eastman, john esq

tag 8 22 clrmnt includes EASTMAN

disbarred 6 25

SEE BAK TWO

rw violence militia

primary on 1/6 subpoena war games

see clarence clerks

bossie --> elite strike team jenna rudy pos, kraken sidney jettison --> this pow [joe d death threat cyberguy krebs]

html non-justiciable

3 22 bak

---

AN 11 25

President Donald Trump went on a Sunday night pardon spree, granting full clemency to at least 77 individuals involved in promoting alternate electors in battleground states after the 2020 election, including former Trump attorneys John Eastman and Rudy Giuliani and former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, according to Axios.

Announced by U.S. Pardon Attorney Ed Martin, the pardons cover potential federal offenses but exclude Trump himself and do not affect ongoing state prosecutions in Georgia, Arizona, and Michigan.

Others who received pardons include attorneys Kenneth Chesebro and Sidney Powell, attorney and Acting Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs at the Office of Management and Budget Jeffrey Clark, and attorney and former Trump strategic advisor Boris Epshteyn.

Legal experts describe the action as largely symbolic, given the absence of federal charges against the recipients, but critics excoriated the pardons on social media.

One wrote on X that this move means the country is "waving goodbye to democracy again."

Chef Courtney Brown wrote that"AmeriKKKa has lost its way! This is an absolute disgrace!"

"The fact that NO ONE will be held to account for conspiring to illegally keep Trump in office is one of the most distressing and infuriating consequences of the 2024 election," posted another critic on X.

An x user by the name of America First Democrat posted, "So basically no one who participated in efforts to illegally overturn the 2020 election can be held accountable? The lawlessness of this administration knows no bounds."

Retired Naval reservist and self-described "JFK Libertarian" David Rouse said, "This only reflects #Trump's total disdain for the #Constitution he swore to "protect, preserve, and defend". Pardoning his accomplices in an attempt to overthrow the 2020 fair election that he lost, makes a mockery of the #Rule_of_Law and endangers us all!"

Tech CEO Simon St-Onge wrote, "When people see injustices, criminals pardoned because they know the leader, they lose faith in the justice system, and take their own defence in to their own hands. That’s a premise for barbarism and violence, and war amongst citizens. We should never tolerate injustice, I pity America, the land of the free is no longer so. It will take years, to make it great again. The USA is alone now, with a few other countries lead by autocratic leaders, demented narcissistic men, like Trump and Putin, devoted to themselves, and themselves alone."

"It's about the political whims of Donald Trump," said MSNBC's justice and intelligence reporter Ken Dilanian.

06/16/2025

by Kyle Mantyla

Courtney Hagle, Alex Kaplan & Noah Dowe @ Media Matters: Right-wing disinformation machine spins up a false profile of Minnesota shooting suspect

The suspect is reportedly a Trump supporter who railed against abortion and the LGBTQ community. But as the public waited for more information, conservatives spun a profile of a far-left Tim Walz ally who assassinated Democratic lawmakers over immigration.

David Gilmour @ Mediaite: MN Suspect Vance Boelter’s Chilling ‘Hit List’ Named 70 ‘Targets’ – Including Amy Klobuchar, Ilhan Omar, Abortion Providers

The suspect arrested in the murder of Minnesota Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband reportedly left a chilling “hit list” of potential targets that included Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), and the offices of multiple abortion providers.

S.V Date @ HuffPost: Trump Hosts $45 Million Military Parade For Himself Before Underwhelming Crowd

While the parade was ostensibly to honor the U.S. Army’s 250th birthday, and not Trump’s 79th, Vance hyped Trump’s remarks as “the main event” of the night.

Colin Kalmbacher @ Law & Crime: Appeals court affirms disbarment recommendation for Trump attorney John Eastman

The legal disciplinary board for attorneys in California has affirmed a recommendation that former law professor John Eastman be disbarred over his role in efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election to favor President Donald Trump.

Steve Benen @ The Maddow Blog: Trump Organization eyes a new Trump-branded wireless service, complete with gold phones

For those consumers who’ve already stocked up on all kinds of Trump-branded items, but who are still asking, “Where’s my Trump phone?” I have some good news.

David Edwards @ Raw Story: ‘I'll have to answer’: Tucker Carlson admits to being ‘dishonest’ and ‘nasty’

Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson admitted that he had spent much of his life being dishonest, cruel and nasty.

2x 3 24

aha founding fr secular saint (or godly xian pilgrim // xian nat’l theocracy

abe gets included bc he is everyone’s fav or b/c // JC martyr that got rid of sin/stain of slavery?

up good god freedom vs down dark devil tyranny

note he claims he has sacrificed/fought on behalf of good godly patriots, unselfishly, tho clearly careerist who tried to pump lackluster gig by jumping on trump train/coup

armed = $

he has to go hard on freedom to counter the truth/mainstream narrative that trump tried to steal election and end democracy?

city on a hill is up and light [and freedom]; a beacon projects light, guides those that are lost, attracts to the side of good/god beacon inst koch BS shop

rww 3 24

john Eastman, a right-wing attorney who is in serious legal trouble for his intensive efforts to help former President Donald Trump stay in power after losing the 2020 election, continues to raise funds for his legal defense fund from Trump’s religious-right supporters. Eastman was the featured speaker at an online event hosted Monday night by the Salt and Light Council, a group that promotes “biblical citizenship.”

Eastman portrayed himself as making a heroic stand for truth and against tyranny, as he did last fall while fighting efforts by the California Bar Association to have him disbarred. Eastman used that trial to make the case that his 2020 claims about election fraud and illegality were legitimate but had never been fully considered by the courts. The judge’s decision in the disbarment trial was expected by March 1.

During his Salt and Light presentation, Eastman promoted his page on the Christian crowdfunding site GiveSendGo, where people have contributed more than $630,000 to his legal defense fund so far. He said he’s “about a million in the hole beyond that right now,” adding that he thinks his total legal costs will run between $3 million and $3.5 million.

Eastman’s appearance made it clear that he remains as unrepentant about his work for Trump as he was last August, when he promoted debunked claims about the 2020 election and asserted that “the very existential threat that the country is under” justified his and Trump’s actions. On Monday’s Zoom call with Salt and Light activists, Eastman made similar claims. Citing the Founding Fathers and Abraham Lincoln, Eastman said, “And now, in this century, this is the fight comparable to those—the defense of freedom.” He went on:

And will this great shining city on a hill that has been a beacon to the rest of the world continue to be that beacon of light? Or will we go into an age of darkness? I can’t imagine anything more important than that fight. And so here we are on the front lines, and let’s just make sure we’re as well armed for it as we can.

Eastman portrayed himself as a defiant warrior for freedom and the future of the country:

Our country is on a precipice of losing our freedoms. And for whatever reason, I’ve been cast in the forefront of this battle. I’m on the battle lines, I’m on the ramparts. And I consider it one of the greatest honors of my life to be in the front of this fight for freedom, and fighting against tyranny. And I will do, I will engage in that fight with every fiber of my being as long as I’m able.

And he seems to have no doubt that he is up to the task:

I’ve been fighting for principled positions for my whole career. I’ve got one of the best law degrees and academic careers you can have. I clerked at the Supreme Court of the United States. I was a dean. I’ve got the skill set, God has given me the skill set to be in a position to fight this probably, at least as well as anybody else in the country. And so that’s what I do. And I’ll do it, you know, I’ll do it with a law degree as long as I have it. And I’ll do it without the law degree if they try and take that away from me, because this is an important fight to have.

Eastman had harsh words for his opponents, whether he was talking about the people trying to impose “a one world order,” public school teachers who undermine parents’ authority, members of the congressional Jan. 6 committee, or officials seeking to silence people who question the official line on vaccines, critical race theory, or transgender youth:

The folks we’re dealing with are evil. They don’t consider destroying our country as collateral damage for their overall mission, they consider that icing on the cake for their overall mission. I mean, we have to understand that we are dealing with pure evil, and the way you gotta, just you got to arm yourselves in truth and light, salt and light.

He urged the Salt and Light activists to get their churches politically engaged:

Your congregations, that’s a massive force, get them engaged, sign them up to vote, get the voter guides out in their hands and let them know who the decent people are, and who the folks that are mouthing platitudes are, whether in the primary elections or the general election. Get them engaged. Get them educated. This is an army that cannot be stopped if we would just launch it.

Salt and Light Council founder and President Dran Reese portrayed the ongoing legal prosecutions over the 2020 election in spiritual terms, praying that God would “overcome the devil in this case around John Eastman and President Trump.”

Video excerpts (full video linked above):

===

1 VIOLATION OF THE GEORGIA RICO

(RACKETEER INFLUENCED AND CORRUPT ORGANIZATIONS) ACT O.C.G.A. 16144(c)

