chief Trial Counsel George Cardona announced today [January 26, 2023] the filing of a Notice of Disciplinary Charges (NDC) against attorney John Charles Eastman (State Bar No. 193726). The 11 charges arise from allegations that Eastman engaged in a course of conduct to plan, promote, and assist then-President Trump in executing a strategy, unsupported by facts or law, to overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 presidential election by obstructing the count of electoral votes of certain states.
Specific charges allege that Eastman made false and misleading statements regarding purported election fraud, including statements on January 6, 2021, at a rally in Washington, D.C., that contributed to provoking a crowd to assault and breach the Capitol to intimidate then-Vice President Pence and prevent the electoral count from proceeding.
The Office of Chief Trial Counsel (OCTC) intends to seek Eastman’s disbarment before the State Bar Court.
2024:
John Eastman, architect of Trump’s 2020 election plot, should be disbarred, judge rules.
And is indicted In Arizona Fake Electors scheme.
Follow the demise of this architect of Trump’s scheme to steal the 2020 election
WHY MIKE LEE FOLDED
In 2016, he tried to stop Trump from becoming president. By 2020, he was trying to help Trump overturn the election. Now he could become Trump’s attorney general.
September 10, 2024
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/10/senator-mike-lee-trump-support/679565/
[Excerpt:]In early November, the day the networks called the election for Biden, Lee sent multiple text messages to Mark Meadows, Trump’s chief of staff, endorsing the work of the attorney Sidney Powell. Lee called Powell a “straight shooter” and asked that she be brought into the White House to advise the president. A couple of weeks later—after Powell had held a press conference at Republican National Committee headquarters during which she spouted wild allegations and claimed that Trump had “won by a landslide”—Lee recommended to Meadows a new lawyer: John Eastman. This was before Eastman wrote his infamous memo arguing that the vice president had the authority to unilaterally overturn the election results on January 6. But Eastman had already gone public with bogus, uninformed statements suggesting that Democrats had cheated to defeat Trump—and Lee called Meadows’s attention to the attorney’s “really interesting research.”
With the December 14 deadline closing in, Lee told Meadows “there could be a path” to overturning the election if states appointed alternative electors. Meadows replied that he was working on it. But when the states cast their electoral votes in favor of Biden on December 14—and sent no competing electors to Congress—it was over. Legally, constitutionally, and otherwise: Trump was defeated. Lee acknowledged as much to me in our conversations, saying repeatedly that there was no recourse for Trump at that point.
Yet in his texts to Meadows, which were obtained by the House committee investigating the January 6 insurrection and published by CNN, Lee kept pushing. On December 16, he asked Meadows for the White House to provide “some guidance on what arguments to raise” so senators might object to the certifying of Biden’s victory. As late as January 4, he told Meadows, “I’ve been calling state legislators for hours today, and am going to spend hours doing the same tomorrow.” The senator said that he was “trying to figure out a path that I can persuasively defend,” adding, “We need something from state legislatures to make this legitimate and to have any hope of winning. Even if they can’t convene, it might be enough if a majority of them are willing to sign a statement indicating how they would vote.”
Jenna Ellis flips to help Arizona prosecutors in 2020 election case
Former Trump campaign attorney Jenna Ellis has agreed to cooperate with Arizona prosecutors in their 2020 election subversion case against aides to former President Trump and the state’s so-called fake electors.
Ellis previously faced nine felony counts including fraud, forgery and conspiracy, but in exchange for her cooperation, the charges were dismissed.
In a statement, Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes (D) called the agreement a “significant step forward” in the case.
“I am grateful to Ms. Ellis for her cooperation with our investigation and prosecution,” Mayes said. “Her insights are invaluable and will greatly aid the State in proving its case in court. As I stated when the initial charges were announced, I will not allow American democracy to be undermined — it is far too important. Today’s announcement is a win for the rule of law.”
As part of the deal, Ellis agreed to testify “completely and truthfully at any time and any place,” including at a criminal trial. She also vowed not to “protect any person or entity” through false information or omissions.
Ex-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and Rudy Giuliani are among the 17 total defendants with remaining charges; they were indicted in April and have pleaded not guilty.
Trump himself is not charged in the case but is described as “unindicted co-conspirator 1.”
Ellis’s charges stemmed from her false claims of election fraud and efforts to pressure the Arizona Legislature into overturning the state’s election results in Trump’s favor.
She was also accused of encouraging then-Vice President Mike Pence to accept slates of fake electors instead of the true electoral votes cast for President Biden. Biden won Arizona by 10,457 votes.
The former Trump campaign lawyer faced charges in Georgia for pushing the fake electors scheme and conspiring to help Trump remain in the White House after losing the 2020 presidential election, too, but later agreed to cooperate with state prosecutors. She pleaded guilty in October to one felony count of aiding and abetting false statements and writings.
In remarks made after changing her plea to guilty in that case, she said through tears that she would have declined to represent Trump after the election if she “knew then what I know now.”
“Nevada attorney general appeals to state high court in effort to revive fake electors case”
LAS VEGAS — The top prosecutor in Nevada is asking the state Supreme Court to uphold the indictments of six Republicans charged with submitting a bogus certificate to Congress that declared Donald Trump the winner of the presidential battleground’s 2020 election…..
Clark County District Court Judge Mary Kay Holthus issued a written order Friday night affirming her ruling from the bench last month that Las Vegas was the wrong venue for the case and therefore the charges must be dismissed.
A spokesperson for Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford, a Democrat, confirmed Saturday in a statement that the office formally filed its appeal shortly after the judge issued her written order.
18 People Indicted In Arizona Fake Electors Scheme
A sweeping state indictment in Trump’s 2020 fake electors scheme targets 11 (presumably all in-state) named defendants and seven as-yet-unnamed (and presumably all out-of-state) defendants who haven’t yet been served.
The case was investigated and is being brought by Attorney General Kris Mayes (D).
The 11 named defendants are:
- Kelli Ward, former chair of the Arizona Republican Party and Trump fake elector
- Michael Ward, Kelli Ward’s husband and Trump fake elector
- Tyler Bowyer, Trump fake elector
- Jacob Hoffman, Trump fake elector
- Anthony Kern, Trump fake elector
- James Lamon, Trump fake elector
- Greg Safsten, former executive director of the Arizona Republican Party and Trump fake elector
- Nancy Cottle, Trump fake elector
- Loraine Pellegrino, Trump fake elector
- Robert Montgomery, Trump fake elector
- Samuel Moorhead, Trump fake elector
The seven redacted defendants, based on context and outside reporting, appear to be:
- Mark Meadows
- Rudy Giuliani
- John Eastman
- Boris Epshteyn
- Christina Bobb
- Jenna Ellis
- Mike Roman
The Epshteyn indictment is a big deal given his central role in organizing Trump’s criminal defense team in the numerous cases against him. Bobb is a highly ironic defendant to have in an election interference case since she was just named the RNC’s new “election integrity” chief.
- Count 1: Conspiracy
- Counts 2-3: Fraud
- Counts 4-9: Forgery
Because the names of some of the defendants remain redacted in the indictment, it’s not entirely clear if each defendant is charged with all nine counts, but it appears that way based on the formatting of the redactions.
Among the unindicted conspirators in the case: Trump himself, Kenneth Chesebro, state Sen. Kelly Townsend, former state Rep. Mark Finchem, and former Arizona GOP lawyer Jack Wilenchik.
John Eastman, architect of Trump’s 2020 election plot, should be disbarred, judge rules
“The most severe available professional sanction is warranted to protect the public,” Judge Yvette Roland wrote.
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/03/27/john-eastman-disbarred-00149468
Newly Released Messages Detail Roots of the ‘Fake Electors’ Scheme
Emails and texts unearthed in a lawsuit show how key figures intended their plan to create a “cloud of confusion” to help keep Donald Trump in office after his 2020 election loss.
By Luke Broadwater and Maggie Haberman
March 4, 2024
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/04/us/politics/chesebro-troupis-jan-6-messages.html
[Excerpts:]Just five days after Election Day in 2020, a conservative lawyer named Kenneth Chesebroemailed a former judgewho was working for the Trump campaign in Wisconsin, James R. Troupis, pitching an idea for how to overturn the results.
Through litigation, Mr. Chesebro said, the Trump campaign could allege “various systemic abuses” and, with court proceedings pending, encourage legislatures to appoint “alternative” pro-Trump electors that could be certified instead of the Biden electors chosen by the voters.
“At minimum, with such a cloud of confusion, no votes from WI (and perhaps also MI and PA) should be counted, perhaps enough to throw the election to the House,” Mr. Chesebro wrote to Mr. Troupis, referring to the swing states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
Mr. Troupis quickly brought Mr. Chesebro into the Trump legal team, directed him to lay out the plans in a series of memos now central to the indictment of Donald J. Trump and a month later — with the help of Reince Priebus, the former White House chief of staff — secured a meeting with Mr. Trump at the White House.
The email is the earliest known evidence of Mr. Chesebro’s involvement in what would become known as the false elector plot. It was released Monday along with a trove of more than 1,400 pages of text messages and emails belonging to Mr. Troupis and Mr. Chesebro as they settled a lawsuit against them filed in Wisconsin.
Taken together, the documents show in new detail how the Trump campaign’s litigation strategy was not designed to win in court as much as it was designed to give cover for their political efforts. And they underscore the central role that Mr. Troupis — previously a little-known figure in the effort to overturn the election — played in furthering the plans.
The messages also detail how Mr. Chesebro worked to get the false-electors documents into the hands of members of Congress, and how Mr. Chesebro — who has since pleaded guilty in Georgia to a felony conspiracy charge related to the scheme — celebrated the crowd that was gathering in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021, before a violent mob stormed the Capitol.
“Enjoy the history you have made possible today,” Mr. Troupis wrote in a text message to Mr. Chesebro at 11:04 a.m. that day.
The new details come from the settlement of a lawsuit filed by the progressive law firm Law Forward and Georgetown University Law Center’s Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection against Mr. Chesebro, Mr. Troupis and the so-called fake electors in Wisconsin.
The suit was filed on behalf of legitimate Wisconsin presidential electors and voters.
The purported electors have already settled their portion of the suit, admitting that President Biden won the 2020 election.
Mr. Troupis and Mr. Chesebro agreed not to engage in similar work in the future, including not participating in a scheme to advance slates of false electors.
The settlement also included a payment to the plaintiffs of an undisclosed amount.
“As these documents show, the fraudulent electors plot originated in Wisconsin, with Trump campaign attorney James Troupis and legal adviser Ken Chesebro concocting the scheme that ultimately provided the false narrative used by the rioters to justify the attack on the Capitol,” said Mary McCord, the director of Georgetown’s Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection.
Mr. Chesebro’s memos were central to the federal indictment of Mr. Trump on charges of seeking to overturn the 2020 election.They are featured as evidence of how the Trump campaign’s plans shifted from legal challenges to what prosecutors describe as a criminal plot to engineer “a fake controversy that would derail the proper certification of Biden as president-elect.”
The memos also became the basis for a strategy put forward by the conservative lawyer John Eastman and Mr. Trump that a federal judge referred to as a “coup in search of a legal theory.”
In a Nov. 19, 2020, email to Mr. Troupis, Mr. Chesebro wrote that the Trump lawyers should “pursue a shot at having two bites at the apple — ligate, hoping to ultimately win by January 6, but also use delay in litigation to try to win in the state legislature on December 8.”
Several of the documents refer to a Dec. 15, 2020, meeting of Mr. Troupis and Mr. Chesebro with Mr. Trump in the Oval Office.
“Pretty clear national people realize this wouldn’t be happening if you and reince and others hadn’t pushed it!” Mr. Chesebro wrote to Mr. Troupis two days before the White House visit.
They were told to keep the meeting secret and not bring anything for Mr. Trump to sign, the messages show.
“Reince was very explicit in his admonition that nothing about our meeting with the President can be shared with anyone,” Mr. Troupis wrote to Mr. Chesebro after.
Mr. Chesebro gave his account of the meeting to state prosecutors in Michigan investigating the fake electors plot. He said Mr. Priebus had told the men not to get Mr. Trump’s hopes up about his chances for victory, but Mr. Chesebro acknowledged he had not listened to that advice.
“We had until Jan. 6 to win,” Mr. Chesebro recalled of what he told Mr. Trump in the meeting, according to audio obtained by CNN, adding: “That got me in real trouble afterwards.”
Mr. Chesebro did not respond to a request for comment.
Mr. Preibus declined to comment. A person familiar with his actions said that he had recommended Mr. Troupis as a lawyer in Wisconsin, his home state, to the Trump campaign, but was not involved in the day-to-day of the legal efforts.
The person said that he had merely arranged a “photo op” for the men at Mr. Troupis’s request and had not met Mr. Chesebro or known who he was until that day. The person offered a similar account of the meeting as Mr. Chesebro, who said Mr. Preibus did not want them encouraging the president to fight the election results.
Even so, after the meeting, both Mr. Troupis and Mr. Chesebro appeared to feel they had some special knowledge of Mr. Trump’s plans.
After Mr. Trump posted on Twitter that he would be holding a rally in Washington on Jan. 6 — “Be there, will be wild!” he urged his followers in a message that served as a crucial call to action for far-right groups — Mr. Chesebro wrote to Mr. Troupis: “Wow. Based on 3 days ago, I think we have unique understanding of this.”
Although the plans originated in Wisconsin, the messages show the men saw Georgia as key to furthering their goals.
“If Georgia is pending before the Supreme Court on January 6, a fairly boss move would be for Pence, when he gets to Georgia, to simply decline to open any of the Georgia envelopes,” Mr. Chesebro wrote on Dec. 26, 2020. He was referring to Vice President Mike Pence’s ceremonial role in the certification by Congress of the Electoral College results.
On the morning of Jan. 6, Mr. Chesebro said he had worked with Michael Roman, the director of the Trump campaign’s Election Day operations, and given documents for the false slates of electors a day earlier to an aide to Representative Mike Kelly, Republican of Pennsylvania. That aide took them to the Senate parliamentarian, he said.
“Excellent,” Mr. Troupis replied. “Tomorrow let’s talk about SCOTUS strategy going forward. Enjoy the history you have made possible today.”
Mr. Chesebro later sent a photo of himself with the crowd at 12:26 p.m. on Jan. 6.
Mr. Troupis responded with an emoji of hands clapping.
The Supreme Pressure Campaign
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/feature/the-supreme-pressure-campaign
Donald Trump’s attorneys in 2020 thought that they had one advantage which nobody — not the Democrats, not lower-court judges, not Congress — could outmatch: the Supreme Court.
