Government

Conservative Superlawyer John Eastman Knows Who Is To Blame For The Capitol Riot And It Is Mike Pence

Yeah, yeah, save it for your testimony.

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(Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Some time this week, the January 6 Select Committee will get around to subpoenaing conservative lawyer John Eastman for documents and testimony about his role in the Capitol Riot. And you can bet your bottom dollar that the Claremont Institute’s most prominent member will assert all the privileges — attorney-client, executive, and heck, maybe even clerical. Which may be something of a lift considering that genius has been flapping his yap all over town about exactly what he said and did in the lead up to the Capitol Riot.

Just last week Eastman gave that insane interview to the National Review in which he yammered on and on about his contacts with the former president and characterized himself as a “white-knight hero here, talking [Trump] down from the more aggressive position.” And he could not restrain himself when the Washington Post requested comment on an unpublished article by former Vice President Pence’s chief counsel Greg Jacob, who described being bombarded by “a barrage of bankrupt legal theories” from Eastman and his allies.

“Thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege,” Jacob wrote to Eastman after the mob shouting “Hang Mike Pence!”overran the Capitol and the Vice President was hustled out of the chamber under guard.

“The ‘siege’ is because YOU and your boss did not do what was necessary to allow this to be aired in a public way so that the American people can see for themselves what happened,” Eastman responded.

And even after law enforcement was finally able to regain control, Eastman still counseled the VP to unilaterally reject certified slates of electors from swing states. In fact, he went so far as to say that Pence allowing legislators to speak without deducting time from the allotment specified under the Electoral Count Act served as precedent for disregarding the Act in its entirety.

“My point was they had already violated the electoral count act by allowing debate to extend past the allotted two hours, and by not reconvening ‘immediately’ in joint session after the vote in the objection,” he gabbled to the Post. “It seemed that had already set the precedent that it was not an impediment.”

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Which is of a piece with the legal argument in Eastman’s two infamous election memos in which he attempted to characterize the VP’s ministerial obligation to open the envelopes containing the certified slates of electors as an entitlement to unilaterally reject any he didn’t like.

In the January opinion piece, which Jacobs ultimately decided not to publish, he demanded professional sanctions for “a cadre of outside lawyers to the President [who] spun a web of lies and disinformation, to him and to the public, for the purpose of pressuring the Vice President to betray his oath to uphold our laws and the Constitution of the United States.”

“Now that the moment of immediate crisis has passed, the legal profession should dispassionately examine whether the attorneys involved should be disciplined for using their credentials to sell a stream of snake oil to the most powerful office in the world, wrapped in the guise of a lawyer’s advice,” he wrote.

And indeed in the months after this piece was written that’s exactly what’s happened, with a group of California lawyers urging that state’s bar to investigate Eastman’s conduct.

Meanwhile, Eastman is still telling anyone and everyone that he really did mean all that stuff he said about Pence overturning the election and hoping to brazen it out in the courts.

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But John Eastman is a very serious lawyer, so he can’t possibly violate privilege by answering questions about all that for Congress, right?

During Jan. 6 riot, Trump attorney told Pence team the vice president’s inaction caused attack on Capitol [WaPo]
Read: Pence aide Greg Jacob’s draft opinion article denouncing Trump’s outside lawyers [WaPo]

Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.

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