2 SOLICITATION OF VIOLATION OF OATH

BY PUBLIC OFFICER O.C.G.A. §§ 164-7 1640-1

3 FALSE STATEMENTS AND WRITINGS O.C.G.A. 16-10-20

4 FALSE STATEMENTS AND WRITINGS O.C.G.A. 1610-20

5 SOLICITATION OF VIOLATION OF OATH

BY PUBLIC OFFICER O.C.G.A. §§ 16-47 16101

6 SOLICITATION OF VIOLATION OF OATH

BY PUBLIC OFFICER O.C.G.A. §§ 164-7 1610-1

7 FALSE STATEMENTS AND WRITINGS O.C.G.A. 16102'0

8 IMPERSONATING PUBLIC OFFICER O.C.G.A. 16-1023

9 CONSPIRACY TO COMMIT INIPERSONATIN PUBLIC OFFICER O.C.G.A. §§ 164-8 16-10-23

10 FORGERY IN THE FIRST DEGREE O.C.G.A. 169-1(b)

11 CONSPIRACY To COMMIT FORGERY 1N THE FIRST DEGREE

12 FALSE STATEMENTS AND WRITINGS

13 CONSPIRACY TO COMmIT FALSE STATEMENTS AND WRITINGS O.C.G.A. §§

14 CRiminAL ATTEMPT To COMMIT filing FALSE DOCUMENTS O.C.G.A. §§ 1641 16102o.1(b)(1)

15 CONSPIRACY TO COMMIT FALSE DOCUMENTS

16 FORGERY IN THE FIRST DEGREE O.C.G.A. 16-9-1(b)

17 CONSPIRACY TO COMMIT FORGERY THE FIRST DEGREE

18 FALSE STATEMENTS AND WRITINGS

19 CONSPIRACY TO COMlVIIT FALSE STATEMENTS AND WRITINGS O.C.G.A. §§ 16-4-8 16-10-20

20 CRIMINAL ATTEMPT TO COMMIT INFLUENCING WITNESSES O.C.G.A. §§ 16-41 161093(b)(1)(A)

21 CRIMINAL ATTEMPT TO COMMIT INFLUENCUYG WITNESSES O.C.G.A. §§ 16-4-1& 16-10-93(b)(1)(A)

22 CRIMINAL ATTEMPT TO COMMIT FALSE STATEMENTS AND writings O.C.G.A. §§ 16-41 161020

23 SOLICITATION OF VIOLATION OF OATH BY PUBLIC OFFICER O.C.G.A. §§ 16-47 16-10-1

24 FALSE STATENIENTS AND WRITINGS O.C.G.A. 16-1020

25 FALSE STATEMENTS AND WRITINGS O.C.G.A. 161020

26 FALSE STATEMENTS AND WRITINGS O.C.G.A. 16-10-20

27 FILING FALSE DOCUMENTS O.C.G.A. 16-1020.1(b)(1)

28 SOLICITATION OF VIOLATION OF OATH BY PUBLIC OFFICER O.C.G.A. §§ 164-7 16-10-1

29 FALSE STATEMENTS AND WRITINGS O.C.G.A. 16-10-20

30 CONSPIRACY TO COMlVIIT SOLICITATION OF FALSE STATEMENTS AND WRITINGS O.C.G.A. §§ 16-4-8, 16-4-7 16-10-20

31 INFLUENcing WITNESSES O.C.G.A. 161093(b)(1)(A)

32 CONSPIRACY TO COMMIT ELECTION FRAUD

O.C.G.A. §§ 21-2603 21-2-566

33 CONSPIRACY TO CONIMIT ELECTION FRAUD

O.C.G.A. §§ 21-2-603 21-2-574

34 CONSPIRACY To COMMIT COMPUTER THEFT O.C.G.A. §§ 1648 16993(a)

35 CONSPIRACY TO COMlVIIT COMPUTER TRESPASS O.C.G.A. §§ 16-4-8 16-9-93(b)

36 CONSPIRACY TO COMIVIIT COMPUTER INVASION OF PRIVACY O.C.G.A. §§ 16-4-8 169-93(c)

37 CONSPIRACY TO DEFRAUD TIE STATE O.C.G.A. 16-1021

39 SOLICITATION OF VIOLATION OF OATH

BY PUBLIC OFFICER O.C.G.A. §§ 16-47 16101

39 FALSE STATEMENTS AND WRITINGS O.C.G.A. 16-1020

40 FALSE STATEMENTS and writings

41 perjury

j6 ch 5

...Kenneth Chesebro Articulated a “President of the Senate” Strategy in Early December, When the Trump Campaign was Convening “Alternate” Electors in Key States President Trump Lost.

On December 13, 2020, Kenneth Chesebro, a pro-Trump lawyer, sent a memo to Rudolph Giuliani, the President’s lead outside counsel, upon request from Trump Campaign official Boris Epshteyn.21 Chesebro laid out a “‘President of the Senate’ strategy,” arguing that the “President of the Senate” (“he, and he alone”) is charged with “making judgments about what to do if there are conflicting votes.” 22 Chesebro argued that when the joint session met on January 6th, the President of the Senate should not count Arizona’s electoral college votes for former Vice President Biden, “[b]ecause there are two slates of votes.” 23 Of course, there were not two legitimate “slates of votes” from Arizona. There were the official electors, certified by the State, and a group of fake electors convened by the Trump campaign.

Chesebro’s memo set President Trump’s pressure campaign on a course to target the Vice President on January 6.24 Judge Carter found that the “draft memo pushed a strategy that knowingly violated the Electoral Count Act” and “is both intimately related to and clearly advanced the plan to obstruct the Joint Session of Congress on January 6, 2021.” 25 That plan was also advanced by John Eastman.26

On December 23, John Eastman Drafted the First of His Two “January 6th Scenario” Memos, Articulating the Argument that Under the Constitution the Vice President is the “Ultimate Arbiter.”

On December 23, 2020, Eastman wrote a two-page memo summarizing ways to ensure that “President Trump is re-elected.” 27 Eastman suggested that Vice President Pence could refuse to count the electoral college votes from seven States: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. According to Eastman, Vice President Pence could simply reject these States’ electoral college votes. At that point, President Trump would have 232 electoral college votes compared to former Vice President Biden’s 222. This was sufficient, in Eastman’s view, to guarantee President Trump’s victory, because he would have a majority of the electoral college votes. “Pence then gavels President Trump as re-elected,” Eastman wrote.

Eastman considered the possibility that Democrats in Congress would object, stating the plain truth that 270 electoral college votes are necessary to win. In that event, according to Eastman, the election could be sent to the House of Representatives.28 The Republican-majority of delegations in the House would then re-elect Trump as president. Eastman concluded: “The main thing here is that Pence should do this without asking for permission—either from a vote of the joint session or from the Court. . . . The fact is that the Constitution assigns this power to the Vice President as the ultimate arbiter. We should take all of our actions with that in mind.” 29

From the start, President Trump was looped in on Eastman’s proposal. The same day Eastman started preparing the memo, he sent an email to President Trump’s assistant Molly Michael, at 1:32 p.m.: “Is the President available for a very quick call today at some point? Just want to update him on our overall strategic thinking.” 30 Only five minutes later, Eastman received a call from the White House switchboard; according to his phone records, the conversation lasted for almost 23 minutes.31

Eastman Changed His Evaluation of the 12th Amendment, and the Role of the Vice President, After President Trump Lost the Election.

...

an 1 23

eastman the far-right attorney, disgraced former law professor, former clerk to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and current chairman of the anti-LGBTQ National Organization For Marriage (NOM) is facing eleven counts of alleged ethics violations, and disbarment, by California state bar regulators. Among the allegations, “intentional acts of moral turpitude, dishonesty, or corruption.”

As The New York Times reported last fall, “after the November election, Mr. Eastman wrote the memo for which he is now best known, laying out steps that Vice President Mike Pence could take to keep Mr. Trump in power — measures Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans have likened to a blueprint for a coup.”

So has the U.S. House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack, which late last month referred Eastman – in the same breath as Donald Trump – to the Dept. of Justice for possible prosecution on criminal charges, including obstruction of an official proceeding and conspiracy to defraud the United States.

\u201c"We believe that the evidence described by my colleagues today and assembled throughout our hearings warrants a criminal referral of former President Donald J. Trump, John Eastman, and others..." \u2014 @RepRaskin #January6thCommitteeHearings\u201d

— Defend Democracy Project (@Defend Democracy Project) 1671477014

On Thursday, Bloomberg News reported California state bar regulators “say they willseek to strip” Eastman of his law license.

“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,” the State Bar of California’s Chief Trial Counsel George Cardona said in a statement. “Eastman has not been charged with any crimes to date.”

“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,” the State Bar of California’s statement adds.

Law & Crime’s Adam Klasfeld further explains that Cardona “intends to seek Eastman’s disbarment for alleged violations of Business and Professions Code section 6106, which punishes making false and misleading statements that constitute acts of ‘moral turpitude, dishonesty, and corruption.'”

Last week The New York Times described Eastman as “a chief architect of Donald Trump’s effort to reverse his election loss,” but it is his fellow Republican attorneys who delivered the judgment on his skills.

“Many White House lawyers expressed contempt for Mr. Eastman, portraying him as an academic with little grasp of the real world,” The Times reported. “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.'”

It wasn’t just Republican attorneys in the Trump White House.

During the January 6 insurrection, Eastman, certainly no silent architect, stood at the same podium Donald Trump would speak at, and delivered a fiery speech alongside Rudy Giuliani. Six days later his colleagues at Chapman University demanded his firing[vid?]

the disbarment may be the least of Eastman’s self-inflicted woes.

“He has been drawn into the criminal investigation into election interference in Atlanta, which is nearing a decision on potential indictments,” according to The Times, also adding that the “F.B.I. seized his iPhone.”

Watch the videos above or at this link.

https://www.alternet.org/trump/john-eastman-2659316821/

...e**astman**, the far-right attorney, disgraced former law professor, former clerk to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and current chairman of the anti-LGBTQ National Organization For Marriage (NOM) is facing eleven counts of alleged ethics violations, and disbarment, by California state bar regulators. Among the allegations, “intentional acts of moral turpitude, dishonesty, or corruption.”

[twt]

on Thursday, Bloomberg News reported California state bar regulators “say they will seek to strip” Eastman of his law license.

an 1 23

after the January 6 Select Committee delivered its 845-page final report in December, countless articles by legal analysts focused on the possible repercussions for former President Donald Trump. The committee gave four criminal referrals to the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), which has the option of either following those recommendations or not following them.

During the months it spent conducting its in-depth investigation, the January 6 Committee not only examined Trump’s actions during the late 2020/early 2021 lame duck period, but also, the actions of Trump’s allies and associates — including attorneys Rudy Giuliani and John C. Eastman, both of whom were major promoters of Trump’s false, thoroughly debunked claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him. Liberal Washington Post opinion columnist Greg Sargent, in his January 5 column, lays out some reasons why Giuliani and Eastman may face “accountability” in 2023.

“You are probably familiar with the term ‘mob lawyer,’” Sargent explains. “It might now be time to inaugurate another, similar term: ‘coup lawyer.’ John Eastman and Rudy Giuliani were instrumental to the plotting and execution of President Donald Trump’s attempt to overthrow his reelection loss, and they corruptly abused their knowledge of the law to that end. Will they ever face real accountability?”

The columnist continues, “Eastman and Giuliani are facing disciplinary proceedings and might even get disbarred. But if they are disciplined on overly narrow grounds — say, for making false statements — it would be a highly insufficient outcome. They should also face professional discipline that declares in some way that their efforts to undermine our constitutional order were central features of their unscrupulous professional misconduct.”

Giuliani has practiced law in New York State and the District of Columbia, while Eastman is licensed to practice law in California. But Sargent argues that in light of their efforts to help Trump overturn perfectly legitimate presidential election results in 2020, neither of them should be practicing law anywhere.