At their most feverish, attorneys for Trump believed that the Supreme Court could eventually be bullied into declaring Joe Biden the loser of the 2020 election and Trump the winner. They deployed a series of strategies, detailed in a trove of documents given to Michigan prosecutors by attorney Ken Chesebro, aimed at stoking a chaotic stalemate in Congress, thereby forcing the Court to act.
The same set of real-time emails and texts between Trump campaign officials and attorneys also shows how the group sought to influence individual justices as they filed lawsuits seeking to overturn Biden’s victory in several swing states. In the trove, attorneys game out which justices would view their claims most favorably, and speculate over how certain claims or lawsuits could create pressure to build a majority on the court.
At times, the Trump attorneys recognized that their play for the Supreme Court was a Hail Mary. It’s from that desperation, the documents suggest, that the push for chaos and delay emerged — a nearly hopeless quest to leave the Supreme Court as the only actor left standing, with Congress buckling under procedural radicalism.
But at other points, the lawyers seemed deadly serious in their speculation. John Eastman, the law professor, wrote in one email that he believed the Supreme Court would probably agree to invalidate Pennsylvania Supreme Court decisions about the election, but that the justices were “likely grappling with” the question of what “remedy” to provide. Chief Justice John Roberts would want “to account for the riots angle if they go our way,” Eastman imagined.
This story largely plays out in the final weeks before Jan. 6, after the Trump campaign had finished convening slates of its own, fake presidential electors who were willing to cast ballots saying Trump, not Biden, had won their state. To the Trump campaign, that scheme, too, was a means to theorize the high court into wrenching states that it lost away from Biden. As Chesebro wrote in late November to several attorneys working on the campaign’s effort to invalidate the Wisconsin result, the point of convening fake electors would be “to benefit from an eventual U.S. Supreme Court ruling” voiding the election result, allowing the Trump electors to swoop in and replace the Biden electors from their state in the Electoral College.
But it wasn’t until mid December, after the fake electors were sworn in — and after the Supreme Court signaled that it would not help the Trump campaign, rejecting on Dec. 11 a lawsuit filed by the state of Texas — that conversations about how to exert pressure on the justices began to accelerate.
The New York Times reported on one of the emails obtained by TPM, in which Chesebro cited “wild chaos” as potentially forcing the Court to act, and another in which he stated that the question of whether to bring suits before the Court was “political.”
The trove of documents obtained by TPM paints a fuller picture. TPM obtained the documents after Michigan prosecutors with Attorney General Dana Nessel (D)’s office sent out a tranche of records provided by Chesebro as part of his cooperation with their investigation. Chesebro supplied the documents, which include emails, texts, and legal memos, to prosecutors. The records do not provide a comprehensive accounting of the Trump campaign’s entire effort to reverse the President’s loss; they reflect what Chesebro provided as he sought to avoid further prosecution.
The documents provide new details about and insights into the Trump campaign’s legal maneuvering before Jan. 6, a story we told in part I and part II of this series. They tell another story, too: how a group of attorneys for the Trump campaign, including Chesebro, sought to use lawsuits before the Court to advance their goal of reversing Trump’s loss, including by:
- Filing lawsuits before SCOTUS challenging the results in enough states to create the impression that more electoral votes were still in play than the margin by which Trump lost
- Forcing SCOTUS to step in by causing a stalemate in Congress on Jan. 6
- Bringing enough lawsuits to SCOTUS so as to pressure friendly justices to act more aggressively
The story picks up in the weeks after the election, when the Trump campaign filed lawsuits across the country, seeking to invalidate or overturn the results in several states. They lost in nearly every case that they brought, and saw dozens more lawsuits dismissed. As time ran out, they had to decide: Which cases should they continue to pursue through appeals to the Supreme Court?
At first, they focused on two lawsuits, one challenging the results in Pennsylvania and another in Wisconsin.
Chesebro had entered the Trump campaign’s legal world via his work on the Wisconsin case, which the state Supreme Court dismissed on Dec. 14. On Christmas Eve 2020, Chesebro found himself trying to persuade Trump campaign officials to give the green light on asking the Supreme Court to intervene in the matter.
Bruce Marks, a lawyer and former politician from Pennsylvania, was counsel, along with John Eastman, on a lawsuit the Trump campaign had filed asking the Supreme Court to hear a case that sought to reverse the result in Pennsylvania.
Marks had his own unique background: in the early 1990s, he lost a state Senate race, only to have a federal judge overturn the result and order him into office upon a finding of massive fraud in the election.
Marks’ story became a north star of Trump’s legal efforts in 2020, serving as an example of what the courts had the power to do, if they only had the will.
On the morning of Dec. 24, Trump campaign official Justin Clark emailed Marks, Chesebro, and other attorneys with an inquiry: If they brought their cases to the Supreme Court, what did they think the odds of winning were? And how much would pursuing the Wisconsin case before SCOTUS cost?
Marks replied that he believed bringing cases from additional states — including Wisconsin — before the Supreme Court would help his Pennsylvania case.
“While it is difficult to estimate success on Cert petitions, the success of Pennsylvania and Wisconsin are intertwined,” Marks wrote to the group, copying Eastman on the exchange. “Wisconsin is an important step to getting to challenging 37 electoral votes.”
“Odds?” Eastman chimed in, responding to Clark’s request. He gave them odds: 10-20 percent that the Court would take the Pennsylvania case; “having Wisconsin in probably pushes that more towards the 20% side of the range or higher.”
“Odds of the Wisconsin case getting granted? ZERO if we don’t file,” Eastman added.
It was a carpe diem approach to seeking review from the Supreme Court, and one echoed by Chesebro, who wrote 10 minutes later that “you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take” and that he would defer to Eastman’s “personal insight” into which justices were the most distressed by the Trump campaign’s claims.
“A campaign that believes it really won the election would file a petition as long as it’s plausible and the resource constraints aren’t too great,” Chesebro wrote.
This intersected directly with the Trump campaign’s quest to find 270 electoral votes using non-electoral means. As Eastman wrote in a message a couple of hours later, a lawsuit to overturn the results in Arizona and Bruce Marks’ suit in Pennsylvania had already been filed before the Supreme Court — 31 electoral votes out of Biden’s lead of 36. Eastman wrote that Wisconsin, with 10 electoral votes, was “the most viable option to fill this gap.”
Earlier on in the Christmas Eve exchange, Wisconsin attorney and former judge Jim Troupis had warned the group: The path to success was “unclear” and “ill-defined.” The attorneys, he wrote, should be concerned about the “obligations” that come with asking the Supreme Court to hear a case. “I have made clear from the outset that I would strongly oppose any Petition where the goal is purely political,” Troupis wrote in an attachment cited by Chesebro.
“I don’t disagree with Judge Troupis’s comments here,” Chesebro replied, before going on to sketch out a theory over several emails throughout the day, proposing a plan to pressure the Supreme Court to overturn the election: the campaign could file enough Supreme Court cases to persuade the justices that they held the power to “change the electoral outcome.”
“Why intervene if it can make no difference in the end,” he wrote, apparently channelling what he hoped enough justices would come to believe. In a separate message that same day, Chesebro suggested to the group that Trump should file the lawsuit to sway internal Court politics, saying “getting this on file gives more ammo to the justices fighting for the Court to intervene,” he wrote.
Eastman wrote that he believed the campaign was on solid legal ground, and so the odds were based not on “the legal merits, but an assessment of the Justices’ spines,” before exhorting the group to help the justices who were “willing to do their duty” by filing the Wisconsin case.
After more back-and-forth, Eastman shared the theory that Chief Justice Roberts would likely be concerned, if the Court ruled in favor of Trump, about “the riots angle” — a premonition of what might come after handing Trump an election he lost.
Clark, the campaign official, wrote in to the sprawling thread two hours after Eastman’s “riots” email with some skepticism: he said that the campaign wouldn’t pay the attorneys “unless we get some wins,” and, worse for Chesebro and Eastman, that his impression was that the odds of success in Wisconsin were zero. He also echoed Chesebro’s theory that, if the election certification in Congress could be derailed, Jan. 6 could extend for days, writing “it also sounds like Jan 6 is a hard deadline for legal recourse unless congress doesn’t count the votes one way or another.”
The campaign eventually assented. On Dec. 29, Rudy Giuliani sent a certification authorizing the attorneys to ask the Supreme Court to hear the Wisconsin case.
The Trump attorneys were also reviewing the option of Georgia. At 16 electoral votes, it was a potentially lucrative prize to be stolen; but as Eastman had written in the Wisconsin thread, the campaign’s lawsuit in the state was “stuck in a quagmire with the state trial courts not even assigning a judge” to consider it.
The group decided to file a federal version of the Georgia lawsuit, seeing it as a way to get around what they regarded as an infuriating cold shoulder from the state judiciary. But a question continued to hang over their efforts, even as they continued into 2021: What was the point?
The attorneys had to keep themselves going — every day that the Supreme Court continued to ignore their filings was a reminder of just how unlikely their success was. Marks, the Pennsylvania attorney, wrote an email to attorneys involved in the Georgia case on New Years Eve asking if the federal judge could issue an injunction allowing the state legislature to appoint the Trump electors.
Chesebro replied within minutes that he saw an added benefit with Marks’ gambit: Georgia federal courts are in the 11th Circuit, which is overseen by Justice Clarence Thomas.
Again, Chesebro wrote, the point was to make a statement via the Court.
“Merely having this case pending in the Supreme Court, not ruled on, might be enough to delay consideration of Georgia, particularly if Pence has the legal ability and will to insert himself at least enough to win delay,” he wrote. “Realistically, our only chance to get a favorable judicial opinion by Jan. 6, which might hold up the Georgia count in Congress, is from Thomas — do you agree, Prof. Eastman?”
“I think I agree,” Eastman replied. All the Court needed to give was a “likely,” he wrote — some suggestion that a ruling which signaled some chance of winning down the line might be enough. After all, Eastman said, he was talking to Georgia lawmakers and Jan. 6 was one week away: all they needed was a small push to decertify Biden’s win in the state before the big day.
By that point, the emails suggest, even the most optimistic Trump attorneys were losing hope of a clear-cut win before the Supreme Court. In talking points for members of Congress emailed among Clark and the attorneys on New Year’s day, Eastman added rhetoric to that effect.
“The Supreme Court has made it clear that it has no intention of addressing this illegal and unconstitutional conduct,” he wrote. “So upholding the rule of law now falls to other constitutional actors who have constitutionally assigned roles.
At this point,” he concluded, “the best we can likely hope for is a strident dissent from Thomas or Alito that maps out the illegal conduct and the constitutional actors who can provide a remedy.”
[Boldface added]
“A Fake Trump Elector in Michigan Told Prosecutors of Regret, Anger”
NYT:
One of the Republicans in Michigan who acted as a fake elector for Donald J. Trump expressed deep regret about his participation, according to a recording of his interview with the state attorney general’s office that was obtained by The New York Times.
The elector, James Renner, is thus far the only Trump elector who has reached an agreement with the office of Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, which brought criminal charges in July against all 16 of the state’s fake Trump electors. In October, Ms. Nessel’s office dropped all charges against Mr. Renner after he agreed to cooperate.
Less appetite — and opportunity — to serve as fake Trump electors in 2024
Amid a growing number of criminal investigations into the 2020 election, some who once cast electoral college votes for the former president say they would not do it again
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/12/10/trump-fake-electors-charges/
[Excerpt:]
Carroll was one of 84 Republican presidential electors who convened to cast votes for Trump in 2020 across seven states where Joe Biden had been declared the certified winner. And he is among the electors in six of those states who have become embroiled in criminal investigations of their actions — saddled with legal bills and in some cases facing criminal charges. Carroll says he never again wants to be involved with a criminal investigation.
In the past few months, 25 of those 84 electors have been charged with felonies, such as forgery, false statements and filing false documents. Ten more have agreed as part of a lawsuit settlement to not serve as electors in any election in which Trump is on the ballot. And 13 others in Georgia have been labeled “unindicted co-conspirators.”
[Boldface added]
Exclusive: Pro-Trump lawyer Kenneth Chesebro cooperating in multiple state probes into 2020 fake electors plot
https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/08/politics/kenneth-chesebro-cooperating-multiple-investigations
The pro-Trump lawyer who helped devise the 2020 fake electors plot and already pleaded guilty to the conspiracy in Georgia is now cooperating with Michigan and Wisconsin state investigators in hopes of avoiding more criminal charges, multiple sources told CNN.
In a dramatic turnaround from 2020 – when the lawyer, Kenneth Chesebro, was at the center of efforts by former President Donald Trump to subvert the Electoral College and overturn his defeat – Chesebro is now helping investigators in at least four states who are looking into the scheme.
Chesebro’s cooperation in Wisconsin is the first indication the state attorney general’s office has launched its own investigation into the false slates of pro-Trump electors. Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul, a Democrat, has not publicly announced that an investigation is underway.
Chesebro also recently testified to a grand jury in Nevada, where indictments against six fake electors were announced Wednesday by state prosecutors. Additionally, Chesebro has been in contact with prosecutors in Arizona, where he plans to sit for an interview as part of that state’s ongoing investigation into fake electors.
CNN has previously identified Chesebro as an unindicted co-conspirator in special counsel Jack Smith’s federal indictment against Trump, where the former president is charged with organizing the fake electors scheme “to disenfranchise millions of voters” and unlawfully remain in power. There is no indication Chesebro is cooperating in the federal probe, or that Smith has ruled out charges against him.
The Trump campaign targeted seven states with the scheme in 2020. Charges have been filed against fake electors in Georgia, Michigan and Nevada. Investigations are underway in Arizona, New Mexico and now, apparently, Wisconsin. The seventh state in the plot was Pennsylvania.
The Michigan inquiry, led by state Attorney General Dana Nessel, a Democrat, was the first in the nation to produce criminal charges. It now appears that the scope of Nessel’s investigation may be broader than previously known, and is looking at other figures with ties to the scheme beyond the fake electors themselves.
The Michigan attorney general’s office confirmed to CNN in an email this week that their investigation is still active.
The Wisconsin attorney general’s office declined to comment, as did Chesebro’s lawyer.
Chesebro has entered into what’s known as proffer agreements in several states, which gives him some protection from prosecution, according to multiple sources. His cooperation with investigators in Michigan and Wisconsin has not been previously reported.
But cooperating with state prosecutors does not guarantee Chesebro will avoid criminal charges in one or all of the ongoing investigations, the sources cautioned.
