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 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.
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