“In Giuliani’s case,” Sargent notes, “a New York court temporarily suspended him from practicing law for making false statements in court — his lies about the 2020 election — and the D.C. bar appears focused on that charge as well. In Eastman’s case, it is unclear what misconduct the California bar is weighing. But the option exists for disbarment on a broader basis, according to advocates urging this course of action. In California, New York and D.C., ethics rules provide for sanctions on the grounds of fundamental unfitness for the legal profession and deep contempt for the rule of law. Disbarment decisions should cite both lawyers’ efforts to help Trump subvert democracy as the basis for those violations.”

Giuliani wasn’t always the far-right MAGA Republican he is now. When he was serving as mayor of New York City during the 1990s and early 2000s, Giuliani (an ex-Democrat) had a reputation for being a moderate Republican who was pro-choice on the abortion issue, was favorable to gay rights, believed that the evangelical Christian Right was harmful to his party in swing states, and had no problem working out bipartisan deals with Democrats. In fact, Giuliani was featured as a speaker at the in order to make then-President George W. Bush appear more moderate.

an 11 22

Another batch of emails obtained from John Eastman shows Donald Trump's lawyers were counting on U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to help them disrupt Joe Biden's election win, and their certainty raises new questions about his wife's role in the scheme.

Trump attorney Kenneth Chesebro wrote Dec. 31, 2020, that Thomas would be "our only chance to get a favorable judicial opinion by Jan. 6" on a challenge to election results in Georgia, whose circuit court he oversees, and Washington Post reporter Jacqueline Alemany wondered on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" why he and Eastman felt so confident about the justice's willingness to assist.

"The fringy lawyers that were surrounding Trump and helping him in his efforts to overturn the results of the election in the last few months of his presidency had reason to believe, at least publicly, that justice Clarence Thomas was going to be sympathetic to their cause. Remember in December of 2020,Thomas along with [Justice Samuel] Alito issued a brief statement after the audacious Texas lawsuit was filed, calling to ultimately throw out the results of the 2020 election in four battleground states. The majority dismissed it, but Alito and Thomas expressed a statement that was sympathetic to the lawsuit, and said that the majority threw it out too quickly."

"Now the question is, I think, privately, what reasons did John Eastman and Kenneth Chesebro have to believe that Thomas would be sympathetic to them if he got a lawsuit in front of them?" she added.v

Ginni Thomas was corresponding with Eastman during that same period, along with White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and Republican legislatures in key states won by Biden, and Alemany said the newly revealed emails place her under additional scrutiny.

"It's a very small world here," Alemany said. "There was no indication in the correspondence that either of the Thomases were [copied] on the e-mails, but you can clearly see why John Eastman was fighting hard to prevent the release of these e-mails."

Host Joe Scarborough said the revelations were scandalous.

"It's shocking, the behavior between John Eastman, Ginni Thomas, and the efforts to overthrow, throw out democratic election for the presidency," Scarborough said. "Also, their misreading of what Clarence Thomas and Alito did when they went along with an opinion in a Pennsylvania case, the only time the court wrote anything of substance on the election challenges, they said about the Pennsylvania case, which involved the court in Pennsylvania overruling the state legislature. That race is a constitutional question, and I think they rightly said, this race has questions we probably should address now, but even if we did address them now, it wouldn't change the outcome of the election, so there you have even the two most conservative justices saying even if we take this question up, which we think we should, there aren't going to be enough votes to change the fact that Joe Biden's the next president of the United States."

Watch the video below or at this link.

an 11 22

badash

A Washington Post bombshell revealing Trump attorneys saw **Justice Clarence Thomas** as the key to getting the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the 2020 election is leaving several legal experts stunned.

The Post reports eight emails “ordered released by U.S. District Judge David O. Carter of California, include correspondence between Trump lawyers Kenneth Chesebro, John Eastman and others discussing various legal strategies to convince Republican members of Congress to object to the official certification of electoral votes in a joint session of Congress on Jan. 6, 2021.”

In one email “from Chesebro to Eastman and several others sent on Dec. 31, 2020, Chesebro argued that [U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence] Thomas would ‘end up being key’ to asking the high court to overturn then-President-elect Joe Biden’s win in contested states.”

The Post states the email also says, “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.'”

Politico’s Kyle Cheney sums up the scheme.

“Chesebro made the plan explicit: Get any remotely favorable ruling from a federal judge — not to win outright but to embolden GOP state legislatures, Congress or Pence to reverse the results.”

Politico‘s reporting includes copies of the redacted emails, and adds: “Chesebro contended that Thomas would be ‘our only chance to get a favorable judicial opinion by Jan. 6, which might hold up the Georgia count in Congress.'”

“I think I agree with this,” Eastman replied.

“Eastman,” Politico notes, “an architect of Trump’s last-ditch bid to subvert the 2020 election, once clerked for Thomas and had corresponded with his wife, Virginia, in the weeks before Jan. 6.”

“[I]f we can just get this case pending before the Supreme Court by Jan. 5,” Chesebro wrote in one email, “ideally with something positive written by a judge or justice, hopefully Thomas, I think it’s our best shot at holding up the count of a state in Congress.”

Richard Signorelli, a former Asst. U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York (SDNY) blasted both the Supreme Court Justice and his far right-wing activist wife, **Ginni Thomas**.

“They had a damn insider on SCOTUS who they thought would help them overthrow our democracy,” Signorelli tweeted. “He’s married to a deranged MAGA cult member. He won’t even recuse himself.”

Former Harvard Constitutional Law professor Laurence Tribe blasted Chesebro.

“We now learn that Ken Chesebro saw Justice Thomas as Trump’s ‘only chance’ to stop the 2020 election from being duly certified. Such abhorrent abuse of an attorney’s license to practice law should be strictly disciplined and perhaps criminally prosecuted,” he tweeted.

Attorney and writer Rachel Solar, pointing to the Politico article asks: “When is it enough???? His wife is an insurrectionist He refuses to recuse He’s the Trump election-denial go-to? Come on.”

Journalist Helen Kennedy goes one step further.

“Hey look! It wasn’t just critics of the Supreme Court who thought Clarence Thomas was corrupted – Trump’s lawyers said so too in secret emails just revealed.”

https://www.alternet.org/2022/11/john-eastman-emails-dropbox-public/

wisconsin election fuckery?

8 pp memo?

https://legis.wisconsin.gov/assembly/59/ramthun/media/1351/eastman-memo-final-draft.pdf

...from copy paste

December 30, 2021

Representative Timothy Ramthun

Wisconsin State Assembly

409 North, State Capitol

P.O. Box 8953

Madison, WI 53708

Re: Decertification of Elector Votes

Dear Representative Ramthun:

You have asked me to provide an opinion letter addressing whether a state legislature has the constitutional authority to decertify previously certified electoral votes for a candidate for the office of President of the United States upon a definitive showing of illegality and/or fraud sufficient to have altered the results of the election.

analysis which follows. And I want

legally necessary for the

legislature to re-assume its plenary authority over the appointment of presidential electors, I do

think it is politically necessary, or at least strongly advised as a matter of prudent statesmanship...

~ jan 6 exec priv BS

27 pp

CONCLUSION For the reasons stated above and previously, plaintiff requests this Court order that the materials identified on plaintiff’s privilege logs are protected from disclosure to the defendants by the attorney client and work product privileges.

Anthony T. Caso (Cal. Bar #88561) Email: atcaso@ccg1776.com CONSTITUTIONAL COUNSEL GROUP 174 W Lincoln Ave # 620 Anaheim, CA 92805-2901 Phone: 916-601-1916 Fax: 916-307-5164

Charles Burnham (D.C. Bar# 1003464)* Email: charles@burnhamgorokhov.com BURNHAM & GOROKHOV PLLC 1424 K Street NW, Suite 500 Washington, D.C. 20005 Telephone: (202) 386-6920 * admitted pro hac vice Attorneys for Plaintiff

UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT CENTRAL DISTRICT OF CALIFORNIA, SOUTHERN DIVISION

JOHN C. EASTMAN, Plaintiff, vs. BENNIE G. THOMPSON, et al. Defendants Case No.: 8:22-cv-00099-DOC-DFM PLAINTIFF’S REPLY BRIEF IN SUPPORT OF PRIVILEGE ASSERTIONS

Judge: Hon. David O. Carter Magistrate Judge: Hon. Douglas F. McCormick Crtrm.: 9D Trial Date: not set

Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show

By Jonathan Karl

https://books.google.com/books?id=vogzEAAAQBAJ&pg=PA268

meadows asked MMartin regent u law to help; pat c not in mtg; eastman offered 2-----

wcf homophobe 2019

John Eastman, law professor at Chapman University. Eastman also serves as chairman of the board of the anti-LGBT National Organization for Marriage. Over the years, he has referred to homosexuality as “barbarism”;voiced support for Uganda’s harsh anti-LGBT bill that would impose life sentences in some instances; and claimed that “a good portion of this [LGBT] movement seeks to remove age of consent so they can have sex with teenage boys.”

raw st an 7 22

According to a report from the Washington Post, the California-based think tank that was home to Donald Trump attorney John Eastman is reeling after having its reputation irreparably damaged by sticking by him after it was revealed he was one of the main architects of the Jan 6th insurrection and riotthat shocked the nation.

As the report notes, the Claremont Institute in Upland was previously known for a staid "America-first, originalist ideology" as it pumped out position papers for conservative policymakers.

As the WaPo's Marc Fisher and Isaac Stanley-Becker wrote, the institute jumped on to the Trump bandwagon,with some misgivings in 2016, and some members are ruing the day after Eastman became a central figure in trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election -- and then the institute hesitated before disavowing him and his work.

"In the final months of 2020, he [Eastman] burst into the national consciousness as he helped lead Trump’s drive to overturn the results of the 2020 election. He wrote confidential memos urging then-Vice President Mike Pence to reject official electoral vote totals and went on former Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon’s show to build support for his widely discredited theory.And, on Jan. 6, he rallied Trump supporters at the Ellipse before a mob stormed the Capitol," the report states before adding that he later "he fell from grace" and was forced to resign from Chapman University where he had previously served as the dean of the law school.