Another pro-Trump lawyer in Michigan
Nessel’s ongoing investigation has already produced charges against the 16 fake electors in Michigan. One agreed to cooperate in exchange for his case being dropped. The rest pleaded not guilty, and there are key hearings this month in their bid to toss the case.
Sources told CNN that Nessel has scrutinized another pro-Trump lawyer, Ian Northon, who was in contact with top Trump allies after the 2020 election and accompanied the fake electors when they tried to enter the Michigan statehouse.
In charging documents against the Michigan fake electors, prosecutors highlighted how Northon tried to persuade a state trooper to let them into the Michigan State Capitol in Lansing – but they were rebuffed. This was a key part of the plan that Chesebro and others devised: Federal law and Michigan statutes require the electors to meet in the statehouse, and Chesebro hoped the pro-Trump slate would hew to the law as closely as possible.
An attorney for Northon did not comment for this story.
After the 2020 election, Northon participated in conference calls with then-Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman where they discussed how to contest the results, according to Northon’s testimony to the House select committee that investigated the January 6, 2021, insurrection.
Northon also had a phone call with Sidney Powell, a right-wing attorney and conspiracy theorist who has pleaded guilty in the Georgia election subversion case. She asked him to join a lawsuit she was filing in Michigan about nullifying the election – he declined and filed a separate suit contesting the results. The meritless cases went nowhere.
According to his congressional testimony, Northon had no ties to Chesebro, except that a colleague forwarded to him one of Chesebro’s memos about the Electoral College after the 2020 election. Northon also said he learned from a pro-Trump state legislator that the fake electors would be meeting in Lansing.
“I was as disappointed, I think, as anybody to see what happened on January 6 at the Capitol,” Northon told the House committee in 2022. “My efforts in representing these private clients were to get people to follow the law, not to encourage people to break it.”
Eastman says he wants sooner plea deadline, split from Trump
The “most important architect” of Trump’s Bogus Electoral College Objections Poised to Be Next Speaker of the House, and Republicans Don’t Want to Talk About It
From this Oct. 2022 NYT article, “They Legitimized the Risk of a Stolen Election–and Reaped the Rewards:”
The most far-reaching of Mr. Trump’s ploys to overturn his defeat, the objections to the Electoral College results by so many House Republicans did more than any lawsuit, speech or rally to engrave in party orthodoxy the myth of a stolen election. Their actions that day legitimized Mr. Trump’s refusal to concede, gave new life to his claims of conspiracy and fraud and lent institutional weight to doubts about the central ritual of American democracy.
Yet the riot engulfing the Capitol so overshadowed the debate inside that the scrutiny of that day has overlooked how Congress reached that historic vote.A reconstruction by The Times revealed more than simple rubber-stamp loyalty to a larger-than-life leader. Instead, the orchestration of the House objections was a story of shrewd salesmanship and calculated double-talk, set against a backdrop of demographic change across the country that has widened the gulf between the parties.
While most House Republicans had amplified Mr. Trump’s claims about the election in the aftermath of his loss, only the right flank of the caucus continued to loudly echo Mr. Trump’s fraud allegations in the days before Jan. 6, The Times found. More Republican lawmakers appeared to seek a way to placate Mr. Trump and his supporters without formally endorsing his extraordinary allegations. In formal statements justifying their votes, about three-quarters relied on the arguments of a low-profile Louisiana congressman, Representative Mike Johnson, the most important architect of the Electoral College objections.
On the eve of the Jan. 6 votes, he presented colleagues with what he called a “third option.” He faulted the way some states had changed voting procedures during the pandemic, saying it was unconstitutional, without supporting the outlandish claims of Mr. Trump’s most vocal supporters. His Republican critics called it a Trojan horse that allowed lawmakers to vote with the president while hiding behind a more defensible case.
Even lawmakers who had been among the noisiest “stop the steal” firebrands took refuge in Mr. Johnson’s narrow and lawyerly claims, though his nuanced argument was lost on the mob storming the Capitol, and over time it was the vision of the rioters — that a Democratic conspiracy had defrauded America — that prevailed in many Republican circles.
That has made objecting politically profitable. Republican partisans have rewarded objectors with grass-roots support, paths to higher office and campaign money. Corporate backers have reopened their coffers to lawmakers they once denounced as threats to democracy. And almost all the objectors seeking re-election are now poised to return to Congress next year, when Republicans are expected to hold a majority in the House.
See also this Dec. 15, 2020 Isaac Chotiner Q and A with Johnson in the New Yorker.
When Johnson, on the cusp of a vote for House Speaker, was asked about it by a reporter, the response from other Members was “boo” and “shut up.” Watch:
Jenna Ellis, Former Trump Lawyer, Pleads Guilty in Georgia Election Case
Three lawyers indicted with Donald Trump for trying to overturn the 2020 election results will now cooperate with prosecutors in the racketeering case.
Richard Fausset and
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/24/us/jenna-ellis-guilty-trump-georgia
[Excerpts:]Prosecutors struck plea deals last week with Kenneth Chesebro, an architect of the effort to deploy fake Trump electors in Georgia and other swing states, and Sidney Powell, an outspoken member of Mr. Trump’s legal team who spun wild conspiracy claims in the aftermath of the election.
In March, Ms. Ellis admitted in a sworn statement in Colorado, her home state, that she had knowingly misrepresented the facts in several public claims that widespread voting fraud had occurred and had led to Mr. Trump’s defeat.
But she said that she had relied on information provided by other lawyers, including some “with many more years of experience than I,” and failed to do her “due diligence” in checking the veracity of their claims.
Last month, on her Christian broadcasting radio show, she called Mr. Trump “a friend” and added, “I have great love and respect for him personally.” But she said on the show that she could not support him politically again, because he displayed a “malignant narcissistic tendency to simply say that he’s never done anything wrong.”
[Boldface added]
Trump fake elector scheme: where do seven states’ investigations stand?
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/oct/22/trump-fake-elector-scheme-case-tracker
John Eastman, in Fundraising Email, Continues to Claim “election illegality and fraud” in the 2020 Election
The ‘fake electors’ and their role in the 2020 election, explained
Pro-Trump electors are central to several of the investigations into efforts by Trump and his allies to overturn his 2020 election loss.
By Amber Phillips
August 1, 2023
Download The Washington Post app.
“Where’s my Roy Cohn?”
Architect of Fake Electors Scheme Appeared to Be Outside Capitol on Jan. 6
It remains unclear why the lawyer, Kenneth Chesebro, seemed to be with the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones outside the Capitol or how he came to be with Mr. Jones and his entourage.
Alan Feuer and
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/18/us/politics/kenneth-chesebro-jan-6-trump
Photographs and videos reviewed by The New York Times suggest that Kenneth Chesebro, one of the legal architects of former President Donald J. Trump’s attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, was in the crowd outside the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and spent part of that day closely following the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who helped lead a mob toward the building.
Mr. Chesebro did not appear to have illegally entered the Capitol, as did hundreds of other rioters, or commit any violence.
But the photographs and videos appearing to show him marching with Mr. Jones, the proprietor of Infowars, and members of his entourage — including Ali Alexander, a prominent “Stop the Steal” organizer — were the first time that one of the many aides and lawyers who helped the former president try to subvert the democratic process with controversial legal theories was also found to have had a connection to pro-Trump activists who were on the ground during the Capitol attack.
Mr. Chesebro’s presence at the Capitol was reported earlier by CNN. His lawyer did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment.
It remains unclear why Mr. Chesebro was with Mr. Jones’s group outside the Capitol or how he came to be with them. A lawyer for Mr. Jones said that Mr. Jones was unaware that Mr. Chesebro had been following his entourage that day.
Mr. Chesebro was charged this week as one of Mr. Trump’s 18 co-defendants in a sprawling racketeering indictment brought by the district attorney’s office in Fulton County, Ga. That indictment accused him of taking part in a sweeping plot to create slates of so-called fake electors pledged to Mr. Trump in several key swing states that Joseph R. Biden Jr. had won.
Mr. Chesebro also appeared as an unnamed co-conspirator in a similar federal indictment brought against Mr. Trump in Washington this month by prosecutors working for the special counsel, Jack Smith. Mr. Chesebro wrote three memos in November and December 2020, which prosecutors used to trace the evolution of the fake elector plan and an attempt to use it as part of a broader effort to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to throw the election to Mr. Trump during a joint session of Congress on Jan. 6, 2021.
Wearing a red MAGA hat, Mr. Chesebro can be seen joining Mr. Jones’s group outside the Capitol shortly before 2 p.m. that day, according to the photographs and video reviewed by The Times. The visual evidence shows he stayed with Mr. Jones, Mr. Alexander and others — including Owen Shroyer, one of Mr. Jones’s top aides — for about an hour and a half, often filming Mr. Jones on his cellphone as the group walked around the Capitol and went partly up the stairs outside the east front of the building.
Mr. Jones and Mr. Alexander were among the first “Stop the Steal” activists to draw attention from federal prosecutors investigating the Capitol riot. As early as April 2022, Mr. Jones reached out to the Justice Department in an unsuccessful effort to secure an immunity deal in exchange for information. Mr. Alexander was subpoenaed by — and ultimately testified to — a grand jury in Washington that was looking into various aspects of the attack.
As for Mr. Shroyer, he pleaded guilty in June to a single count of illegally entering and remaining on the Capitol’s restricted grounds.
It was a remarkable turn of events that Mr. Chesebro, an obscure lawyer versed in the complexities of election law, appeared to be seen on video marching on Jan. 6 with two of the main “Stop the Steal” activists who helped lead the mob to the Capitol from Mr. Trump’s speech near the White House that day. The convergence of someone who took part in the legal attempts to keep Mr. Trump in power with those who were central to bringing the force of a crowd to bear as Congress was certifying the election results was a powerful reminder of how many mysteries remain where Jan. 6 is concerned.
Until now, there appeared to be different tentacles of the efforts to keep Mr. Trump in power that had not overlapped. But Mr. Chesebro hinted at those connections in an email exchange with John Eastman, another lawyer who was instrumental in the plan to pressure Mr. Pence with the fake elector scheme.
In late December 2020, the two lawyers discussed how to get a case before the Supreme Court. Mr. Chesebro told Mr. Eastman as they discussed filing a legal action that in terms of the highest court, the “odds of action before Jan. 6 will become more favorable if the justices start to fear that there will be ‘wild’ chaos on Jan. 6 unless they rule by then, either way.”
After Years of Spreading Lies, Election Deniers Face Consequences
Legal repercussions have arrived for the leaders of the effort to overturn the 2020 presidential contest, in what could serve as a warning to those who meddle in future elections.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/15/us/politics/election-deniers-charges-indictment
Trump, allies charged with racketeering scheme over bid to subvert election in Georgia
The former president and 18 allies were indicted for what prosecutors described as a wide-ranging criminal enterprise.
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/08/14/fulton-county-trump-indictment-00111211
[Excerpt:]A grand jury in Georgia has indicted former President Donald Trump and 18 allies on racketeering charges for a sweeping attempt to corrupt the 2020 election by subverting Joe Biden’s victory in the state.
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis leveled the charges Monday night after a two-year investigation that also tagged Trump with allegations that he conspired to derail the Electoral College process, marshaled the Justice Department to bolster his scheme, pressured Georgia officials to undo the election results and repeatedly lied about fraud allegations to ratchet up pressure.
In addition to Trump, Willis charged former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and attorneys Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, Sidney Powell, Jeff Clark, Ken Chesebro and Jenna Ellis, key figures in Trump’s bid to subvert the 2020 election.
The 98-page indictment tracks several well-known aspects of Trump’s conduct in the chaotic weeks that followed his defeat in the Nov. 3, 2020, election, many of which were aired by the House Jan. 6 select committee and, more recently, in a federal indictment obtained by special counsel Jack Smith.
How Donald Trump tried to undo his loss in Georgia in 2020
If you do not support my dad 100 percent, we have a problem, Donald Trump Jr. told the group, a Trump campaign staffer familiar with the meeting testified to the House committee that investigated the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
The state party chairman, David Shafer, emerged looking “like he had seen a ghost,” the staffer said.
Giuliani drew national attention with a series of legislative hearings in two battlegrounds, Michigan and Pennsylvania, but his appearance with Eastman before a Georgia State Senate committee in Atlanta revealed the lengths Trump was willing to go to reverse his defeat.
“There was ample evidence to conclude that this election was a sham,” Giuliani said. “It was an embarrassment to the people of your state.”
He went on to say that state law did not prevent the legislature from “immediately taking this over and deciding this. There would have to be a substantial basis for it. And that’s really what we’re presenting to you, a substantial basis, even to the point that these votes are too illegitimate to certify.”
Eastman, piped into the hearing on a video screen, told the assembled senators that if the Republican-controlled legislature chose to appoint a pro-Trump slate of electors, it could fall to the president of the U.S. Senate — at the time, Vice President Mike Pence — to determine if that slate should be counted in Congress’s Jan. 6 joint session rather than the Biden electors appointed by the governor when he certified the election results in late November.
Although widely overlooked at the time, Eastman’s remarks indicated that Trump’s electors may have met and voted in seven states on Dec. 14 not merely to preserve their legal recourse in pending lawsuits, as many claimed, but also to prepare for Jan. 6, when Trump and his allies would heavily lobby Pence to block the final counting of the electoral college votes for Biden.
“Unfortunately, Section 15 of Title III is embarrassingly ambiguous about which of those slate of electors ought to be counted,” Eastman told the senators. “And the 12th Amendment is also a bit ambiguous about who has the final say. So in making that determination, I think a very credible argument can be made that it’s the president of the Senate as the presiding officer of that joint session of Congress.”
State Sen. Elena Parent, a Democrat, reacted incredulously to what Eastman was saying. “So correct me if I’m wrong here,” she said during the live broadcast. “Your argument is that essentially we have a failed election that would require the legislature to step in and assign electors. Am I correct?”
Eastman’s reply: “Yes.”
The memos and emails reveal the underpinnings of a desperate strategy to assemble slates of fraudulent electors, first to preserve legal options and later to foment a conflict on Jan. 6, 2021, that might lead to Trump retaining the presidency. Along the way, Chesebro concocted methods for avoiding unfavorable court rulings, enlisting friendly allies in Congress to grease the skids and ultimately counting on Mike Pence to take “bold” steps to derail the impending Biden presidency. (Chesebro, through his lawyer, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)
Here’s a chronology of Chesebro’s key documents and proposals, which show how his thinking evolved from philosophical discussions to operational plans — and at times veered into outright fantasy.
