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John Eastman Demands Court Block Release Of Those Emails We All Read This Morning

Okay, Boomer.

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Yesterday the January 6 Select Committee argued to the Ninth Circuit that it should not grant Trump’s coup lawyer John Eastman a stay on disclosure of eight contested emails. Tonight, he’ll docket his response demanding that the committee burn any copies and pretend they never saw them.

Which is objectively hilarious since Politico published the emails hours ago, thanks to Eastman’s dimwitted failure to disable the Dropbox link he used to forward them to the committee. So when the committee attached the email where Eastman’s lawyer said that he intended to seek a stay from the Ninth Circuit and invited the recipient to pretend that such a motion had not only been filed, but also granted, reporters just clicked on the link and got ’em.

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The link has since been deactivated — better late than never! But since those emails have now been widely disseminated, it would seem there’s very little left for the appellate court to enjoin, and any claim of attorney-client privilege is mooted. Accepting of course the premise that there was ever anything to enjoin, since the toothpaste was pretty clearly out of the tube the minute Eastman’s lawyer hit send anyway.

But now that we’ve all seen the emails, we can certainly understand why Trump’s lawyer was so hot to claw them back … once he returned from vacation and looked at the calendar.

In his order to release the documents, Judge Carter ruled that “the crime-fraud exception [to attorney-client privilege] applies to a number of emails related to President Trump and Dr. Eastman’s (1) court efforts to delay or disrupt the January 6 vote; and (2) their knowing misrepresentation of voter fraud numbers in Georgia when seeking to overturn the election results in federal court.”

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The trial judge ruled that “President Trump filed certain lawsuits not to obtain legal relief, but to disrupt or delay the January 6 congressional proceedings through the courts,” conduct which he had already found more likely than not amounted to criminal obstruction of congress. And indeed the emails do reveal an effort to get the Supreme Court to at least preliminarily enjoin certification of the electors as a pretext to allow the swing state legislators, particularly in Georgia, to convene and claw back the electoral votes legitimately won by Joe Biden.

“The point is to have the court say that probably the election was void, which ought to be enough to prevent the Senate from counting the Biden electoral votes from Georgia, right?” Trump lawyer Kenneth Chesebro wrote early on the morning on December 31, 2020. “Merely having this case pending before the Supreme Court, not ruled on, might be enough to delay consideration of Georgia, particularly if [Mike] Pence has the legal ability and will to insert himself, at least enough to win delay.”

“Possibly [Supreme Court Justice Clarence] 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 some legitimate doubt,” he went on. “Realistically, our only chance to get a favorable opinion by Jan. 6 which might hold up the Georgia account is from Thomas — do you agree Prof. Eastman?”

And although Pence never had any legal ability to unilaterally reject electors, Prof. Eastman agreed wholeheartedly. Whether that’s because he was getting the inside scoop from his good pal Mrs. Justice Virginia Thomas is not clear.

“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 that they’re leaning that way,” Eastman responded, making it clear that the point of the litigation wasn’t judicial relief but political cover for Republican legislators.

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Later in the day, he huddled up with Trump’s personal attorneys Kurt Hilbert and Alex Kaufman to discuss the vexing problem of having the president attest to allegations in Georgia lawsuit which he knew damn well were not true.

“Here’s the issue,” Eastman wrote. “The complaint incorporates by reference the state court challenge. Although the president signed a verification for that back on Dec. 1, he has since been made aware that some of the allegations (and evidence proffered by the experts) has been inaccurate. And I have no doubt that an aggressive DA or US Atty someplace will go after both the President and his lawyers once all the dust settles on this.”

Which was correct! And probably should have tipped Eastman and the rest of his pals off that what they were doing was likely to land badly with various state bar and/or law enforcement officials. And yet they went ahead and did it so … here we all are.

Good luck with that stay application, fella. And with all the rest of your legal issues. You’re gonna need it.

Trump lawyers saw Justice Thomas as ‘only chance’ to stop 2020 election certification [Politico]

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

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