Until recent events overtook him, the Claremont Institute stood by him, at one time issuing a statement in support by condemning the “widespread lies peddled by malicious domestic political opponents” while complaining about the “blackout on the Claremont Institute or on John.”

All of that has changed now, the report states, as one former institute fellow lamented, "How on Earth does Eastman get to this point of being ready to jettison the Constitution?” It’s by pushing deeper into this idea of natural rights, which justify any means necessary to preserve the republic. … That’s how Claremont goes from this quirky intellectual outfit to one of the main intellectual architects of trying to overthrow the republic.”

According to Charles Kesler — a senior fellow at the institute -- "I’m persuaded that John was wrong in the advice he gave Trump. ... Whether his actions will hurt us or not, I’m not sure. It’s awkward and it raises some questions.”

Ralph Rossum, who oversaw Eastman’s PhD work at Claremont Graduate University, claimed too much damage has been done.

“His reputation is in tatters, and the institute is badly damaged,” he stated before adding that some of Eastman's former admirers at the institute, "... are grappling with how to gracefully separate themselves from him.”

According to the report, one outsider thinks the institute will survive the reputational damage.

"There’s been a subtle retreat from Eastman,” explained David Swartz, a sociologist at Boston University, “but the institute is doing well despite the publicity about Eastman. Their network of influence continues to spread.”

According to longtime conservative commentator Bill Kristol, the Claremont Institute "saw Trump as a vehicle for their ambitions,” adding, "They always had a streak of radicalism, which could be provocative and interesting.”

"They had a big impact in legitimizing the demagoguery, the mean-spirited willingness to demonize outsider groups,” he suggested.

You can read more here.

https://www.alternet.org/2022/06/john-eastman/

on fox beg $

https://www.alternet.org/2021/11/john-eastman-2020/

The Trump advisor who wrote the infamous pseudo-legal justification for overturning the 2020 election also helped to create a blueprint for what Donald Trump could do to hang onto power by force.

John Eastman joined a couple dozen right-wing operatives in simulating the aftermath of a closely contested election. The report was published in mid-October 2020 and co-sponsored by the Claremont Institute, the think tank where Eastman works.

The authors of the report are clear their simulation had a very serious purpose: to prepare real public officials for real violence in the event of a disputed election. The authors say they fully expected the necessary preparations to crush dissent would be perceived as the run-up to a military coup. But in their view, that couldn't be helped. It was important to come up with legal justifications for overwhelming political violence before the election, they said.

The report is a blueprint for how Donald Trump could fuse federal power, local police and criminal gangs like the Proud Boys to hang onto power. It seems to foreshadow Eastman's plan for a procedural coup on January 6, except projected onto Biden supporters.

The Claremont simulation started from the assumption that left wing violence was a "near-certainty" and that Trump's Defense Department, FBI, and Department of Homeland Security must be prepared to crush Biden supporters in the event of a contested election.

The simulation starts from the following half-baked premise: All the networks call the contest for Biden on Election Night, because he appears to have won Texas, bringing his electoral vote total to 270.

Somehow, all the networks fail to notice that Russia had taken the entire electoral apparatus of Texas offline before all the votes came in. (This wouldn't get past Steve Kornacki, let me tell you.) Texas goes back in the "too close to call" column. Biden is still two electoral votes ahead, but the nation explodes with rioting and arson by "antifa" and Black Lives Matter. Fourteen police officers are shot on election night.

Thus begins Choose Your Own Adventure: Death Squads. There's an elaborate procedural and legal backstory about how an uncertain Election Night metastasizes into a constitutional crisis to be worked out probably by the Supreme Court, but I won't bore you with it because it's obviously a figleaf. This is a manual for state violence.

With the nation in flames, the players have Trump's Department of Defense deploy military personnel carriers to multiple states, which local mayors rudely call "tanks." These pesky mayors aren't cooperating with the Trump administration's desire to clamp down on dissent.

So, their police departments go completely rogue and join forces with the Trump administration. The NYPD seems to have overthrown Bill De Blasio. The Chicago Police Union refuses to protect Mayor Lori Lightfoot. Federal law enforcement with no identifying insignias encircle the White House to defend it with heat rays.The Proud Boys, Three Percenters and Oath Keepers form posses to "assist."

Tellingly, Eastman and his fellow players assume that pro-Biden forces will try to gather at the Capitol on January 6. So they thwart their political adversaries by tracking their phones, setting up police checkpoints and using Trump's Homeland Security fusion centers to identify and detain their leaders. The players protect the Capitol with an army of federal agents, snipers and of course more heat rays. Trump's FBI hunts down more antifa leaders in the DC suburbs.

War games often reveal more about the players than they do about the future, and this exercise is no exception. The report shows that John Eastman and his confederates expected a disputed election would set off a wave of civil unrest that would culminate in the US Capitol on January 6, supported by insurrections at key state houses that same day. The report projected this strategy onto Biden supporters, but that's exactly what Trump confederates did on January 6.

A showdown on January 6 might feel inevitable in retrospect, given the horrific events of that day. But it wasn't an obvious choice. January 6 was the date of the certification of the presidential election, which has historically been a pro-forma affair. Results have already been decided.

The states have certified their election results, the Electoral College already has voted and all that's left to be done is the little ceremony during which the Congress counts the electoral votes. It doesn't make sense to have your last stand to win a contested election after the results are already set in stone, unless you think you can change them.

John Eastman did in fact come up with a crackpot legal excuse for how Mike Pence could throw the election to Trump. His argument was to the law as creationism is to biology, but it was good enough for Trump. We know Trump pressured Pence to act on Eastman's advice. Eastman shared a dais with Trump as well as Rudy Giuliani at the rally immediately before the siege. The crowd was chanting "Hang Mike Pence," because Pence had refused to comply with Eastman's scheme.

Eastman later claimed he wasn't serious about the memo, but the results of this simulation suggests he and fellow right-wingers had sized up the certification of the presidential election as their moment to stage a procedural coup with physical reinforcements waiting.

west va v epa

BRIEF OF AMICUS CURIAE THE CLAREMONT INSTITUTE’S CENTER FOR CONSTITUTIONAL JURISPRUDENCE IN SUPPORT OF PETITIONERS

JOHN C. EASTMANANTHONY T. CASO Counsel of Record CONSTITUTIONAL COUNSEL GROUP 174 W. Lincoln Ave., #620 Anaheim, CA 92805 (916) 601-1916 atcaso@ccg1776.com

day 5 thurs 6/23 DOJ

https://www.thedailybeast.com/jan-6-committee-exposes-how-donald-trump-misused-the-doj-to-concoct-election-fraud

no lnx

CAPITOL RIOTS

Jan. 6 Committee Exposes Trump’s Chaotic Abuse of the DOJ to Try to Stay in Power

‘JUST SAY IT WAS CORRUPT’

The Jan. 6 Committee is laying out how Trump pressured the DOJ to say there was election corruption when there wasn't.

Jose Pagliery

Political Investigations Reporter

Updated Jun. 23, 2022

In the most damning evidence yet that former President Donald Trump knew he lost the 2020 election but was still willing to abuse his office to remain in power, a former top Department of Justice official testified Thursday that Trump told the DOJ to "just say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and Republican congressmen.”

Thursday’s groundbreaking congressional testimony came from former acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue, one of a handful of ex-DOJ officials who stood up to Trump in his final days in office and refused to have the department misused this way.

Donoghue’s handwritten notes of his interactions with the former president were presented at the Jan. 6 Committee’s fifth public hearing on Thursday, where legislators on the panel announced that several fellow members of Congress eventually sought presidential pardons for their role in Trump’s wide-ranging plan to stay in office.

The committee also revealed that pardons were sought by some of the most vocal Republicans who promulgated election conspiracy theories, played different roles to interrupt the transfer of power, and publicly called for Trump to remain in power—even if by force: Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ), Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL), Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX), and Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA).

Many of those asking for a pardon were present at a meeting on Dec. 21, 2020 in which members of Congress discussed overturning the election. Others like Gaetz—who asked for a blanket pardon “from the beginning of time up until today, for any and all things,” according to videotaped testimony by Trump White House lawyer Eric Herschmann—and Brooks, who requested a pardon for anyone who voted to decertify the election, sought larger immunity.

Cassidy Hutchinson, once an aide to Trump’s White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, recalled hearing from fellow staff that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) also requested a pardon.

“The only reason I know to ask for a pardon is because you think you've committed a crime,” said Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), a member of the committee. “They knew that every bit of what they did was a lie and it was wrong.”

None of the legislators who allegedly sought pardons from Trump responded to questions from The Daily Beast emailed after the hearing.

The hearing kicked off just hours after news broke that federal agents had raided the Virginia home of the former DOJ official at the center of this plot: Jeffrey Clark, a Trump loyalist who has already come under scrutiny for abusing his high-ranking position there in the final weeks of the administration. This relatively unknown government lawyer devised a plan to use the DOJ to cast doubt on election results in states where Trump lost to now-President Joe Biden by making vague references to a federal investigation and intimidating state-level officials. His home was searched by federal law enforcement on Wednesday.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia has awkwardly confirmed the raid in vague terms, noting there "was law enforcement activity in the Lorton, Virginia area yesterday” without commenting on “the nature of that activity or any particular individuals."

At Thursday’s hearing, former DOJ leaders also recounted what may be one of the most decisive moments of the Trump presidency: a Sunday afternoon meeting on Jan. 3, 2021 when Trump nearly fired acting Attorney General Jeffrey A. Rosen—only to hear that several regional U.S. attorneys from districts across the country had threatened to quit in solidarity if the president would weaponize the DOJ this way. When Trump suggested putting Clark in charge, Donoghue told him something that seemed to stick: "Mr. Clark will be left leading a graveyard."

[Jan. 6 Panel Delays Hearing Schedule Due to New Evidence

KEEP IT COMING]

The committee on Thursday also revealed text messages between Trump’s White House chief of staff and a Republican congressman from Pennsylvania who lobbied to have Clark ascend through the DOJ ranks as part of the plan to hijack the department.

In those texts, Perry expressed the urgency in getting Clark a high enough spot where he could make a difference.

“Mark, just checking in as time continues to count down. 11 days to 1/6 and 25 days to inauguration. We gotta get going!” the congressman wrote on Dec. 26, 2020. “Mark, you should call Jeff [Clark]. I just got off the phone with him and he explained to me why the principal deputy won’t work especially with the FBI. They will view it as not having the authority to enforce what needs to be done.”