NOV. 18, 2020 MEMO: Chesebro’s initial foray into Trump world’s upper echelons came as states prepared to certify their election results. Chesebro was advising Wisconsin-based Trump attorney Jim Troupis about a legal strategy for challenging the results there in court.
Here, Chesebro first emphasized that Jan. 6, 2021 was the real “hard deadline” for courts to rule on Trump’s election challenges. But he stressed that in order to sustain legal challenges to Wisconsin’s results, a slate of pro-Trump electors must convene on Dec. 14, 2020 and cast ballots as though they were legitimately elected.
“It may seem odd that electors pledged to Trump and Pence might meet and cast their votes on December 14 even if, at that juncture, the Trump-Pence ticket is behind in the vote count,” Chesebro wrote. “However, a fair reading of the federal statutes suggests that this is a reasonable course of action.”
Chesebro noted that if courts ruled in Trump’s favor, Congress may only be able to count electoral votes cast by the legally prescribed deadline of Dec. 14. In other words, it was a contingency plan while lawsuits were pending.
DEC. 6, 2020 MEMO: By early December, Chesebro’s thinking had shifted radically. A memo first described in the special counsel’s indictment, and publicly revealed Tuesday by The New York Times, showed that Chesebro began to view the pro-Trump electors as part of a strategy to derail the transfer of power altogether — not simply as a backup plan for the courts.
The memo, also directed to Troupis, suggested that the Trump campaign assemble alternate slates of electors in six states where legal challenges were pending.
“I’ve mulled over how January might play out, and it seems feasible that the Trump campaign can prevent Biden from amassing 270 electoral votes on January 6, and force the Members of Congress, the media, and the American people to focus on the substantive evidence of illegal election and counting activities in the six contested states,” Chesebro wrote.
He described three essential criteria: 1) Meetings of the pro-Trump elector slates on Dec. 14 in all six states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin (a seventh, New Mexico, would be added later); 2) The existence of pending litigation in those states that could conceivably reverse the outcome; 3) A declaration by Pence that only he could decide which electoral votes to count on Jan. 6, 2021, when he presided over the joint session of Congress to certify the election.
“I’m not necessarily advising this course of action,” he added, describing it as a “bold, controversial strategy.”
Chesebro also used the memo to suggest that Trump’s elector slates meet secretly to avoid protest. At the same time, he wrote, the campaign should be prepared to characterize the meetings as “routine” contingency planning for potential legal victories.
DEC. 9, 2020 MEMO: Days after advising the campaign to convene its false elector slates, Chesebro provided a plan to operationalize the strategy. In a third memo to Troupis, Chesebro outlined the federal and state laws governing the meetings of the electors and how the Trump campaign could attempt to comply with those requirements in order to keep alive the chance that they would be counted by the courts or Congress.
Chesebro notes that no state legislatures had certified these alternate slates — Trump and his allies were still leaning on GOP legislators to take that step — but that the pro-Trump electors should meet anyway to cast contingent ballots. However, in some states, valid electors were required to meet in specific venues or under the guidance of specific state officials like the governor or secretary of state.
He noted the rules could make assembling alternate slates “very problematic” in Nevada and “somewhat dicey” in Michigan and Pennsylvania.
DEC. 13, 2020 NOTES TO RUDY GIULIANI: On the eve of the elector meetings, Chesebro typed up notes to Rudy Giuliani, a substitute for a memo he said he lost due to a “reboot on the hotel computer.” This document, which he forwarded to Eastman on Jan. 2, 2021, was publicly revealed last year, after a federal judge determined it constituted evidence of a likely crime.
In this memo, Chesebro laid out what he called the “President of the Senate” strategy — a reference to Pence’s role on Jan. 6, 2021. He strongly advocated that Pence take the position that he had ultimate authority to determine which electoral votes to count or ignore. Even if it couldn’t prevent Biden’s election, Chesebro reasoned, Pence’s declaration could help obtain leverage that might be used to broker some alternative outcome.
Most notably, Chesebro’s memo laid out a pre-Jan. 6 timeline that would help facilitate the plan. It began with a Jan. 3-5 plan for friendly GOP lawmakers to hold hearings highlighting the ambiguities of the Electoral Count Act — the law that has governed the transfer of power since 1887 — and the vice president’s role in counting electoral votes. The goal was to feature testimony from allied legal scholars to “buttress the substantive basis for the President of the Senate later refusing to count votes from those states, absent more needed scrutiny.”
On Jan. 6, Chesebro said, Pence would announce his recusal from presiding over the joint session of Congress, citing the unconstitutionality of the Electoral Count Act as well as a conflict of interest because of his candidacy for reelection. This, Chesebro contended, would “insulate” Pence from charges of making a self-serving decision and leave the matter ostensibly in the hands of a senior Republican senator. Then, after beginning to count electoral votes from an alphabetical list of states, that senator would refuse to count the votes from Arizona, citing the competing slates of electors. If Arizona wants to be counted, this senator would say, it would either have to “rerun” its election or allow for more judicial review of the outcome.
Chesebro predicted controversy and conflict would ensue from this step — and noted Biden could still emerge victorious if the conflict made its way to the Supreme Court. But he said the Supreme Court might refuse to step in, avoiding the clash between the political branches. In that scenario, he said, with the White House and Congress at loggerheads, then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi might become acting president on Jan. 20. But another outcome, he said — one that appears even more far-fetched in hindsight — might play out: Trump could quit the race in exchange for a negotiated deal to make Pence president.
“In this situation,” Chesebro wrote, “which would be messy and unpalatable to many … it doesn’t seem fanciful to think Trump and Pence would end up winning the vote after some legislatures appoint electors, or else that there might be a negotiated solution in which the Senate elects Pence vice president and Trump agrees to drop his bid … so that Biden and Harris are defeated, even though Trump isn’t re-elected.”
DEC. 23, 2020 EASTMAN EMAIL TO BORIS EPSHTEYN: Eastman distilled his own analyses and Chesebro’s advice into a pair of memos he brought to Trump and Pence. On Dec. 23, Eastman shared a draft of one of those memos with Trump adviser Boris Epshteyn, cc’ing Chesebro on the message. Eastman signaled to Epshteyn that Chesebro had edited the memo. He also noted that he and Chesebro agreed that congressional hearings to bolster their case were no longer advisable because they could “invite counter views that we do not believe should constrain Pence (or Grassley).”
“Better for them to just act boldly and be challenged,” Eastman wrote.
This step, Eastman noted, would likely result in the Supreme Court refusing to take up the case “on nonjusticiable political question grounds” — in other words, a win for Trump by default.
DEC. 31 2020 EMAIL FROM CHESEBRO TO EASTMAN AND OTHER TRUMP LAWYERS: Chesebro was also involved in the campaign’s broader legal strategy to try to get a friendly judge to give judicial imprimatur to the notion that the election results were in doubt — especially in Georgia. While Trump worked, via Justice Department official Jeff Clark, to get the department to similarly use its institutional power to cast doubt on the results, Chesebro suggested targeting efforts at Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Thomas is the so-called “circuit justice” for Georgia and neighboring states, meaning he performs the initial review of emergency appeals arising from that part of the country.
“The point is to have the court say that probably the election was void, which should be enough to prevent the Senate from counting the Biden electoral votes from Georgia, right?” Chesebro said in an email to Eastman and a larger group of lawyers working on Trump’s post-election legal efforts.
“Possibly Thomas would end up being the key here — circuit justice, right? We want to frame things so that Thomas could be the one to issue some sort of stay or other circuit justice opinion saying Georgia is in legitimate doubt,” Chesebro wrote. “Realistically, our only chance to get a favorable judicial opinion by Jan. 6, which might hold up the Georgia count in Congress, is from Thomas — do you agree, Prof. Eastman?”
Eastman, a former Thomas clerk who had at times been in touch with his wife Ginni during the post-election period, replied: “I think I agree with this. If the court were to give us ‘likely,’ that may be enough to kick the Georgia Legislature into gear, because I’ve been getting a lot of calls from them indicating to me they’re leaning that way.”
JAN. 1, 2021 NOTES TO EPSHTEYN AND EASTMAN: Chesebro’s last known message ahead of Jan. 6 was a set of 14 talking points for congressional Republicans to challenge the limits imposed on them by the Electoral Count Act. It was his most specific and granular advice yet regarding the minutiae of Congress’ procedures.
In particular, Chesebro advocated for friendly GOP lawmakers to resist the law’s limit of just five minutes of debate per lawmaker — with a maximum aggregate debate time of two hours — during formal challenges to a state’s electors.
Chesebro reasoned that Pence could side with the objecting lawmakers and agree that debate could not constitutionally be limited without a cloture vote of 60 senators.
“It might be politically painful for a Republican to vote to cut off debate,” Chesebro contended, adding, “It could take hours of debate on each state before a filibuster is overcome.”
But Chesebro noted one huge, little-understood hurdle: Every four years — for decades — Congress has affirmatively bound itself to the strict limits of the Electoral Count Act by adopting a “concurrent resolution” agreeing to abide by the terms of the 136-year-old law. If that resolution were passed on Jan. 3, 2021, he noted, it would remove any possible challenge to the constitutionality of the procedures.
As a result, Chesebro advocated for a lawmaker — like Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) — to attempt to block the concurrent resolution, forcing a debate and vote. Chesebro said this plan would be useful to determine the whip count among Senate Republicans for challenges to the election results.
Chesebro also sought to reconcile his call for lengthy debates with his larger argument that Pence — not Congress — got to determine which electors to count. He said Pence could simply allow the debates to proceed without conceding their legitimacy, buying time for the Supreme Court or state legislatures to act.
Ultimately, no lawmaker objected to the concurrent resolution, which was adopted unanimously on Jan. 3, 2021.
“John Eastman, awaiting potential indictment, asks judge to postpone his disbarment proceedings”
Attorney John Eastman, an architect of Donald Trump’s last-ditch efforts to subvert the 2020 election, is asking a California judge to postpone disbarment proceedings lodged against him, saying he’s increasingly concerned he’s about to be criminally charged by special counsel Jack Smith.
“[R]ecent developments in the investigation have renewed and intensified [Eastman’s] concerns that the federal government might bring charges against him,” his attorneys Randall Miller and Zachary Mayer wrote in an Aug. 4 filing posted to the court’s public docket on Monday.
Miller said the growing concern about criminal charges might prompt Eastman to assert his Fifth Amendment rights during disbarment proceedings. The Fifth Amendment generally allows people to refuse to provide testimony that could be used against them. But invoking the Fifth Amendment in the disbarment proceedings would jeopardize Eastman’s ability to defend his law license, his lawyers wrote.
“[Eastman] requests that the Court exercise its discretion to stay the State Bar’s disciplinary proceeding against him pending resolution of a parallel criminal investigation being conducted by Special Counsel Jack Smith and any trial or other proceedings that may result from that investigation,” Miller and Mayer wrote.
Bill Barr: Trump committed a ‘grave wrongdoing’ in Jan. 6 case
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/bill-barr-trump-committed-a-grave-wrongdoing-in-jan-6-case
[Excerpt:]-
Geoff Bennett:
Yes.
Well, Mr. Lauro also said that the former president was following the advice of his lawyers, to include John Eastman, that he had the advice of counsel. How solid a defense is that, in your view?
-
William Barr:
I think that’s quickly going to fall apart.
First, Trump basically searches around for any lawyer he can find who agrees with his predisposition. He doesn’t get advice and follow it. He looks for a lawyer who will tell him what he wants to hear. And, here, he was saying — just passing through all the
lawyers, all the government lawyers, all his campaign lawyers who were telling him, no, no, no.
And he finally found this professor who — it’s going to be interesting to say what he actually told him, because I don’t think he necessarily said, this is legal, and it’s OK. I think he said, well, you might be able to make an argument to this. You might make it. The courts wouldn’t accept it, and so forth.
So we will have to see how he casts it. But there’s a big practical hurdle to him doing that, because he’s going to have to get on the stand to raise that defense and subject himself to cross-examination, and he will have to waive attorney-client privilege. And Eastman would have to get on the stage — on the stand.
Here are the Trump co-conspirators described in the DOJ indictment
“Co-Conspirator 2” was an attorney “who devised and attempted to implement a strategy to leverage the Vice President’s ceremonial role overseeing the certification proceeding to obstruct the certification of the presidential election,” according to the indictment.
Eastman, a conservative attorney who once clerked for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, crafted a legal strategy that involved creating slates of pro-Trump electors in states that Joe Biden won. He also falsely asserted, without evidence, that Trump lost Georgia in part because 66,000 underage people and 2,500 convicted felons had voted in the state that year.
Some of those allegations surfaced in a lawsuit Trump filed to overturn the Georgia results. The indictment says this co-conspirator acknowledged in an email that he and Trump had “been made aware that some of the allegations (and evidence proffered by experts) has been inaccurate.” But the claims remained in the lawsuit. The indictment also details phone calls the co-conspirator made to state officials and Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel, in which he “falsely represented” that the alternate electors’ votes would only be used if ongoing litigation changed a state’s results. Even as he made those claims, this co-conspirator wrote a memo suggesting Vice President Mike Pence could throw out votes in states with disputed electoral slates and gavel “Trump as re-elected,” according to the indictment.
Charles Burnham, Eastman’s lawyer, said in a statement Tuesday night that the indictment “relies on a misleading presentation of the record to contrive criminal charges against Presidential candidate Trump and to cast ominous aspersions on his close advisors.” Burnham said Eastman is not involved with plea bargaining.
“[I]f he were invited to plea bargain with either state or federal prosecutors, he would decline. The fact is, if Dr. Eastman is indicted, he will go to trial. If convicted, he will appeal,” Burnham said. “The Eastman legal team is confident of its legal position in this matter.”
Building a Legal Wall Around Donald Trump
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/20/opinion/jan-6-legal
[Excerpt:]
Does anything make a difference in the fight against Trump’s lawlessness and lies?
The answer is yes, and the record is impressive. Let’s go through it.
The pro-Trump media ecosphere that repeated and amplified his election lies has paid a price. Fox News agreed to a stunning $787 million defamation settlement with Dominion Voting Systems, and multipledefamationcases continue against multiple right-wing media outlets.
