Government

Trump Lawyer John Eastman Used Not One But TWO Work Emails To Plot A Coup

The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.

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What kind of idiot uses his work email to plot a coup, we LOL-ed back in January when it emerged that Coups 4 Dummies lawyer John Eastman had used a Chapman University account to disseminate his crackpot plan to have Vice President Pence unilaterally reject swing state electors and give Donald Trump a second term.

And we’ve been laughing for the past five months watching Eastman’s ridiculous claims of privilege get systematically gutted after he ran to a federal court to stop Chapman from turning the communications over to the January 6 Select Committee.

Last night the Denver Post and Politico reported that there is yet another batch of Eastman’s coup-plotting emails in the possession of the University of Colorado, where he was a visiting professor at CU Boulder in 2020. Because this bloody genius used not one, but two work emails to foment the overthrow of democracy. And the Committee doesn’t even have to bother with litigation to get its hands on these messages, because a watchdog group already kicked them loose with public records request. ROFLMAO!

In an April 19, 2022 letter to the Committee, the Colorado Ethics Institute explained that it filed a request for documents pertaining to Eastman’s election ratf*cking efforts under the Colorado Open Records Act (CORA). The search yielded extensive communications between Eastman and Pennsylvania state Rep. Russ Diamond from December of 2020 laying out a plan for Republican-dominated legislature to reject the will of the voters and substitute an alternate slate of pro-Trump electors.

Their theory, which went on to become accepted dogma on the right and is likely to come back around in 2024, is that the Constitution vests power to choose the manner of elections in state legislatures, and thus state legislatures have the ultimate say in selecting electors. Working from this premise, Eastman helped Diamond draft a resolution purporting to exercise the legislature’s “plenary authority” to swear in its own slate of electors, rejecting the expressed will of the voters and giving the state’s 20 electoral votes to Donald Trump.

It’s important to note that these guys weren’t claiming to have evidence of widespread fraud to substantiate a claim that the citizens of the Keystone State had not chosen Joe Biden. They were just pissed that their guy lost, and they seized on measures taken by the Democratic secretary of state to make it easier to cast a ballot as a pretext to toss out votes.

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“I did not watch the hearings that were held [in Pennsylvania], but I suspect they contained ample evidence of sufficient anomalies and illegal votes to have turned the election from Trump to Biden,” Eastman wrote Diamond on December 4, before going on to suggest that the legislature should simply adjust the outcome by giving those absentee ballots a haircut across the board.

For example, depending on how many ballots were counted that were received after the statutory deadline (say 10,000 for example’s purpose), those 10,000 votes need to be discarded, and you can take the absentee ballot ratio for each candidate in the counties were late-received ballots were illegally counted and deduct the pro-rated amount from each candidate’s total.

For the signature verification violation (and perhaps the banning of observers), you could take the difference between the 4% historical rejection rate and the .34% rejection rate done under the illegal procedures, and similarly discount each candidates’ totals by a prorated amount based on the absentee percentage those candidates otherwise received.

Then, having done that math, you’d be left with a significant Trump lead that would bolster the argument for the Legislature adopting a slate of Trump electors – perfectly within your authority to do anyway, but now bolstered by the untainted popular vote. That would help provide some cover.

In case that wasn’t totally clear, that’s a professor of constitutional law admitting that he has no evidence of fraud, but advising a state legislator that he should just go into heavily Democratic districts with a lot of absentee ballots and make a pro rata adjustment with the specific goal of overturning the result.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but that is fucking crazy. Which is perhaps why John Eastman is no longer a law professor, since CU Boulder “relieved him of his public facing duties” and Chapman allowed him to “retire”  immediately when his role in the January 6 Capitol Riot came to light. Eastman has threatened to sue the University of Colorado system for retaliating against him for “constitutionally protected First Amendment activities.”

We could delve more deeply into the clanging irony of complaining about cancel culture after being handed $185,000 of private funds to be the “visiting professor of conservative thought and policy” at a public university’s center dedicated to studying “the intellectual, artistic and political traditions that characterize Western civilization,” but this way madness lies.

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John Eastman used CU email account to advise Pennsylvania legislator on challenging that state’s 2020 election results [Denver Post]
Eastman Emails [via Politico]

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

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