“I got it. I think I understand. Let me work on the deputy position,” Meadows responded that evening. The congressman and White House official then began to communicate via Signal, an encrypted chatting app with disappearing messages.

The committee on Thursday also presented new evidence touching on the unhinged legal strategy put together by law professor John Eastman to keep Trump in command by interrupting the official certification of 2020 electoral college ballots on Jan. 6, 2021 at the Capitol building—the very event insurrectionists were trying to derail.

That plan, which involved having key states replace Biden electors by submitting alternate slates of fake electors loyal to Trump, apparently also involved an attorney freshly appointed to the DOJ and assigned to specifically work under Clark as a senior counsel: Kenneth A. Klukowski.

That attorney’s role in the plot, which partly relied on a sustained campaign to pressure then-Vice President Mike Pence into misusing his duty as the person counting the ballots aloud, was detailed in an email written by J. Kenneth Blackwell—an activist who has worked at the conservative group Groundswell alongside Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ wife, Ginni.

In it, Blackwell wrote, “As stated last week, I believe the VP and his staff would benefit greatly from a briefing by John [Eastman] and Ken [Klukowski]. As I also mentioned, make sure we don’t overexpose Ken given his new position.”

At the outset of the hearing, Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-MS) said Trump “wanted the Justice Department to legitimize his lies, to basically call the election corrupt… it was a brazen attempt to use the Justice Department to advance the president’s personal agenda.”

The committee’s three witnesses Thursday were all part of DOJ leadership during the tumultuous end of the Trump administration who had abrasive interactions with the White House when they took a firm stand and refused to do the president’s bidding: then-acting Attorney General Jeffrey A. Rosen, former acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue, and Steven Engel, who led the DOJ’s in-house policymaking office.

“They were willing to sacrifice their careers for the good of our country,” Kinzinger said.

All are expected to explain in further detail how Clark tried to use the chaos of Trump’s refusal to concede to Biden to make himself attorney general—and turn what should remain a non-political law enforcement agency into Trump’s personal tool.

Much of what the nation previously knew about the ordeal came from a Senate Judiciary Committee investigation last year that culminated in a 394-page report titled, “Subverting Justice: How the Former President and His Allies Pressured DOJ to Overturn the 2020 Election.”

[‘Pence Deserves It’: Jan. 6 Panel Reveals Dark Trump Desire

PRIMETIME HISTORY

Jose Pagliery]

Internal emails acquired by congressional investigators showed that Clark, then the head of the DOJ’s civil division, sought his boss’ approval for a draft letter he wrote to Georgia state officials claiming the Justice Department was “investigating various irregularities” and asking the governor and legislature there to “convene in special session” and hear testimony about made up election fraud claims.

Co-chair Liz Cheney (R-WY) noted that Clark’s draft letter sounded all too similar to the legal theories of law professor John Eastman and Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani because it was a key part of their ploy to keep Trump in power.

Clark already testified under oath before the committee back in February, although he repeatedly refused to answer questions, citing his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. 105/125x]

On Thursday, the committee played a portion of a videotaped deposition of former Trump White House lawyer Eric Herschmann, one of several attorneys who was present at a decisive meeting at the Oval Office on Jan. 3, 2021. Herschmann expressed bewilderment at Clark’s proposed plan to use the DOJ this way—and his ploy to make himself the nation’s AG.

“I thought Jeff's proposal was nuts,” Herschmann testified, recalling that he said, “The best I can tell, the only thing you know about environmental and elections challenges is that the both start with 'E.’”

[Republican on Jan. 6 Panel Sees ‘Violence in the Future’

‘WAKE UP, AMERICA’]

Donoghue, then the acting AG, previously told the committee in a recorded interview that Trump White House lawyer Pat Cipollone called Clark’s letter “a murder-suicide pact” that would “damage anybody who touches it.”

Several lawyers there remembered how Clark tried to argue that his short stint overseeing environmental cases at the DOJ somehow qualified him to be top lawyer in the country. Donoghue told the committee that he shot back: “That's right. You're an environmental lawyer. How about you go back to your office, and we'll call you when there's an oil spill."

READ THIS LIST

Klepper Confronts Clueless Trumpers With Jan 6 Hearing Clips

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/06/23/5-takeaways-jan-6-hearing-trumps-doj-plot/

wapo

June 23, 2022

In the Jan. 6 committee hearing on June 23, witnesses described how President Donald Trump pressured the Justice Department to investigate election fraud. (Video: JM Rieger/The Washington Post, Photo: Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post)

The Jan. 6 committee on Thursday held its fifth major hearing, this one focused on President Donald Trump’s pressure campaign on the Justice Department to help him overturn the election.

The plot was spearheaded within the department by an official named Jeffrey Clark, whose home federal agents searched Wednesday in a significant development that reflects the increasing legal jeopardy faced by Trump’s allies and perhaps Trump himself. Trump at one point considered installing Clark as acting attorney general to further the plot — which prompted mass resignation threats....

The Jan. 6 committee on Thursday held its fifth major hearing, this one focused on President Donald Trump’s pressure campaign on the Justice Department to help him overturn the election.

Timeline: Trump's pressure on the Justice Department to overturn the election

Below, some takeaways from the hearing.

The pardon picture, filled out

In a video presented on June 23, Trump White House officials said that at least five House Republicans asked President Donald Trump for pardons. (Video: The Washington Post, Photo: Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post)

The committee has repeatedly previewed evidence that certain key players in Trump’s plot soughtpardons. Last week, one of them was revealed to be Trump lawyer John Eastman, who asked to be put on “the pardon list.” The implication from that email was that there was indeed a list that seemingly might have other names.

The committee built out its own list Thursday, adding several House Republicans to it. Here are the names and the evidence:

Reps. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) and Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) — In a Jan. 11 email from Brooks, he said he and Gaetz were suggesting pardons for everyone who objected to the election results in Arizona and Pennsylvania. White House lawyer Eric Herschmann also said he believed that Gaetz had requested a pardon. White House aide John McEntee said Gaetz told him he asked for one from White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. Cassidy Hutchinson, an aide to Meadows, also testified to the effort by Brooks and Gaetz, saying that Gaetz had been seeking a pardon “since early December” and that he reached out to her personally.

Days after the Capitol attack and the final attempt to overturn the election, Members of Congress requested pardons.

Five days after the attack on the Capitol, Representative Mo Brooks requested pardons for himself, Representative Gaetz, and others. pic.twitter.com/f0xLm5SKtT

— January 6th Committee (@January6thCmte) June 23, 2022

Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) — Hutchinson testified that he requested a pardon.

Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Tex.) — Hutchinson testified that he requested a pardon.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) — Hutchinson said that she had heard that Greene had asked the White House counsel’s office for a pardon from deputy counsel Pat Philbin but that Greene hadn’t asked her personally.

Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) — Hutchinson testified that he requested a pardon.

Perry has flatly denied seeking a pardon, calling it “a shameless, soulless lie,” but Hutchinson said he talked to her directly about it.

Hutchinson also said that Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), whom House Republicans tried to put on the committee before Democrats objected, talked with the White House about congressional pardons but that she was unaware of him asking for one.

What John Eastman and ‘the pardon list’ means

Asking for a pardon doesn’t equal admitting guilt,[but in applying you must tell what you did? negates exec priv] and Eastman in particular argued that his request was meant as a precaution. But given how far-fetched this plot was and how often those involved were told their plot was illegal, that fact that people were trying to cover their backsides on the way out is important.

And crucially, some of these requests came even before the plot failed on Jan. 6.

A new link between Trump and Justice Dept. plotters?

At another point, the committee indicated for apparently the first time that there might have been coordination in the plotting between Trump’s legal team and certain members of the Justice Department.

Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) shared a Dec. 28 email from longtimeOhio Republican Party politician Ken Blackwellrecommending a briefing for Vice President Mike Pence from Eastman and former Trump aide Kenneth Klukowski, who had recently joined the Justice Department. The email added that “we want to make sure we don’t overexpose Ken, given his new position.”

Klukowski has already been implicated in helping draft Clark’s draft letter seeking to have the Justice Department legitimize Trump’s false voter-fraud claims. This would indicate more of a link between that Justice Department effort and the Trump legal team.

“This email suggests that Mr. Klukowski was simultaneously working with Jeffrey Clark to draft the proposed letter to Georgia officials to overturn their certified election and working with Dr. Eastman to help pressure the vice president to overturn the election,” Cheney said.

The Jan. 6 committee connects two strands of Trump’s effort to retain power

We know elements of Trump’s legal team and the Justice Department plotted in different ways. But this suggests there might have been more coordination in the entire plot than we know. That’s particularly remarkable, given how much this effort within the Justice Department wasn’t sanctioned by superiors and how it would amount to government lawyers working with political aides to subvert democracy.

Stay tuned to this space.

Clark was warned about illegality, too

Justice Department officials recalled how President Donald Trump discussed replacing acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen days before the Jan. 6 attack. (Video: The Washington Post, Photo: Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post)

Yet again, we have been presented with evidence that those involved in this plot were told they would be breaking the law — and by no less than their own colleagues and allies.

This time, it was Clark.

Early in the hearing, the committee again played video of Herschmann’s testimony. In the clip, Herschmann said he offered a vulgar response when Clark laid out his plan to have the Justice Department intervene in the election dispute.

“When he finished discussing what he planned on doing, I said: … ‘Congratulations, you’ve just admitted your first step you’d take as attorney general would be committing a felony and violating Rule 6(e). You’re clearly the right candidate for this job.’”

Precisely which portion of Clark’s plan this referred to or why Herschmann thought it would break the law wasn’t clear, which is relevant. (Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 6(e) prohibits a government attorney from disclosing matters occurring before a grand jury.)

But yet again, we know of people who might otherwise be sympathetic to Trump telling those involved in the plot that what they were advocating was illegal.

Herschmann previously said Rudy Giuliani admitted that their plan probably wouldn’t hold up in court. And Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers (R) testified that he told Giuliani that Giuliani was asking him to violate the law by overturning Arizona’s results. There is also a volume of evidence that Eastman also knew what he was advocating was illegal, including by his own admission.

All of this plays into efforts to argue that this plot was “corrupt,” which is a key element of the law the Jan. 6 committee has focused on.