Trump’s lawyers and his lawyer allies have paid a price. Last month the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit upheld the bulk of a sanctions award against Sidney Powell and a Mos Eisley cantina’s worth of Trump-allied lawyers. A New York State appellate court temporarily suspended Rudy Giuliani’s law license in 2021, and earlier this month a Washington, D.C., bar panel recommended that he be disbarred. Jenna Ellis, one of Guiliani’s partners in dangerous dishonesty and frivolous legal arguments, admitted to making multiple misrepresentations in a public censure from the Colorado Bar Association. John Eastman, the former dean of Chapman University’s law school and the author of an infamous legal memo that suggested Mike Pence could overturn the election, is facing his own bar trial in California.
Congress has responded to the Jan. 6 crisis, passing bipartisan Electoral Count Act reforms that would make a repeat performance of the congressional attempt to overturn the election far more difficult.
The Supreme Court has responded, deciding Moore v. Harper, which gutted the independent state legislature doctrine and guaranteed that partisan state legislatures are still subject to review by the courts.
The criminal justice system has responded, securing hundreds of criminal convictions of Jan. 6 rioters, including seditious conspiracy convictions for multiple members of the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys. And the criminal justice system is still responding, progressing steadily up the command and control chain, with Trump himself apparently the ultimate target.
In roughly 30 months — light speed in legal time — the American legal system has built the case law necessary to combat and deter American insurrection. Bar associations are setting precedents. Courts are setting precedents. And these precedents are holding in the face of appeals and legal challenges.
Do you wonder why the 2022 election was relatively routine and uneventful, even though the Republicans fielded a host of conspiracy-theorist candidates? Do you wonder why right-wing media was relatively tame after a series of tough G.O.P. losses, especially compared to the deranged hysterics in 2020? Yes, it matters that Trump was not a candidate, but it also matters that the right’s most lawless members have been prosecuted, sued and sanctioned.
The consequences for Jan. 6 and the Stop the Steal movement are not exclusively legal. The midterm elections also represented a profound setback for the extreme MAGA right. According to an NBC News report, election-denying candidates “overwhelmingly lost” their races in swing states. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the relentless legal efforts also had a political payoff.
And to be clear, this accountability has not come exclusively through the left — though the Biden administration and the Garland Justice Department deserve immense credit for their responses to Trump’s insurrection, which have been firm without overreaching. Multiple Republicans joined with Democrats to pass Electoral Count Act reform. Both conservative and liberal justices rejected the independent state legislature doctrine. Conservative and liberal judges, including multiple Trump appointees, likewise rejected Trump’s election challenges. Republican governors and other Republican elected officials in Arizona and Georgia withstood immense pressure from within their own party to uphold Joe Biden’s election win.
American legal institutions have passed the Jan. 6 test so far, but the tests aren’t over. Trump is already attempting to substantially delay the trial on his federal indictment in the Mar-a-Lago case, and if a second federal indictment arrives soon, he’ll almost certainly attempt to delay it as well. Trump does not want to face a jury, and if he delays his trials long enough, he can run for president free of any felony convictions. And what if he wins?
Trump’s Conspirators Are Facing the Music, Finally
Norman Eisen and
Mr. Eisen is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Mr. Goodman is a law professor at New York University.
We’ve reached a turning point in the effort to ensure there are consequences for those who deliberately attempt to undermine our democracy: Michigan’s attorney general, Dana Nessel, charged 16 Republican leaders in her state on Tuesday for their role as fake electors working to overturn the results of the 2020 election. The charges, coming on the heels of news that the special counsel Jack Smith has informed Donald Trump that he’s a target of the Department of Justice’s investigation into the Capitol riot, mean we are witnessing a new and necessary phase in this quest for accountability, one in which the federal and state wheels of justice work to hold people accountable not only for the violence on Jan. 6, but also for what got us there: the alleged scheme to interfere with the transfer of power.
The charges in Michigan will surely meet criticism on all sides. Some will say the case is not broad or bold enough, that Mr. Trump and the other alleged national ringleaders should have been charged as well. Others will say Ms. Nessel cast too wide a net, pulling in low-level party functionaries who did not know better. We think those critiques are misconceived. Ms. Nessel got it just right, prosecuting crimes firmly within her jurisdiction, while opening the way for federal authorities to net even bigger fish.
Ms. Nessel brought the same eight counts against all 16 defendants. The offenses include conspiracy to commit forgery, since the defendants are accused of signing documents stating they were the qualified electors (they were not), and publishing forged documents by circulating these materials to federal and state authorities. On paper, the penalties for the offenses range from five to 14 years, but sentencing in this case would presumably be lower than that maximum.
Until now there have been no charges centered on the fake electors plot. For that reason alone, Michigan’s action brings a sense of needed accountability for those who fanned the rioters’ passions leading up to Jan. 6 by spinning a false narrative about a stolen election.
Michigan charges 16 fake electors for Donald Trump with election law and forgery felonies
Exclusive: Special counsel trades immunity for fake elector testimony as Jan 6 probe heats up
[Excerpts:]
Special counsel Jack Smith has compelled at least two Republican fake electors to testify to a federal grand jury in Washington in recent weeks by giving them limited immunity, part of a current push by federal prosecutors to swiftly nail down evidence in the sprawling criminal investigation into efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
In recent weeks, the special counsel’s office has also shown interest in several members of Trump’s post-election legal team who promoted baseless claims of widespread voter fraud, including his former lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, as well as former Justice Department appointee Jeffrey Clark, who tried to help Trump’s push to use the Department of Justice to overturn the election.
Giuliani played a key role in overseeing the fake electors plot across seven battleground states as part of the broader push to overturn the 2020 presidential election results for Trump, as CNN has previously reported.
Prosecutors have also continued to focus on potential financial crimes and money laundering after Trump raised millions of dollars off false claims the election was stolen. One former Trump campaign official who testified this month before the grand jury was asked about specific campaign ads and messaging produced as part of those fundraising activities, according to a source familiar with the matter.
Multiple 2020 election witnesses are scheduled for grand jury appointments in the coming days, sources say.
Fake electors in Nevada
The fake electors scheme – one of the more public efforts to overturn Biden’s win in the 2020 election – now appears to be at the forefront for prosecutors, sources said. The Republicans at the center of the fake electors effort asserted that Trump won in seven battleground states that he actually lost, and signed documents claiming they were the rightful electors.
The two Nevada Trump electors who were given the limited immunity – the state’s Republican Party Chairman Michael McDonald and another Nevada GOP official, Jim DeGraffenreid – both testified before the grand jury last week.
At least two more grand jury witnesses this week had insight into the fake electors scheme, including Gary Michael Brown, a 2020 Trump campaign election day operations official, who had told campaign staff he delivered fake elector votes for Trump to Congress from battleground states. Brown previously never responded to House Select Committee investigators who tried to reach him in their separate investigation.
McDonald and DeGraffenreid previously declined to answer some questions about the fake electors scheme in the House inquiry.
McDonald also previously told reporters in Nevada that the FBI seized his phone as part of the federal probe related to January 6 and efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
The two Nevada fake electors who testified recently spoke to the grand jury about the actions of Nevada’s former GOP attorney general Adam Laxalt, and Jesse Binnall, a lawyer who worked for the Trump campaign in Nevada. Laxalt and Binnall both appeared at a press conference in mid-November 2020 to tout a lawsuit challenging the presidential election results and spreading claims of election fraud.
“Donald Trump won the state of Nevada after you account for the fraud and irregularities that occurred in the election,” said Binnall, who was one of the lawyers who brought a failed lawsuit on behalf of the GOP electors in Nevada.
As part of the special counsel’s investigation into the state-level efforts to overturn the election results, several county election commissions and state officials in battleground states Trump tried to contest received subpoenas last year for documents related to communications involving his campaign and various allies.
Nevada’s Clark County was among those that produced documents following a subpoena. In the batch of documents handed over and obtained by CNN, representatives for Trump’s campaign were in touch with election workers in Clark County. In their communications, the election workers parried questions from the Trump campaign about mail-in ballots and knocked down rumors, including a claim that there were problems with ballot tabulation hardware, the documents show.
Hearing in Eastman disbarment case
It’s a good thing that this public proceeding is being recorded, because I suspect one could teach a whole variety of law school classes using it, if one wishes. Here’s the link for the livestream: calbar.zoom.us/j/97985435232
“Eastman plan to keep Trump in power faces a reckoning, as authorities seek his disbarment”
“Bar authorities say Eastman’s scheme began after basic legal challenges to the election results failed to influence the outcome — despite Trump’s repeated efforts to sow false claims of election fraud. Eastman spent much of December 2020 urging state legislatures in at least five states won by Biden to appoint “alternate” presidential electors. Those “dueling” slates, Eastman contended, would trigger a chance for Pence to either declare Trump the victor or simply delay the count altogether by citing the controversy. Then, Eastman theorized, GOP-controlled states would have more time to consider whether to declare Trump the winner and invalidate Biden’s victory.
“But no legislatures adopted Eastman’s strategy, so the attorney shifted to an even riskier course. Eastman encouraged Pence to consider slates of electors filed by pro-Trump activists in seven states Trump falsely claimed to have won. Eastman said that even without the backing of a state government, those slates could be used to trigger the same controversy for Pence he had already been envisioning. …
“According to Eastman, however, his advice — no matter how unorthodox — was “tenable” legal advice, not something that should be punished, even if it turned out to be wrong or misguided. He contends there were legitimate, contested interpretations of the 12th Amendment and the Electoral Count Act of 1887 — which govern the counting of electoral votes — and that a “good-faith” dispute should not result in professional consequences.”
FBI resisted opening probe into Trump’s role in Jan. 6 for more than a year
In the DOJ’s investigation of Jan. 6, key Justice officials also quashed an early plan for a task force focused on people in Trump’s orbit.
By Carol D. Leonnig and Aaron C. Davis
June 20, 2023
In several cases, before the special counsel’s office got in touch, witnesses in the fake electors scheme hadn’t heard from the FBI in almost a year and thought the case was dead. Similarly, firsthand witnesses to Trump’s Jan. 2, 2021, call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger — in which Trump asked him to “find” enough votes to win that state — were not interviewed by the Justice Department until this year, after Smith’s team contacted them.
In late May, members of Trump’s legal team began bracing for Smith to bring charges in his other line of investigation. On June 8, a grand jury in Miami endorsed Smith’s evidence that Trump kept and withheld top-secret documents, indicting Trump.
On Tuesday, as Trump pleaded not guilty to those charges in federal court in Miami, Smith’s investigation into efforts to steal the election continued: Michael McDonald and Jim DeGraffenreid, the chairman and vice chairman of the Nevada Republican Party who had signed a document claiming to be electors for Trump, entered the area of the D.C. federal courthouse where a grand jury has been meeting on cases related to Jan. 6.
He devised a fringe legal theory to try to keep Trump in power. Now he’s on the verge of being disbarred.
John Eastman, an architect of Donald Trump’s last-ditch bid to subvert the 2020 election on Jan. 6, is about to go on trial — but not in a criminal court.
Rather, the attorney is fighting to save his California bar license from authorities who say he repeatedly breached professional ethics — and possibly the law — in his bid to keep a defeated Trump in power. And those proceedings, while not as prominent as the Jan. 6 select committee or as potentially punitive as a criminal prosecution, are slated to elicit some of the most revealing and comprehensive testimony from figures who aided Trump’s effort to derail the transfer of power.
That’s because Eastman and the California State Bar have amassed witness lists that include figures who have rarely spoken publicly about Jan. 6 but may hold valuable evidence — including Eastman himself, who is listed as a potential witness by the state bar’s trial counsel and by his own defense team. Their lists also include other high-profile figures, like former Bush administration lawyer John Yoo and Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, who are slated to testify as experts about constitutional law or election administration.
Eastman’s list features Kurt Olsen, a lawyer who spoke with Trump multiple times on Jan. 6 and who helmed legal efforts to unravel the election results in multiple states; Peter Navarro, the former Trump trade adviser who authored discredited reports on election integrity during the final weeks of 2020; Kurt Hilbert, a lawyer who worked on Trump’s post-election litigation in Georgia; Linda Kerns, a lawyer who worked on Trump’s post-election lawsuit in Pennsylvania; former Georgia State Sen. William Ligon; Doug Logan, the CEO of far-right election “audit” firm Cyber Ninjas; and Russell Ramsland, who was involved with a review of voting machines in Antrim County, Michigan, that became the source of pro-Trump conspiracy theories.
Trump delivers his own Jan. 6 timeline at CNN town hall
Trump talked to Olsen three times Jan. 6, 2021, including twice in the evening for a total of 21 minutes, according to White House logs obtained by the Jan. 6 select committee. But the content of those calls, as Congress was poised to reconvene after the riot had been largely pacified, remains unknown.
Meanwhile, the state bar plans to call its own notable list of witnesses, beginning with Greg Jacob, who on Jan. 6 was counsel to then-Vice President Mike Pence. Jacob tangled with Eastman in the days before Jan. 6 over Eastman’s claim that Pence could single-handedly prevent Congress from certifying Joe Biden as the winner of the 2020 presidential election.
That theory is at the heart of the state’s case to punish Eastman on 11 professional charges, which include failure to support the laws and Constitution, seeking to mislead a court, misrepresentations to other Trump aides and the public, and moral turpitude.
“It is no overstatement that democracy stood on the precipice. Had Vice President Pence followed [Eastman’s] baseless advice … the country would have plunged into a ‘profound constitutional crisis,’” writes Duncan Carling of the California State Bar’s office of trial counsel in a pretrial brief. “[Eastman] and Trump’s plan violated our Nation’s most fundamental commitments to the rule of law and the orderly transition of power. And it rested upon transparently false claims of election fraud that continue to harm our democracy to this day.”
The bar proceedings, including a pretrial conference Monday and two weeks of testimony later in the month, are an example of the myriad forms of accountability facing those in Trump’s orbit Jan. 6 — particularly lawyers, whose roles are often shrouded in the murky domain of legal advice and attorney-client privilege. Though national attention has been riveted to the potential prosecutions of Trump and his allies in Washington and Georgia, state bars have also been marshaled to pursue investigations of these matters and in some cases have produced much quicker results.
For example, amid pressure from bar authorities in Colorado, Trump attorney Jenna Ellis admitted in March that she had repeatedly misrepresented evidence about the integrity of the 2020 election. Rudy Giuliani’s law license was suspended in December after D.C. bar discipline proceedings resulted in a finding that he violated professional ethics and rules. And former Justice Department attorney Jeffrey Clark is awaiting similar proceedings in Washington, which were cleared to proceed last week after an eight-month delay.