Another Justice Dept. official testified he debunked fraud claims to Trump

Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) on June 23 described President Donald Trump's pressure to find an attorney general to back his election lies. (Video: The Washington Post, Photo: Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post)

The other key element that the committee has keyed on while trying to prove corruption is how much Trump was told his voter-fraud claims were false. The committee has shown extensive evidence that Attorney General William P. Barr and Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue told him that — both broadly and when it came to multiple specific claims Trump made.

On Thursday, Barr’s successor as acting attorney general, Jeffrey Rosen, said he told Trump much the same thing on his first day on the job in late December 2020.

“He thought the election had been stolen or was corrupt and that there was widespread fraud,” Rosen said. “And I had told him that our reviews had not shown that to be the case.”

Donoghue, who testified in person, also said Clark was told that his allegations — specifically, on foreign interference — were baseless and that he was briefed on that by the director of national intelligence.

But he said Clark pressed ahead with trying to get the draft letter sent anyway.

“We thought perhaps once it was explained to him that there was no basis for that part of his concern, that he would retreat,” Donoghue said. “But instead he doubled down and said: ‘Well, okay, so there’s no foreign interference. I still think there are enough allegations out there that we should go ahead and send this letter.’ Which shocked me even more than the initial one, because you would think after a couple of days of looking at this, he like we would have come to the same conclusion that it was completely unfounded.”

Donoghue has said he repeatedly told Clark that what he was doing was tantamount to having the Justice Department meddle in the presidential election. Donoghue said Clark responded, “I think a lot of people meddled in this election.”

Again, all of this comes back to corrupt intent — that those involved knew what they were saying was false and even illegal, and pressed forward anyway.

5. Everyone hates Jeff Clark

Richard Donoghue, former acting deputy attorney general, criticized former justice department official Jeffery Clark's qualifications in a video on June 23. (Video: The Washington Post, Photo: Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post)

It’s already been a bad week for Clark, and it got no better Thursday. In addition to having his role in the plot detailed so extensively and having his home searched, it became clear how little regard his fellow government lawyers had for him.

Herschmann said in a video clip: “I thought Jeff’s proposal was nuts. I said, at a certain point, ‘Listen, the best I can tell is the only thing you know about environmental and elections challenges is they both start with E. And based on your answers tonight, I’m not even sure if you know that.’ ”

Donoghue recalled a meeting that involved both Trump and Clark:

And so I said, ‘Mr. President, you’re talking about putting a man in that seat who has never tried a criminal case, who’s never conducted a criminal investigation. He’s telling you that he’s going to take charge of the department — 115,000 employees, including the entire FBI, and turn the place on a dime and conduct a nationwide criminal investigations that will produce results in a matter of days? It’s impossible. It’s absurd. It’s not going to happen. It’s going to fail. He has never been in front of a trial jury, a grand jury. He’s never even been to [FBI Director Christopher] Wray’s office.’ … ‘It’s not going to happen. He’s not competent.’

Donoghue was asked whether anyone in the room thought Clark had the appropriate background or supported Clark as acting attorney general. He responded: “No one.”

The picture painted was of a dilettante being completely out of his depth and striving for power by any means necessary.

day 4 "aside" RNC ronna directly involved in fake elector scheme?!

aha GOP cognitive dissonance: beleive they say in democracy, but realize they cannot win in mktplace of ideas, demographic shift, and they are inherently winners (b/c blessed by god?); thus if # say they lost election, it must be b/c dems cheated [tammany hall machine pol hillary corrupt]; or like eastman/rudy will pretend to beleive voter fraud if enable hold on to power // auth fascist disable norms, institutions and shared sense of reality/ empirical fact THUS BIG LIE has fundamentally crippled/corrupted body politic, peril to democracy (heads on slender thread of norm , as maddow says, like Bowers to uphold norms despite unprecendented pressure [// Lady Ruby personally and publically [jumbotron rally and presumably twt soc media]

testified day 4 praise RR on election day transfer miracle; dtr term ill, big pathos; xian // VP staff/lawyer in basement 1/6?

https://www.alternet.org/2022/06/donald-trump-rusty-bowers/ attack cohen ctr-punch BS?

https://www.alternet.org/2022/06/arizona-gop-lawmaker/

An Arizona Republican lawmaker is speaking out about the pressures he faced from former President Donald Trump, his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, and the former president's allies amid Republicans' attempts to overturn the presidential election.

According to NPR.org, Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers (R) recently testified and shared details about his conversations with Giuliani where he claimed undocumented voters were responsible for casting illegal ballots. He also claimed votes had been cast on behalf of a substantial number of deceased individuals.

But instead of just running with Giuliani's claims, Bowers and other Republican legislators requested he provide solid evidence to back the tall accusations. "In my recollection," Bowers said of Giuliani, "he said, We have lots of theories we just don't have the evidence.'"

Bowers also recalled how Giuliani also "pressured him to call the Arizona legislature back into session — a unilateral move Bowers said he cannot do — to recall the electors that would be going to President Biden after Biden beat Trump in the state."

"It is a tenet of my faith that theConstitution is divinely inspired," he said, growing visibly emotional. "I would not do it."

He noted that the former president also echoed similar sentiments but he didn't believe the evidence they provided to back their claims "merited a hearing."

"You are asking me to do something against my oath, andI will not break my oath," he said he told Trump and Giuliani, to which the former New York mayor said: "Aren't we all Republicans here? I would think we'd get a better reception."

Trump-supporting lawyer John Eastman also contacted Bowers by phone as he echoed Trump and Giuliani's demands. "His suggestion was that we would do it, and I said I can't," Bowers said, adding that Eastman pressured him by telling him to "just do it and let the courts sort it out."

In addition to pressure from Trump's allies, Bowers also noted that the former president's supporters also expressed concern about the outcome of the election. He revealed, per NPR.org, that "his office was subject to over 20,000 emails, thousands of voicemails and texts from those who believed he was wrong to not recall the electors."

"Up until recently, it is a new pattern in our lives to worry what will happen on Saturdays," he said of his family. "Because we have various groups come by."

Bowers has also faced a litany of accusations including being called "a pedophile and corrupt politician" as video trucks drive through his neighborhood and threaten his neighbors."It was disturbing," he said emotionally as he recalled what transpired.

3% gun on hip verbally threat neighbor "I knew I had to get close" to WHAT?!

https://www.rawstory.com/rudy-giuliani-eastman-chesebro-memo/

no lnx

Read the secret memo to Rudy Giuliani that a judge said was likely 'part of a criminal effort'

U.S. District Court Judge David Carter said in March that former President Donald Trump "more likely than not" tried to obstruct Congress as part of an ongoing criminal conspiracy to overthrow the 2020 election.

“Based on the evidence, the Court finds it more likely than not that President Trump corruptly attempted to obstruct the Joint Session of Congress on January 6, 2021,” Carter wrote in a ruling that approved the public release of more than 100 emails that Trump's legal adviser, John Eastman, sent to craft a legal argument for stopping the certification of the election.

Eastman's emails, combined with a memo from Trump attorney Kenneth Chesebro, crafted a plan for Vice President Mike Pence to block the election from being certified.The memo was sent to Rudy Giuliani and has now been published publicly by the House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack and the efforts that led to the election overthrow, Politico reports.

On Jan. 2, 2021, Eastman wrote: "Ken, Did you do a memo on the Jan 6 authority that includes the competing scholarship on the topics? If so, can you send it to me? I might have it in my inbox, but I can't find it at the moment."

Chesebro then responded: "Oh, I did a very rough e-mail on Dec. 13, which [redacted] requested on behalf of the Mayor. A lot of it is irrelevant at this point. The end discusses the originalist view of the 12th Amendment."

He then included his memo. According to the Dec. 2020 email, Chesebro had been writing the memo on a hotel computer.

"I have not delved into the historical record (Vice President Pence's counsel has, and seems totally up on this and I'm sure there are many other lawyers who can add great detail, [Redacted] in particular), and am writing this with reference 3 law 104 N.C. L. Rev. 1732 (2004); and Foley, 51 Loyola U. Chi. L.J. 309 (2019)," the memo begins.

"The bottom line is I think having the President of the Senate firmly take the position that he, and he alone, is charged with the constitutional responsibility not just to open the votes, but to count them — including making judgments about what to do if there are conflicting votes — represents the best way to ensure: (1) that the mass media and social media platforms, and therefore the public, will focus intently on the evidence of abuses in the election and canvassing; and (2) that there will be additional scrutiny in the courts and/or state legislatures, with an eye toward determining which electoral slates are the valid ones."

He then suggested that top aides to Pence and Trump do this to keep the two leaders "above the fray."

He then outlined a "chronology of how things could play out," with Pence refusing to count the votes. The Senate would then hold hearings to talk about "widespread violations of law," despite the fact that dozens of lawsuits alleging fraud filed by the Trump campaign had been tossed out of court.

He said that the Senate Judiciary Committee would then explore "the constitutional question of how the votes must be counted, with at least two highly qualified legal scholars concluding that the President of the Senate is solely responsible for counting the votes, and that the Electoral Count Act is unconstitutional in dictating limits on debate and dictating who wins electoral votes when there are 2 competing slates and the House and Senate disagree."

Read the full memo here.

6 22

The first thing to know about today’s hearing by the J6 committee is John Eastman, the coup-memo mastermind, is in deep deep doo doo.

The former professor of law at Chapman University and fellow at the Claremont Institute apparently thought it was a good idea to explain in writing that the J6 insurrection might not have happened if not for a mulish vice president refusing to go along with a bloodless coup.

Eastman moreover had no qualms about saying in front of witnesses that it’s OK for a Republican vice president to pick and choose who’s going to be president but nuh-uh for VPs from the other side. He also said – to the president – that his attempted coup would perhaps maybe I dunno yeah definitely violate the Electoral Count Act of 1887.

Former White House counsel Eric Herschmann said he told Eastman this: “I'm 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.” (Evidently counsel advised mum’s the word. In deposition, Eastman invoked his Fifth Amendment rights 100 times.)

Eastman’s hare-brained scheme came down to this: Mike Pence, in his ceremonial role as president of the Senate, in the counting of the electoral votes, could do one of two things on his own, Eastman said.

He could reject the votes, thus declaring Donald Trump the winner.

Or he could send the votes back to the five to seven states that had determined the 2020 election’s outcome. (From there, it’s hard to tell what would have happened. Either the states would resend alternate slates of electors loyal to Trump, a dubious option. Or the election would have been thrown to the House, where state legislatures controlled by one party would get one vote to settle matters.)

Either way, Pence said no.

He said no from the start, according to Greg Jacob, former counsel for the office of the vice president. Jacob was today’s star witness. Thanks to his testimony, we know that those who did not believe that Mike Pence could decide the election on his own, included, in addition to the entire White House counsel’s office, the following people:

Mark Meadows.

Rudy Giuliani.

Donald Trump.

And John Eastman himself.

Indeed, Eastman conceded numerous time and in various ways that his conspiracy would not survive legal scrutiny or the Supreme Court, Jacob said. Eastman vacillated between requesting that Pence reject the votes outright, which he deemed too aggressive an option, or suspend the vote count, which he deemed more politically palatable.

Having gotten nowhere with White House attorneys, state elections officials and his own vice president, Trump mounted a pressure campaign on Pence knowing that neither statutory law nor the Constitution gave him the authority to do what Trump demanded.

Trump did it anyway.

The J6 committee made must-see good TV by illustrating how, starting in December, the former president began pressing Pence via television remarks, Twitter and in private meetings. On the morning of January 6, 2021, Trump called to ask Pence one last time. According to witnesses, Trump called him a coward, a wimp and the p-word.

Then Trump took the stage at the Ellipse. According to lead presenter California Congressman Pete Aguilar, the first draft of his speech made no mention of Pence. Trump revised it, however. Then on stage, he ad libbed. Video footage shows that with each mention, the crowd got more jacked up before being sent down Pennsylvania Avenue.

Most dramatic, I think, was the demonstration of cause and effect regarding Trump’s tweet at 2:24 p.m. By that time, Pence had begun counting the votes. White-power terrorist group the Proud Boys had already breached security and were pouring into the building. White House staffers told J6 investigators there was general agreement that Trump ought to send out a tweet in order to calm things down.

He was told an insurgency was brewing. He wrote:

“Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving states a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or incorrect ones which they were previously asked to certify. USA demands the truth!”

That, according to a witness, “was like pouring gasoline on the fire.”

Congressman Aguilar said an informant told the FBI that the Proud Boys were prepared to capture and kill House Speaker Nancy Pelosi if they found her. Same for Mike Pence. A makeshift gallows was raised on the Capitol grounds while the mob chanted “Hang Mike Pence!”

Like said, deep deep doo doo.

And John Eastman isn’t alone.

6 16 22 raw an

New information reveals that the efforts of Ginni Thomas to overturn the 2020 presidential election were even more extensive than previously known, according to a bombshell new report by The Washington Post.

"The House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol has obtained email correspondence between Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and lawyer John Eastman, who played a key role in efforts to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to block the certification of Joe Biden’s victory, according to three people involved in the committee’s investigation," the newspaper reported. "The emails show that Thomas’s efforts to overturn the election were more extensive than previously known, two of the people said. The three declined to provide details and spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters."

Justice Thomas refused to recuse himself from a case involving Jan. 6.

"The committee’s members and staffers are now discussing whether to spend time during their public hearings exploring Ginni Thomas’s role in the attempt to overturn the outcome of the 2020 election, the three people said. The Post previously reported that the committee had not sought an interview with Thomas and was leaning against pursuing her cooperation with its investigation," the newspaper explained.

The report comes as the committee has three additional public hearings scheduled in June.

"The two people said the emails were among documents obtained by the committee and reviewed recently. Last week, a federal judge ordered Eastman to turn more than a hundred documents over to the committee. Eastman had tried to block the release of those and other documents by arguing that they were privileged communications and therefore should be protected," the newspaper reported.

Read the full report.

judge turned over more docs b/c plan crime ~ atty-client priv; more on Ginni?

an 6 22

Pennsylvania state legislator Russ Diamond had a problem. Joe Biden carried the commonwealth by 80,000 votes, thereby securing its 20 electors. According to a newly released trove of emails, Diamond and fellow Republican state legislators wanted instead to send electors dedicated to Donald Trump. They just needed the right excuse.

If that sounds outrageous, that’s because it is.

At first, it seemed allegations of electoral fraud might do the trick. Trump and his lawyers blanketed the airwaves with outlandish claims about fraud at the polls. But when the Trump legal team made their case to the Pennsylvania legislature, their efforts struck Diamond as unconvincing and frankly incompetent. If there was no fraud, how could they justify overriding the will of the voters?

Luckily for Diamond, an obscure conservative law professor had recently said in testimony that state legislatures didn’t need evidence of fraud to disregard the will of the people. It was enough, Professor John Eastman said, that the legislature objected to the rules under which the election was conducted. [SCOTT PERRY NOW?] After watching Eastman’s testimony, Diamond decided Eastman was just the man to help him write a resolution purporting to nullify the will of his state’s voters.

“Honestly, the Trump legal team was not exactly stellar at PA's hearing, failed to provide the affidavits of their witnesses, and made a glaring error by purporting that more ballots had been returned than mailed out,” Diamond admitted in an email to Eastman. “It is for this reason that I latched onto your comments that actual fraud is irrelevant when the election itself is unlawful.”

Diamond sent Eastman a draft resolution predicated on Eastman’s crackpot theory that the US Constitution gives state legislatures the unchecked power to disenfranchise their own voters after the fact if legislators don’t like the results of an election.

Eastman praised Diamond’s efforts but urged his protegé to go still further and actually name Trump electors in the resolution, as opposed to simply announcing their intent to do so.

“One big question, though. Do you want to only go half way, and require another resolution to actually choose a slate of electors? Or should you do it all in one resolution?,” Eastman wrote. “I don't know the dynamic of your Legislature, so can't answer that. But my intuition is that it would be better to do what you need to do in one fell swoop.”

The Pennsylvania Secretary of State and the courts had made some tweaks to facilitate voting during the pandemic. Republicans challenged these changes in court and lost. But Eastman promised that these changes could give the Pennsylvania legislature the excuse it needed to throw out the election, even without any evidence of fraud.

Eastman argued that it would be more politically palatable if the legislature could claim that the new rules cost Trump the election and they as legislators were simply righting that wrong by nullifying the election and replacing Biden’s electors with Trump’s.

Knowing that the mail-in vote favored Biden, Eastman suggested that the legislature pass a resolution arbitrarily declaring a certain percentage of perfectly legal mail-in ballots to be illegal based on a convoluted formula Eastman made up.

That way, Eastman said, the legislature could claim Trump won. “That would help provide some cover,” he asserted. (In fact, Trump would still have lost under Eastman’s metric, but that’s beside the point.)

Ultimately, Pennsylvania state legislators did not pass a resolution openly nullifying the results of their state’s election and naming alternative electors. Instead, at the urging of Trump’s legal team, Pennsylvania Republicans secretly named a slate of pseudo-electors, as did Republicans in six other states that Biden won.

The threat of an Eastman gambit has not passed.

If anything, it has gotten worse.

Republicans who take Eastman’s arguments seriously are gaining ground in state legislatures and key election administration posts.

The GOP may retake the House and Senate this year, which could put GOP legislators in charge of certifying the next presidential election.

A bolder state legislature could still attempt the Eastman gambit in 2024. A GOP-controlled Congress might agree to count the illegitimate electors chosen by politicians, instead of those chosen by the people.

That is why Congress must reform the Electoral Count Actto specify that if there are two slates of electors claiming to represent a state, Congress must only count electors courts have affirmed as legitimate.

1/6 comm 1st hearing said had evidence he knew his legal args BS

https://www.alternet.org/2022/04/john-eastman-claims-attorney-client-privilege-over-37000-pages-of-emails-sought-by-jan-6-committee/

https://www.alternet.org/2022/04/proof-congressional-republicans-subvert-election/

a recording made by a disgruntled election conspiracist is the strongest evidence yet that operatives in Donald Trump’s orbit summoned supporters to Washington on January 6 for the express purpose of coercing lawmakers into overturning the 2020 election.

News broke late Tuesday afternoon, whereupon this bombshell of a story was promptly buried under an avalanche of other news.

The main characters aren’t household names, but this story is every bit as important as the earlier revelation that Donald Trump, Jr, was pushing a detailed plan for a coup to his father’s chief of staff before the election had even been decided. And it’s even more important than the late-breaking news that Sen. Mike Lee talked up Trump lawyer John Eastman’s plan for a procedural coup in late November.

The star of the secret recording is Jason Sullivan, one-time aide to dirty trickster and longtime Trump confidante Roger Stone.

Sullivan told the Times he was invited to speak by a group of anti-vaccine activists, who were planning a permitted event in the capital on J6. (By amazing coincidence, Stone was scheduled to speak at an anti-vax event on the afternoon of J6, an engagement he missed, for reasons that are surely of great interest to the J6 committee.)

The call was made a week before the insurrection.

Sullivan repeatedly urged the other callers to intimidate the lawmakers who were meeting to certify the election. He told them they needed to make them feel like the people were “breathing down their neck.”

“If we make the people inside that building sweat and they understand that they may not be able to walk in the streets any longer if they do the wrong thing, then maybe they’ll do the right thing,” Sullivan said.

“We have to put that pressure there.”

This recording was made by a woman named Staci Burk, a former school board official turned election conspiracist. Burk filed an anonymous affidavit supporting one of Trump lawyer Sidney Powell’s many election conspiracy theories. Whereupon heavily armed paramilitary operatives calling themselves the 1st Amendment Praetorian (1AP) moved into her home for several weeks, ostensibly to guard her. Burk told the Times a 1AP member joined the call, and she made the recording because the armed men were making her feel unsafe. Members of 1AP were in the capital during the insurrection and members of the group have been subpoenaed by the J6 committee.

This recording partially corroborates previous claims by Ali Alexander, another one of Roger Stone’s associates. He said he schemed with members of the Congress to gather a crowd to pressure lawmakers into overturning the election during the certification ceremony.

In a video made before the insurrection, Ali Alexander claimed that he and US Reps. Mo Brooks, Andy Biggs and Paul Gosar “schemed up putting maximum pressure on Congress while they were voting.”

The video circulated on social media but was later deleted. The plan was to “change the hearts and the minds of Republicans who were in that body, hearing our loud roar from outside,” Ali Alexander said.