Eastman spent the final weeks of the Trump administration stoking false claims of election fraud in order to put pressure on GOP-led state legislatures to appoint alternate slates of presidential electors. In Eastman’s view, those alternate slates would form the basis of a dispute that only Pence could resolve Jan. 6, when he presided over the joint session of Congress to count electoral votes and finalize the results of the election.
But no state legislatures agreed to appoint those alternate electors. Instead, in five states, groups of pro-Trump activists signed false documents claiming to be legitimate presidential electors — but without the backing of their state governments, which had certified the results in favor of Biden. Eastman would ultimately change tack, arguing that the false electors presented enough of a controversy for Pence to decide which ones to count — or at the very least refuse to count Biden’s votes and call for a delay in finalizing the election to permit those GOP-run states to revisit the outcome.
Jacob and Pence fiercely rejected that strategy, which they contended would require violating several provisions of longstanding election law with no credible evidence to support reversing the outcome.
But Eastman, undeterred, fought with Jacob even as rioters — infuriated by Pence’s refusal to acquiesce to Trump’s pressure — ransacked the Capitol. Jacob testified to the Jan. 6 select committee about his interactions with Eastman, even as the riot raged, and his email correspondence with Eastman from that day formed some of the most compelling evidence about Eastman’s efforts. Jacob has also testified to a federal grand jury in Washington.
Efforts by the Jan. 6 select committee to obtain Eastman’s emails from his former employer, Chapman University, also resulted in one of the most remarkable court rulings of the post-Jan. 6 era: A federal judge’s determination that Eastman and Trump likely conspired to obstruct congressional proceedings and defraud the public. That ruling, by California-based jurist David Carter, was part of long-running litigation that gave the select committee access to thousands of Eastman’s emails, including some after Carter applied the “crime-fraud” exception to attorney-client privilege.
Former Justice Brown disqualified as expert for John Eastman [Updated]
Former Justice Brown disqualified as expert for John Eastman [Updated]
John Eastman, the attorney who faces possible disbarment by the California Supreme Court for his role in trying to overturn President Biden’s 2020 election, in March designated former California Supreme Court Justice — and former federal Court of Appeals Judge — Janice Rogers Brown as one of seven expert witnesses in the State Bar’s disciplinary proceedings against him. The Office of Chief Trial Counsel of the State Bar objected.
On Tuesday, a State Bar Court judge agreed with the OCTC.
In their expert witnesses designation, Eastman’s attorneys said that Brown was “expected to testify regarding her opinion that the California State Bar seems to be moving into unchartered [sic] territory with seeking to discipline an attorney on one side of a contentious legal fight.”
The judge’s order says, “Judge Brown’s opinion regarding the unprecedented nature of OCTC pursuing charges against Respondent is not relevant to the court’s determination of Respondent’s culpability for violating the Rules of Professional Conduct or Business and Professions Code.”
[May 26 update: Link to State Bar Court judge’s order added.]
Related:
James Mills on Law360 — Ex-Circ. Judge, Law Prof Barred From Eastman’s Ethics Case
Former justices join call for State Bar disciplinary investigation of former president’s lawyer
The Dangerous Journey of John Eastman
It’s hard to overstate how much trouble John Eastman is in. On January 6, 2021, he spoke to the “Save America” rally on the Washington Ellipse that led to the bloody attack on the Capitol by a mob of Donald Trump’s supporters. Since then, headline after headline has indicated actions taken or threatened against him: Only a few days after he spoke at the January 6 rally, three members of Chapman’s board demanded that he be disciplined. Soon after, the school announced that Eastman would retire and instead concentrate on his visiting professorship in “Conservative Thought and Policy” at the University of Colorado. The Colorado chancellor, meanwhile, said in a statement on January 7 that “[Eastman’s] continued advocacy of conspiracy theories is repugnant, and he will bear the shame for his role in undermining confidence in the rule of law.” Shortly after that, Colorado canceled Eastman’s classes for lack of enrollment and stripped him of his other duties.
On December 9, 2021, in a deposition taken by the staff of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol, Eastman invoked the Fifth Amendment roughly 100 times. He invoked the Fifth again in an appearance in front of a Georgia grand jury investigating the Trump team’s efforts to pressure Georgia authorities into reversing the result in that state and awarding its electors to Trump.
On March 28, 2022, Judge David O. Carter of the Central District of California wrote in a published opinion that “it is more likely than not that President Trump and Dr. Eastman dishonestly conspired to obstruct the Joint Session of Congress on January 6, 2021”—that is, the official certification of the electoral vote totals that made Joe Biden president. If proved, Carter concluded, Eastman’s actions violated 18 U.S.C. § 371, which forbids conspiring to “defraud the United States,” by “dishonestly” conspiring to file false electoral votes for Trump from states carried by Biden. That statute provides a maximum of five years in prison.
Then, in December 2022, the January 6th Committee, in its final report, issued a “criminal referral” against Eastman by name, proposing a federal indictment for violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1512(c). That statute forbids “corruptly” obstructing, influencing, or impeding “any official proceeding.” Although the committee suggests criminal referrals against Trump, or “President Trump and [unnamed] others,” six times, in only one of these referrals does it name another specific person as a potential defendant: John Eastman.
In January of this year, the California State Bar Trial Counsel announced public proceedings to strip Eastman of his legal credentials. The bar’s complaint alleged six counts of “Moral Turpitude—Misrepresentation” in Eastman’s public statements alleging that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump; one count of “Seeking to Mislead a Court” because, as a lawyer for the Trump campaign, he signed a motion to join the Texas lawsuit asking the Supreme Court to overturn the election; and one count of “Failure to Support the Constitution and Laws of the United States,” because he allegedly tried to pressure then Vice President Mike Pence into rejecting the electors from states Biden won.
A Tale of Two Conservative Legal Scholars
Why did Michael Luttig stand up for democracy while John Eastman tried to burn it to the ground?
March 29, 2023
https://thetriad.thebulwark.com/p/a-tale-of-two-conservative-legal
[Excerpt:]
Epps sees Eastman’s transformation as a function of the compromises people are willing to make for power. And surely that’s part of it, too.
But what makes an Eastman turn out one way and a Luttig turn out the other? None of us can peer into their souls, obviously. But it seems that it’s a combination of traits.
- Adherence to principle over search for power
- Devotion to country over tribe
- Living in reality and not abstract fantasy
- Caution in place of recklessness
In other words: the virtues. Character is destiny.
The Dangerous Journey of John Eastman
I can’t help seeing Eastman’s story as a cautionary tale about the peril that awaits all of us when we venture out of the daily world of rules and norms and into the shadow world created by a figure like Trump, whose persistent message is that he is above the law—indeed, that the very idea of “law” is irrelevant to someone like him—and that if we follow him, we can be above the law as well.
I also think Eastman’s story tells us something about a serious wrong turn American conservatism took a quarter century ago, and about the dangerous path the Republican Party seeks to guide the nation on.
How The Fake Electors Scheme Explains Everything About Trump’s Attempt To Steal The 2020 Election
New materials illustrate why Fani Willis and Jack Smith have focused on this esoteric part of Trump’s plot.
Josh Kovensky
February 10, 2023
[Excerpts:]It presented an opportunity, Chesebro articulated in a series of memos sent from mid-November through December published by the panel: State legislatures could re-certify pro-Trump electors even if state officials had said that Biden was the winner.
Aiding in this was John Eastman, a conservative movement attorney who had worked with Chesebro on a birthright citizenship case years before.
On Nov. 23, Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) referenced Eastman’s role in developing the plot in a text to Meadows, saying that the professor was “proposing an approach that unlike what Sidney Powell has propose could be examined very quickly.”
State Bar of California: “Attorney John Eastman Charged with Multiple Disciplinary Counts by the State Bar of California”
The State Bar of California’s Chief Trial Counsel George Cardona announced today the filing of a Notice of Disciplinary Charges (NDC) against attorney John Charles Eastman (State Bar No. 193726). The 11 charges arise from allegations that Eastman engaged in a course of conduct to plan, promote, and assist then-President Trump in executing a strategy, unsupported by facts or law, to overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 presidential election by obstructing the count of electoral votes of certain states.
Specific charges allege that Eastman made false and misleading statements regarding purported election fraud, including statements on January 6, 2021, at a rally in Washington, D.C., that contributed to provoking a crowd to assault and breach the Capitol to intimidate then-Vice President Pence and prevent the electoral count from proceeding.
The Office of Chief Trial Counsel (OCTC) intends to seek Eastman’s disbarment before the State Bar Court.
In March 2022, Cardona invoked a public protection waiver to announce that an investigation of Eastman was underway. Eastman now faces multiple charges that he violated Business and Professions Code section 6106 by making false and misleading statements that constitute acts of “moral turpitude, dishonesty, and corruption.”
“There is nothing more sacrosanct to our American democracy than free and fair elections and the peaceful transfer of power,” said Cardona. “For California attorneys, adherence to the U.S. and California Constitutions is their highest legal duty. 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.”
As has been widely reported, Eastman drafted two “legal memos” that laid out proposed strategies to block then-President-elect Joe Biden from taking office by circumventing established procedures for the counting of electoral votes in front of the U.S. Congress and overseen by Vice President Pence. The NDC alleges that the strategies proposed by these memos, as well as in remarks Eastman made publicly and privately to President Trump, Vice President Pence, and others, were unsupported by law, based on false and misleading assertions of fact, and designed for the purpose of keeping Trump in office. The NDC alleges that, after hearing from the U.S. Department of Justice that it had not seen any election fraud on a scale that could have affected the election’s outcome, and after multiple courts had rejected election fraud lawsuits, Eastman knew, or should have known, that the factual premise for his proposals―that massive fraud was at play―was false, and that Trump had lost his bid for re-election.
The NDC also alleges that Eastman ignored these truths when he spoke at the “Save America March” on January 6, 2021, inciting the crowd to take action when, with the intent to convince them that the outcome of the presidential election had been affected by fraud, he said that “dead people had voted” in the presidential election, that Dominion voting machines had fraudulently manipulated the election results, and that Vice President Pence did not deserve to be in office if he did not delay the counting of electoral votes. These statements contributed to provoking the crowd that participated in the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol that occurred after the rally.
A Notice of Disciplinary Charges filed by OCTC contains only allegations of professional misconduct. The licensee is presumed to be innocent of any misconduct warranting discipline until the charges have been proven. …
John Eastman Is Unbowed as Investigations Proliferate
A legal reckoning awaits a chief architect of Donald Trump’s effort to reverse his election loss. But in Mr. Eastman’s telling, he was far from a criminal.
Danny Hakim and
WASHINGTON — John C. Eastman, a legal architect of Donald J. 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, characterized 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 A. Cipollone, the chief White House counsel, is described calling Mr. Eastman’s ideas “nutty.”
In the coming months, Mr. Eastman will be facing 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 F.B.I. 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 right-wing 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 organize 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.
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 toward the Capitol, he spoke ominously of stolen elections, voting machine chicanery and ballots stuffed in a “secret folder.” Over the last 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 whomever he wanted as president. And Mr. Eastman said his advice to the president and vice president 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 during the interview at his lawyer’s office in Washington, just blocks from the White House. “And, you know, you look at some of his tweets before that Jan. 4 meeting, he’s saying things like that, because that’s what people out there are saying. But if you look at his speech on Jan. 6, after I weigh in at that meeting, he’s saying exactly the opposite.”
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.
The former vice president refused to cooperate with the Jan. 6 committee but addressed the issue in a recent opinion essay in The Wall Street Journal. Mr. Pence wrote that on Jan. 5, a day after first meeting with Mr. Eastman in the Oval Office, Mr. Trump summoned the vice president for another meeting where “the president’s lawyers, including Mr. Eastman, were now requesting that I simply reject the electors.”
He said that he “later learned that Mr. Eastman had conceded to my general counsel that rejecting electoral votes was a bad idea and any attempt to do so would be quickly overturned by a unanimous Supreme Court. This guy didn’t even believe what he was telling the president.”
The crux of Mr. Eastman’s defense is that he was simply a lawyer offering advice, and that he was acting in good faith, since he still believes many of the fraud claims that were made. “I’m not backing down on that,” he said. “I mean, the amount of evidence, even if I’m wrong about it, was certainly enough to have warranted further review.”
Asked what he based such claims on, he cited a report issued last year by Michael J. Gableman, a former Wisconsin judge who was hired, and later fired, by the Republican speaker of the Wisconsin State Assembly, Robin Vos. The report endorsed a host of debunked claims. He also cited the deeply flawed documentary “2000 Mules,” directed by Dinesh D’Souza, a conservative activist who once pleaded guilty to felony campaign finance fraud. (He was later pardoned by Mr. Trump.)
In recent weeks, Mr. Eastman has continued to assert himself as a far-right stalwart, signing a letter endorsing dissident Republicans’ ultimately failed efforts to block Representative Kevin McCarthy of California from becoming speaker of the House. Among the other signatories to the letter was Virginia Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, for whom Mr. Eastman once clerked. In her own testimony to the Jan. 6 committee, Ms. Thomas referred to Mr. Eastman as “an active participant with the ‘Thomas clique’ clerks” who keep in touch.
Perhaps Mr. Eastman’s most immediate potential exposure comes in the criminal investigation into election interference in Fulton County, Ga., which encompasses most of Atlanta. One of Mr. Eastman’s lawyers said last year that his client was “probably a target” in the inquiry, but his lawyers said this month that he had received no notification that he is one.
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 Rudolph W. 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. “It was clear to me that 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, you know, the voters or a court, or anything like that.”
Clark D. Cunningham, a professor at Georgia State University College of Law, said in an email 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.
In addition to his central role in the electors plan, Mr. Eastman appeared remotely before a Georgia State Senate panel on Dec. 3, 2020, and made several false claims about the election. Among them was the assertion that “the number of underaged individuals who were allowed to register” in the state “amounts allegedly up to approximately 66,000 people.”
Asked about the claim during the interview last month, Mr. Eastman said that he had relied on a consultant who made an error that was later corrected, and that the actual number was about 2,000 who “were only 16 when they registered.” The new figure, he said, came from the same consultant. In a statement, the Georgia Secretary of State’s office said that “the system literally does not allow a person to register if they don’t have a birth date that makes them at least 17.5 years old.”
A review of the data used by Mr. Eastman showed that he was referring to any Georgians who were recorded as having registered early going back to the 1920s; data entry errors appeared to be a common culprit, with many people’s registration year listed in place of their birth year. A review by The Times found only about a dozen Georgians who were recorded as having registered in 2020 when they were 16, in what appeared most likely to be another data-entry problem.
Norman Eisen, special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee during the first Trump impeachment and co-author of a lengthy report on the Fulton County inquiry, said Mr. Eastman “was referred for criminal prosecution by the Jan. 6 committee, with good reason,” adding that if charges are brought in Georgia “it’s hard to imagine that D.A. Fani Willis does not include him.”
Final Report of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol
Committed to the Committee of the Whole House on the State of the Union and ordered to be printed.
December 22, 2022.
[Excerpts:]
The findings of the Committee include the following:
. . . .
3. Despite knowing that such an action would be illegal, and that no State had or would submit an altered electoral slate, Donald Trump corruptly pressured Vice President Mike Pence to refuse to count electoral votes during Congress’s joint session on January 6th.
5. Without any evidentiary basis and contrary to State and Federal law, Donald Trump unlawfully pressured State and legislators to change the results of the election in their States.
6. Donald Trump oversaw an effort to obtain and transmit false electoral certificates to Congress and the National Archives.
7. Donald Trump pressured Members of Congress to object to valid slates of electors from several states.
8. Donald Trump purposely verified false information filed in Federal court.
. . . .
12. Each of these actions by Donald Trump was taken in support of a multi-part conspiracy to overturn the lawful results of the 2020 election.
Concerning John Eastman’s role, the Executive Summary of the January 6th Report states in part:
Rather than concede, Donald Trump chose to to try to overturn the 2020 presidential election by taking specific steps, including:
- John Eastman’s plan whereby Vice President Pence would, as the presiding officer, declare that certain electoral votes from certain states could not be counted at the joint session of Congress on January 6, 2021. (The Committee pointedly observed that prior to the electionEastman had specifically disagreed with the constitutionality of such a plan.)
- Eastman’s plan was related to other efforts overseen by President Trump to create and transmit fake electoral slates to Congress and the National Archives, and to pressure States to change the election outcomes and issue new electoral slates, targeting every tier of federal and state elected officials.
- The Committee observed that Trump, Eastman and others proceeded with such the fake elector scheme despite the fact that all major law election lawsuits had failed.
- Eastman acknowledged to others that Pence could not lawfully do what he proposed and that the U.S, Supreme Court would unanimously reject his legal theory.
- But as January 6th approached, and against opposition from all White House lawyers, Trump nevertheless embraced the Eastman’s theories despite having been repeatedly advised that the Vice President’s role was only ministerial (i.e., limited to opening Electoral College certificates and counting the votes recorded therein).
- One minute after Trump tweeted accusing Pence of cowardice for having failed to do the “right” thing, the Secret Service determined that they could no longer protect the Vice President in his ceremonial role near the Senate Chamber, and evacuated the Vice President to a secure location, missing the violent mob by a mere 40 feet.
- The day after the attack on the Capitol, Eastman called White house lawyer Eric Herschmann to talk about continuing litigation on behalf of the Trump Presidential Campaign in Georgia. Herschmann described his reaction to Eastman this way:
- And I said to him, are you out of your F’ing mind? Right? I said, because I only want to hear two words coming out of your mouth from now on: Orderly transition. I said, I don’t want to hear any other F’ing words coming out of your mouth, no matter what, other than orderly transition. Repeat those words to me,
- Herschmann concluded the call by telling Eastman: “Now I am going to give you the best free legal advice you’re ever getting in your life. Get a great F’ing criminal defense lawyer, you’re going to need it,” and hanging up the phone.
- A federal district judge concluded in a civil proceeding that Eastman (like Trump) likely violated criminal laws against conspiring to defraud the United States pr obstructing, impeding or influencing Congress’s official proceeding to count electoral votes or both.
- The federal district judge concluded that “Dr. Eastman and President Trump launched a campaign to overturn a democratic election, an action unprecedented in American history.’
Jan. 6 committee refers Trump to Justice Dept. for criminal charges
The decision — an unprecedented move for Congress — came as the panel released a summary of its final report and met publicly for the last time
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/12/19/trump-referrals-jan-6-committee/
[Excerpt:]The criminal referrals were a major escalation for a congressional investigation that is the most significant in a generation. The panel named five other Trump allies — Mark Meadows, his final chief of staff, and the lawyers Rudolph W. Giuliani, John Eastman, Jeffrey Clark and Kenneth Chesebro — as potential co-conspirators with Mr. Trump in actions the committee said warranted Justice Department investigation.
Giuliani Faces Disbarment In State Hearing Underway This Week—Sidney Powell, Lin Wood And Other 2020 Election Attorneys Could Be Next
A disciplinary hearing against Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani is taking place this week, as the lawyer faces the prospect of being disbarred for bringing litigation trying to overturn the 2020 election—and other attorneys are likely to follow, as more bar complaints and investigations remain ongoing against major 2020 election attorneys like Sidney Powell, Lin Wood and John Eastman.
KEY FACTS
Rudy Giuliani: Giuliani is now facing a hearing by the D.C. Bar’s Office of Disciplinary Counsel—which is part of a multi-step process and will not immediately result in consequences—after a D.C. court and a New York court have already temporarily suspended his law license in both those jurisdictions.
Sidney Powell: Powell, who brought lawsuits in four battleground states alleging election fraud, will go to trial on April 24, 2023, in litigation brought against her by the Commission for Lawyer Discipline at the Texas State Bar, court documents show, which could result in her being disbarred or otherwise punished for professional misconduct.
Lin Wood: Wood, who brought litigation challenging Georgia’s election and also participated in some of Powell’s lawsuits, is under investigation by the State Bar of Georgia, which the bar confirmed to Forbes Tuesday is still pending after its disciplinary board shot down Wood’s attempt to dismiss the complaint against him in August, but no hearing date has yet been set.
John Eastman: Eastman aided former President Donald Trump’s efforts to stop Congress from certifying the election on January 6, prompting an ethics investigation by the State Bar of California, which the bar confirmed to Forbes is still underway after being publicly announced in March.
Ken Paxton: The Texas attorney general was sued by the state bar’s disciplinary counsel in May over the lawsuit he filed at the Supreme Court seeking to overturn the election—causing him to retaliate against the bar as a result—and that lawsuit remains pending, though a separate complaint against his deputy attorney general was dismissed in September.
Jeffrey Clark: The former DOJ official, who aided Trump’s attempts to overturn the election from within the agency, faces a pending complaint from the D.C. Bar that was brought against him in July, and Clark asked a federal court to block the complaint in October, arguing the D.C. Bar doesn’t have jurisdiction to bring the complaint.
Giuliani’s hearing that’s now ongoing is scheduled to wrap up by the end of next week, at which point the hearing committee at the D.C. Bar’s Board on Professional Responsibility will issue a non-binding recommendation on what punishment Giuliani should face. The case will go on to ultimately be decided by the D.C. Court of Appeals, a process that the Washington Post notes could still take months to go through. Under the bar’s rules for disciplinary action, Giuliani could face a range of punishments, from being permanently disbarred to just being formally censured or reprimanded or being put on probation. His law license in Washington, D.C., is still suspended, the D.C. Bar’s database shows, but that suspension is only temporary, so the D.C. Bar’s disciplinary process will determine whether Giuliani could have his license revoked permanently or if he could be allowed to practice law again.
Giuliani has continued to defend his actions as a lawyer in testimony over the first two days of his hearing against him and decried the attempt to punish him for his post-election litigation. “I am shocked and offended this is happening to me,” Giuliani said on Tuesday. Other post-election lawyers have similarly remained defiant despite the action being taken against them, with Powell telling Forbes in June that the action being taken against her by the Texas State Bar “should concern every practicing lawyer because now any lawyer can be subjected to the extraordinary harassment and expense of lawfare directed specifically at his or her law license whenever the other side disagrees with a filing.”
Which other 2020 election attorneys will face investigations and disciplinary proceedings. Activist group The 65 Project, which is dedicated to taking action against lawyers who helped efforts to overturn the election, is targeting 111 lawyers in 26 states, and has filed ethics complaints with state bars in an effort to have the attorneys punished. Those complaints have been filed as recently as October, so it may take months before they result in public reports of any concrete action. Among those who have had complaints brought against them—but have not yet been announced as being actively under investigation or sued by disciplinary committees—are Trump campaign attorney Jenna Ellis; Cleta Mitchell, who participated in Trump’s call asking Georgia officials to “find” enough votes to overturn the election; Boris Epshteyn, who continues to advise Trump on legal issues; and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who pushed Trump’s false claims of election fraud and offered to represent the Trump campaign in post-election cases at the Supreme Court.
Giuliani and many of the other right-wing attorneys now facing consequences were behind more than 60 lawsuits in the aftermath of the 2020 election that broadly challenged results in battleground states, which were nearly all unsuccessful except for one minor lawsuit in Pennsylvania. The disciplinary actions being brought by state bars are part of a broader range of consequences those attorneys have faced for their actions in the two years since the election, which have so far also included lawyers such as Powell and Wood being sanctioned in federal court in Michigan and a series of defamation lawsuits brought by voting machine companies that Powell and her allies accused of fraud. The ethics complaint against Giuliani, which was brought by the bar after his D.C. license had already been suspended, was largely focused on the lawsuit the Trump campaign brought in Pennsylvania challenging its results, with Giuliani representing the campaign. That litigation failed in court multiple times, with a district judge declaring the campaign’s legal argument was “not how the Constitution works.”
Giuliani ‘weaponized’ law license in Trump election suit, D.C. Bar argues (Washington Post)
Rudy Giuliani Defends Failed Trump 2020 Election Challenge in DC Ethics Case (Bloomberg)
Sidney Powell Could Still Be Disbarred As Court Lets Case Against Her Move Forward (Forbes)
Campaign Targets 111 Trump-Linked Election Lawyers. Here’s Some Already Facing A Backlash. (Forbes)
With Giuliani’s Law License Suspended, Here Are The Other Trump Lawyers Who May Face Discipline Next (Forbes)
Letters from an American, Heather Scott Smith
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com
Nov. 3, 2022
Yesterday morning, Kyle Cheney, Josh Gerstein, and Nicholas Wu of Politico reported more about the eight emails lawyer John Eastman, who wrote the memo outlining a plan by which then–vice president Mike Pence could steal the 2020 election for Donald Trump, tried to hide from the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol. The emails included discussions between Eastman, fellow Trump lawyer Kenneth Chesebro, and others about how to stop Congress from counting the certified 2020 electoral ballots on January 6, 2021.
In the emails, Chesebro urged arranging to get a case before Justice Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court so he could issue a stay that would cast doubt on the legitimacy of the election in Georgia. They should “frame things so that Thomas could be the one to issue some sort of stay or other circuit justice opinion saying Georgia is in legitimate doubt.” Thomas oversees the circuit court that includes Georgia, and he would “end up being key” to getting Biden’s victory overturned.
Eastman responded: “I think I agree with this.” Such a move by Thomas could “kick the Georgia legislature into gear.”
As a young lawyer, Eastman clerked for Thomas, and Dan Froomkin of PressWatchers noted that Eastman and others were in this same period of time writing to Thomas’s wife, Ginni, who was urging state legislators to overturn the election by submitting fake slates of electors.
Froomkin pointed to a New York Times article from June 15, 2022, which explained that on December 24, 2020, five days after Trump had announced a “protest” at the Ellipse to be held on January 6, Eastman wrote to Chesebro that Eastman had heard there was a “heated fight” among the Supreme Court justices about whether they should take up the election issue. Chesebro replied that the “odds of action before Jan. 6 will become more favorable if the justices start to fear that there will be ‘wild’ chaos on Jan. 6 unless they rule by then, either way.”
So we seem to have a deliberate attempt to throw a court case to Justice Clarence Thomas, whose wife was urging the overthrow of the election, and to pressure the Supreme Court to act by creating chaos in the streets, all in order to keep former president Trump in the White House.
Trump signed statement alleging voter fraud knowing it was false, judge says
Document was part of lawsuit challenging results of 2020 election in Georgia
Oct. 19, 2022
Donald Trump signed a legal statement alleging voter fraud in the 2020 election despite being told the numbers underpinning the case were false, a federal judge said on Wednesday.
The disclosure was made by the US district judge David Carter, who ordered John Eastman, a former Trump lawyer, to provide more emails to the congressional committee investigating the January 6 attack on the US Capitol.
Eastman was one of Trump’s attorneys when the former president and his allies challenged his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden.
The legal document was part of a lawsuit by Trump’s team challenging the results in Georgia, a state Trump narrowly lost to Biden, in which they claimed a Georgia county had improperly counted more than 10,000 votes of dead people, felons and unregistered voters.
In an 18-page opinion, Carter said that the former president had “signed a verification swearing under oath” that the inaccurate fraud numbers were “true and correct” or “believed to be true and correct” to the best of his knowledge.
“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,” the judge wrote, adding: “The Court finds that these emails are sufficiently related to and in furtherance of a conspiracy to defraud the United States.”
Carter previously ruled that Eastman and Trump had probably committed a felony by trying to pressure his then vice-president, Mike Pence, to obstruct Congress.
The ruling was made in a lawsuit filed by Eastman to block disclosure of the emails to the January 6 select committee, following a congressional subpoena.
Carter previously ordered Eastman to provide over 200 emails to the committee, after the lawyer resisted the subpoena and claimed that the communications were privileged.
The judge said on Wednesday that the vast majority of emails still being sought by congressional investigators should not be handed over, as legal protections given to attorneys and their clients apply to the records.
He said eight emails that would normally be shielded under those protections must be given to the committee, after he found that the communications were in furtherance of a crime – one of the few times those legal safeguards can be lifted.
Carter found that four emails show that Eastman and other lawyers suggested that the “primary goal” of filing lawsuits was to delay Congress’s certification of the 2020 election results.
The judge said four other emails “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”.
At one point, Eastman wrote that although the former president had signed documents related to a lawsuit in Georgia on 1 December, “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.”
Carter wrote: “President Trump and his attorneys ultimately filed the complaint with the same inaccurate numbers without rectifying, clarifying, or otherwise changing them.”
Trump and his allies filed over 60 lawsuits challenging the 2020 election, with some complaints alleging voter fraud without evidence to support those claims. Those cases were overwhelmingly rejected by judges, some of which Trump appointed to the federal courts.
The January 6 select committee last week voted to subpoena Trump in its investigation. It is expected to issue a report in the coming weeks on its findings.
How to Ensure Accountability for the Legal Foot Soldiers of Jan. 6
Former Trump lawyer John Eastman pleads the 5th (yes, again)
By any fair measure, John Eastman is having a bad week. It was in late June when the Republican lawyer who served as a key architect of Donald Trump’s anti-election plot, was greeted by FBI agents who executed a search warrant and seized his phone. Eastman made a series of allegations against the Justice Department and sought a court hearing.
As my MSNBC colleague Ja’han Jones explained, a federal judge this week scrapped the hearing, concluding that there wasn’t any point to considering Eastman’s suspect claims.
And while that was no doubt disappointing for the controversial attorney, it wasn’t the only discouraging development. NBC News reported:
Former Trump lawyer John Eastman invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination and cited attorney-client privilege Wednesday when he appeared before a Fulton County grand jury investigating attempts to influence the 2020 election in Georgia, his attorneys said.
I’m mindful of the fact that Trump World is filled with assorted figures, and there may be some readers asking right now, “Wait, which one is John Eastman?” So let’s revisit our recent coverage and review why he’s significant.
In theory, we should barely be aware of the Republican lawyer’s existence. After all, before joining Team Trump — the then-president saw him on Fox News and was impressed — Eastman was a rather obscure figure.
Even after Donald Trump’s defeat, Eastman, at least on paper, shouldn’t have been especially relevant. He didn’t work in the White House counsel’s office. He wasn’t the attorney general. He had no office in the Justice Department. Eastman was, as MSNBC’s Chris Hayes recently described him on the air, a well-credentialed crank.
But the radical lawyer had one important thing going for him: The sitting president of the United States was eager to buy what Eastman was selling, and everyone around Trump quickly realized that the attorney’s views represented their boss’ views.
As a matter of law and politics, the lawyer may have been a fringe operator, better suited for a role on a far-right, C-list podcast than a seat in the Oval Office, but in the aftermath of Election Day 2020, Trump didn’t much care.
Why not? Because as the Jan. 6 committee’s recent hearings have helped prove, Eastman helped concoct an illegal scheme — a scheme Eastman knew to be illegal — that the then-president saw as an avenue to keeping power he hadn’t legitimately earned.
Eastman was not, however, merely a behind-the-scenes author of a ridiculous memo. The Republican lawyer also effectively played the role of a lobbyist, advocating on behalf of a plot he recognized as illegal, pleading with officials to go along with his plot, and even appearing at a pre-riot Jan. 6 rally to espouse his outlandish ideas to Trump’s radicalized followers.
As part of these efforts, Eastman also delivered remote testimony to a Georgia state Senate panel on Dec. 3, 2020, and peddled a variety of demonstrably false claims about the election results. The lawyer even told state lawmakers at the time that “the election can’t be validly certified.”
Fortunately, Eastman failed, but the fact that he tried is of ongoing interest to state law enforcement investigators examining possible election interference. It’s why he was subpoenaed to testify, leading to him repeatedly pleading the Fifth yesterday.
It was not the first time. Eastman also reportedly pleaded the Fifth months ago with the Jan. 6 committee — by some accounts, roughly 100 times.
Let’s also note for context that before Trump left office, Eastman sent Rudy Giuliani an email, declaring, “I’ve decided that I should be on the pardon list, if that is still in the works.” (He may have feared prosecution, but he never received a pardon.)
As for the list of high-profile figures from Team Trump who’ve pleaded the Fifth recently, let’s circle back to our earlier coverage and review:
- Donald Trump pleaded the Fifth last month, as part of a New York investigation into his allegedly fraudulent business practices.
- Eric Trump, in this same civil case, reportedly invoked the Fifth Amendment in response to more than 500 questions.
- Roger Stone, a longtime Trump adviser and GOP operative, said two weeks later that he also pleaded the Fifth.
- Alex Jones, by his own admission, pleaded the Fifth nearly 100 times when the professional conspiracy theorist sat down with congressional investigators.
- Jeffrey Clark, a former Justice Department official, also pleaded the Fifth, reportedly more than 100 times.
- Michael Flynn, the beneficiary of a Trump pardon despite having previously pleaded guilty to felonies, pleaded the Fifth in response to investigators’ questions in March.
- John Eastman, a Republican lawyer who allegedly played a leading role in the overall coup scheme, reportedly pleaded the Fifth with both the Jan. 6 committee and a Georgia special grand jury.
“The mob takes the Fifth Amendment,” Donald Trump said in 2016, deriding those who assert their right against self-incrimination. “If you’re innocent, why are you taking the Fifth Amendment?”
The relevance of the quote continues to linger.
Eastman appears before Atlanta-area grand jury probing Trump election scheme
Eastman, along with other Trump-aligned attorneys, pushed state legislatures to appoint pro-Trump presidential electors in a handful of states where Joe Biden was the certified winner.
Eastman’s counsel, Charles Burnham and Harvey Silvergate, indicated in a statement that Eastman pleaded the Fifth and asserted attorney-client privilege “where appropriate.”
Charles Kesler Sees the Light
It only took 1 year, 6 months, and 18 days, but Charles R. Kesler, the intellectual impresario of the Claremont Institute, has finally gone on the record declaring that he does not agree with his colleague John C. Eastman’s discredited legal theories or with Donald Trump’s lies about the 2020 election.
Kesler is the founding editor of the conservative institute’s flagship publication, the Claremont Review of Books, and he is, as Elisabeth Zerofsky put it in a New York Times Magazine article about Claremont from earlier this month, “widely regarded, at 65, as the institute’s éminence grise.” (He is also a professor at Claremont McKenna College, which has no formal affiliation with the Claremont Institute.)
It is in Zerofsky’s article, and in a Washington Post article by Marc Fisher and Isaac Stanley-Becker, that Kesler at last concedes, after eighteen months of evasion and coyness, that Eastman and Trump were wrong.
You can read more about Kesler’s book in this tense exchange between Kesler and Shep Melnick, a professor at Boston College. Kesler indignantly denies that his mode of thinking provides cover for extremist action. But if that’s the case, why shouldn’t he call out proponents of extremism at Claremont?
For one thing, for Kesler to speak out against them publicly would put him in flagrant contradiction with the people in charge—people who have brought the institute into a position of greater national influence. This would take courage—not only because he could lose friendships, and his standing among Trumpist intellectuals, and perhaps even his well-compensated position at the institute, but also because he would have to admit his own complicity in something extreme and destructive—a tough psychological proposition for anyone.
One final note: While these days Kesler would like to take credit for closing Pandora’s box, remember that he helped pry open the lid when he published Michael Anton’s widely read pseudonymous essay, “The Flight 93 Election,” in 2016. Anton’s essay made an intellectualized case for electing Trump that equated the possibility of a Hillary Clinton victory with the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Rush Limbaugh seized on the essay and read excerpts on his radio show, which caused it to go viral; its subsequent reception set the stage for the growth of the New Right intellectual movement that has been part of American politics ever since—all the while providing a boon to the Claremont Institute.
It must be said that any late concessions New Right intellectuals want to make to the truth of what happened in the 2020 election and on Jan. 6th are welcome. But what Charles Kesler and his intellectual confreres continue to avoid in their discussions of those events is the role they themselves played in fomenting the unrest that attended them. The consequences continue to buffet the country: Widespread distrust in electoral processes, especially among Republicans; a rise in militant and dehumanizing rhetoric, especially on the right; and the growing threat and reality of right-wing violence.
“A lot of us have now staked our reputations on the claims of election fraud,” wrote John Eastman in an email from late January 2021. Charles Kesler didn’t stake his reputation on claims about election fraud, but he didn’t exactly not do that either. And he did, at least in part, stake his reputation on Anton and Trump back in 2016. He should be held accountable in the public mind for these choices—if not “throughout eternity,” then at least while Claremont is enjoying the national spotlight.
The stakes are too high, and the broader American reality too precarious, for waffling words and easy ways out.
August 9, 2022
This afternoon, Representative Scott Perry (R-PA) said the FBI has confiscated his phone after presenting him with a search warrant.
Perry was deeply involved in the attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election. He connected former president Trump with Jeffrey Clark, the environmental lawyer for the Department of Justice (DOJ) who supported Trump’s claims and who would have become acting attorney general if the leadership of the DOJ hadn’t threatened to resign as a group if Trump appointed him.
Cassidy Hutchinson, former top aide to Trump’s White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, told the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol that Meadows burned papers after a meeting with Perry.
The DOJ searched Clark’s home in June. On the same day, it seized the phone of John Eastman, the author of the memo laying out a plan for then–vice president Mike Pence to refuse to count presidential electors for Democratic candidate Joe Biden and thus throw the election to Trump.
Eastman sued to get his phone back and to force the government to destroy any information agents had taken from it; the Department of Justice says the phone was obtained legally and that purging it would be “unprecedented” and “would cause substantial detriment to the investigation, as well as seriously impede any grand jury’s use of the seized material in a future charging decision.” A court hearing on the matter is scheduled for early September.
Letters from an American, Heather Scott Richardson
August 3, 2022
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/
Tonight another piece of information about that lie came from Maggie Haberman and Luke Broadwater, who reported in the New York Times that John Eastman, the lawyer who produced the memo explaining the plan to have then–vice president Mike Pence overturn the 2020 presidential election, told Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani that they must continue to fight even after January 6, suggesting they contest Georgia’s election of Jon Ossoff and the Reverend Raphael Warnock to the Senate in the hope that those races might yield the evidence of voter fraud that until then they hadn’t found. “A lot of us have now staked our reputations on the claims of election fraud, and this would be a way to gather proof,” he wrote.
Eastman also asked Giuliani to help him collect a $270,000 fee from the Trump campaign for his work on overturning the election, and he implied that the effort could be ongoing.
Way back in 2004, an advisor to President George W. Bush told journalist Ron Suskind that people like Suskind were in “the reality-based community”: they believed people could find solutions based on their observations and careful study of discernible reality. But, the aide continued, such a worldview was obsolete. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore…. We are an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
I wonder if reality is starting to reassert itself.
Opinion
Here’s a test to see whether Supreme Court justices are above the law
Now, the group is making its most ambitious move yet: It is filing a specific demand with the Supreme Court to kick Eastman, the chief architect of the coup plot, out of the elite Supreme Court Bar (lawyers eligible to argue in the highest court). And it has requested that Justice Clarence Thomas recuse himself from the disciplinary proceeding because of the role that Thomas’s wife, Ginni Thomas, played in the 2020 scheme.
The complaint, made available to me before it was filed, states that Eastman “bolstered and amplified” claims not backed by evidence or the law. It also alleges that Eastman “actively participated in an effort to undermine our elections – a scheme that led to the gravest attack on American democracy since the Civil War.”
The complaint describes five “spokes” in the coup plot, all of which included Eastman. They include litigating the 65 bogus lawsuits; arranging slates of phony electors in seven states; pressuring Vice President Mike Pence to reject electoral votes; pressuring state lawmakers to overturn votes or rescind electors; and summoning “Trump’s supporters to Washington, D.C. and, having spent months lying to them about fraud and a stolen election, sending them to the Capitol, agitated and armed, to stop the electoral vote count.”
After a detailed review of facts revealed in the Jan. 6 hearings and in reporting, the group argues that Eastman’s conduct warrants expulsion from the Supreme Court Bar as well as the loss of his California legal license. The complaint amounts to a handy guide not only to Eastman’s professional violations, but also to facts that might be the basis for criminal charges in state and federal court.
Michael Teter, the 65 Project’s managing director, tells me, “If Mr. Eastman is allowed to continue to remain a member of the highest court in the United States despite the undisputed facts regarding his actions, the American public’s quickly eroding confidence in the Supreme Court will deteriorate even faster.”
But that’s not even the most intriguing part. Citing the obligation for federal judges to recuse themselves from proceedings in which their impartiality “might reasonably be questioned” or in which the judge has personal bias or knowledge of the facts (including spouses with an interest), the complaint asks the Supreme Court — specifically Justice Thomas — to adhere to the rules (which is not mandatory for justices to follow), since the disciplinary matter concerns “public confidence in the judicial system’s integrity.”
The complaint argues that Ginni Thomas “played a significant role in pursuing many of the same post-election strategies as Mr. Eastman.” It recites her text exchanges with then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and her effort to pressure Arizona lawmakers, including a former Thomas clerk, to overturn the presidential vote. The complaint also notes that Ginni Thomas attended the “Stop the Steal” rally in D.C. on Jan. 6 and later wrote to House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) denigrating the House select committee’s investigation of the attack on the Capitol. (Thomas previously stated she only briefly attended the rally.)
The recusal request concludes:
In short, Ms. Thomas participated in the concerted effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election. She supported Mr. Eastman’s efforts and conferred with him as Mr. Eastman engaged in scheme described by a federal court as a likely criminal conspiracy. She used her relationships with several other of Justice Thomas’s former clerks to further push the effort to subvert American democracy.
At a moment when the Jan. 6 committee is considering issuing a subpoena for Ginni Thomas based on exactly the same set of facts, the complaint raises questions as to why she has not cooperated and why her husband did not recuse himself from Jan. 6-related cases. (Justice Thomas has been roundly criticized for failing to do so when the court ordered the National Archives produce documents to the committee. He was the lone dissenter.)
Teter argues his complaint is an opportunity for the court to improve its image. A decision by Justice Thomas to recuse himself from the matter, he says, would be “an important first step toward the Court’s regaining some of its legitimacy.”
The court might not entertain the complaint or the recusal request. But if it chooses to ignore them, new questions about its integrity inevitably will arise. As for Ginni Thomas, both the Justice Department and Jan. 6 select committee should hear from her. Her refusal to talk to the committee is as egregious as her husband’s failure to recuse himself. It’s time to test whether a Supreme Court justice and his wife are above the law.
Feds get new warrant to search contents of pro-Trump lawyer’s phone
The development came in response to a legal effort by John Eastman to block investigators in the Jan. 6 probe from “rummaging” through his files.
The Justice Department revealed on Wednesday that it had obtained a new search warrant to access the contents of attorney John Eastman’s phone, which it seized from the pro-Trump lawyer last month before transporting it to a lab in Virginia.
The development, filed in court via Assistant U.S. Attorney Thomas Windom, came in response to a legal effort by Eastman to block investigators from “rummaging” through his files. The Justice Department had indicated that it would obtain a warrant that would limit investigators’ access to “evidence of specific federal crimes or specific types of material.”
Judge rejects Eastman’s request to protect phone from investigators
“Misinformation can be a cognitive burden. It can have a lingering effect on our reasoning, even if it has been corrected. It can be used to craft false beliefs and memories that affect our behavior — for example, what foods we will eat, or how we remember the news.”