The Sullivan call proves there was an inside-outside game on J6.

The inside game was the procedural coup devised by John Eastman that was unfolding inside the Capitol on J6 as GOP legislators raised spurious claims of election fraud to overturn a free and fair election.

The outside game was the mob deliberately assembled in order to pressure legislators to go along with Trump’s illegal scheme.

'Coup in search of a legal theory': Judge delivers damning rebuke — orders Eastman to hand over docs

https://www.alternet.org/2022/03/john-eastman-2657052274/

an 3 22 tom b raw story

According to a report from Politico, attorney John Eastman -- who was leading the charge to overturn 2020 presidential election results that ousted Donald Trump from the White House -- is receiving new scrutiny over his relationship with Justice Clarence Thomas.

In light of revelations about texts being exchanged between Ginni Thomas and former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, where the wife of the Supreme Court justice was passing on conspiracy theories and urging the Trump's inner circle to do what they could to remain in power, one member of the House select committee investigating the Jan 6th insurrection said he has some questions for Eastman.

As Kyle Cheney reports, "Eastman spent the final weeks of Trump’s presidency driving a strategy to pressure then-Vice President Mike Pence to stop Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s victory, a plan that relied on legal theories so extreme the Jan. 6 select committee says they could amount to criminal conspiracy and fraud," before adding, "The select committee has evidence that when a top Pence aide challenged Eastman’s plan on Jan. 4, 2021, Eastman initially told him he believed two Supreme Court justices would back him up. One of them was Ginni Thomas’ husband, Justice Clarence Thomas."

Politico is reporting that Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) is raising concerns about Eastman and Justice Thomas.

"Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) told POLITICO that the new details raise important questions about whether Eastman had a specific reason to believe Justice Thomas would support his radical gambit, or if he was simply voicing a hunch," Cheney wrote before noting, "Eastman’s attorney Charles Burnham did not respond to questions about whether Eastman maintained ties to the Thomases or communicated with either of them in the aftermath of Trump’s 2020 defeat. There’s no known evidence that Eastman was directly in touch with either of the Thomases during his campaign to pressure Pence to subvert the results."

According to Politico, "Eastman had reason to know Thomas’ views well: He clerked for the George H.W. Bush appointee in the 1990s before becoming a mainstay in deeply conservative legal circles."

The report goes to note that when investigators asked Eastman if he had any reason to believe that the Supreme Court would support his plan to have former vice president Mike Pence refuse to certify the election and throw it back to the states, his response was to plead the 5th Amendment.

What has raised red flags was testimony from Pence lawyer Greg Jacob who told the committee that Eastman had told him that at least two Supreme Court justices might support his plan, with Jacob saying he couldn't recall if Eastman named the other justice.

You can read more here.

3 22

John Eastman, former President Donald Trump's lawyer, was well aware that it was unlawful to obstruct the Electoral College certification of President Joe Biden's election victory, new reports reveal.

According to The Guardian, Eastman GUK admitted in an email that the plot was a violation of the Electoral Count Act but advised former Vice President Mike Pence to move forward with the agenda anyway.

Per The Guardian: "The email exchange – revealed in court filings by the select committee last week – shows Eastman attempted to take advantage of the fact that the Electoral Count Act was not followed exactly in the immediate aftermath of the Capitol attack to try and benefit Trump."

“The Senate and House have both violated the Electoral Count Act this evening – they debated the Arizona objections for more than two hours. Violation of 3 USC 17,” Eastman wrote.

Eastman is also said to have pressured the former vice president's to support the flawed agenda describing it as "only a 'minor violation' of the statute that governed the certification procedure."

In a second portion of the email, Eastman attempted to justify his actions arguing that "the statute had already been violated in small ways – delays that amounted to a few hours at best – Pence should have no problem committing 'one more minor violation and adjourn for 10 days.'"

Eastman’s email is deeply significant because it suggests he "knew the scheme to delay Biden’s certification was unlawful – which the select committee believes bolsters its case that he was involved in a conspiracy to defraud the United States and obstruct Congress," GUK The Guardian reports.

House Counsel Douglas Letter also weighed in with his take on Eastman’s actions and what he requested of Pence.

“It was so minor it could have changed the entire course of our democracy," Letter noted. "It could have meant the popularly elected president could have been thwarted from taking office. That was what Dr. Eastman was urging.”

https://www.alternet.org/2022/03/donald-trump-john-eastman-crimes/

roger knew

trms jamie said judge asked 1/6 comm to weigh in on crimes b/c has to decide if eastman has atty -cli priv, but crime negates

3 22

John Eastman, who previously worked as a lawyer for former President Donald Trump, is facing pressure from the House Select Committee overseeing the investigation of the insurrection on the U.S. Capitol to surrender records that contain specific keywords in compliance with his subpoena.

According to The Guardian, GUK the keyword terms are said to shed light on Eastman's role in the alleged conspiracy lawmakers are investigating to uncover. "The keyword search list – which the select committee transmitted to Eastman – provides a glimpse of what House investigators suspect might be contained among the thousands of emails and documents that Eastman is being forced to review to comply with his subpoena."

An inside source with knowledge of the investigation has revealed "The list is intended to act as a dragnet to catch his records from 4 to 7 January about efforts to overturn the 2020 election results between Eastman and individuals in different 'centres of gravity.'”

In addition to the committee's investigation into Eastman's search terms, the lawmakers are also investigating several Republican congressional members. Those lawmakers include Sens. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.), Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), Roger Marshall (R-Kan.), Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.); and Reps. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-Miss.), Doug Mastriano (R-Penn.), Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), Louie Gohmert (R-Texas), Mo Brooks (R-Ala.), Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.), and Scott Perry (R-Calif.).

Another focus for the committee will be on Eastman's communications with members of the federal government. That list includes emails under the following domains: “'usdoj.gov' and 'justice.gov' for the justice department, 'senate.gov' for the Senate, and 'house.gov' for the House."

The latest development follows House Select Committee chair Rep. Bennie Thompson's (D-Miss.) move to issue automatic subpoenas for specific documents and testimonies. As the investigation moves forward, the committee has expanded its scope. Following that move, Thompson said, “We keep adding to the list of people we need to talk to. That’s grown the body of work."

===

https://www.alternet.org/2022/02/john-eastman-docs/

asserts atty client priv

devos 180

https://www.alternet.org/2022/01/betsy-devos/

no lnx

Betsy DeVos’ foundation is giving $640,000 to right wing group whose 'scholar' wrote Trump-Pence coup memos

David Badash and The New Civil Rights Movement January 12, 2022

The foundation belonging to anti-public school activist and former Trump Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and her husband, is handing a right wing group, The Claremont Institute, $640,000.

“The Dick and Betsy DeVos Foundation donated $240,000 to Claremont in 2020 and approved another $400,000 to be paid out in the future, tax records show,” Rolling Stone reports in an article titled, “Revealed: The Billionaires Funding the Coup’s Brain Trust.”

The Claremont Institute is home to John Eastman, who was best known (and currently serves) as the chairman of the anti-LGBTQ organization NOM, the National Organization For Marriage. Eastman agreed to “retire” as a law professor at the Chapman University School of Law exactly one week after he delivered a speech, on stage with Rudy Giuliani, at Donald Trump’s rally that preceded the violent and deadly January 6 insurrection.

But only later would Americans learn that John Eastman was the architect and author of several documents, now called the “coup memos,” detailing how Vice President Mike Pence could, effectively, steal the election for Donald Trump on the fateful day of the insurrection.

Eastman continues to serve as a Senior Fellow at The Claremont Institute, and in his role as the Founding Director of the Claremont Institute’s Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence.

The Bulwark, founded by prominent conservative never-Trumpers, last year wrote: “That Claremont has been unparalleled in its intellectual submission to Trumpism should give us pause.”

In 2019, Claremont welcomed as a Lincoln Fellow the conspiracist and “ king of fake news” Jack Michael Posobiec III. Posobiec, already well known as a promoter of the Pizzagate hoax and the Seth Rich conspiracy theory, was then working as a correspondent and host for the One America News Network (OANN), which became one of the major promoters of false claims about the 2020 election. Claremont remains proud of the affiliation with Posobiec, with an institute official recently calling him “one of the best public political voices in America”—just days before it was revealed that a right-wing website Posobiec frequently promoted was a Russian disinformation project.

And among the latest crop of Lincoln Fellows is Charlie Kirk, the founder of the right-wing youth-mobilizing group Turning Point USA. Kirk bragged about sending “80+ buses full of patriots to DC to fight” for Trump on January 6. After his slimy “Falkirk Center,” co-founded with Jerry Falwell Jr., imploded, Kirk was ousted from Liberty University. The Claremont Institute has welcomed him with open arms.

As Americans now know, Eastman also counseled President Donald Trump in other areas, but in a shocking revelation which The New York Times and other news outlets reported late last year, Eastman sat in the Oval Office with Trump attempting to pressure the outgoing vice president to act to overturn a free and fair election.

Later, on January 6, Eastman, The Washington Post reported, would blame Pence for the violent attempted coup which included Trump supporters hunting for Pence inside the Capitol, a gallows and noose just outside, chanting repeatedly, “hang Mike Pence.”

What was essentially an attempted assassination of a sitting vice president came barely hours after Eastman – who to this day remains a Claremont Institute “scholar” – at the Jan. 6 spouted “conspiracy theories about voter fraud.”

Here is John Eastman, chairman of a Federalist Society practice group, at the pre-insurrection rally spouting conspiracy theories about voter fraud. He concludes: \u201cAnybody that is not willing to stand up and [vote to overturn the election] does not deserve to be in the office!\u201dpic.twitter.com/auD2vXSjNE

— Mark Joseph Stern ***FAIR COLAs FOR SLATE*** (@Mark Joseph Stern ***FAIR COLAs FOR SLATE***) 1610553789

https://www.alternet.org/2021/11/trump-attorney-eastman-went-directly-to-arizonas-house-speaker-with-his-insurrectionist-scheme-report/

John C. Eastman — a far-right attorney, Donald Trump ally, MAGA Republican and prominent figure in the Claremont Institute — has horrified constitutionalists because of his authoritarian plan to overturn the 2020 presidential election results. And one of the Republicans he reached out to directly, according to the Arizona Republic, was Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers.

Referencing reporting in the Arizona Republic, Talking Points Memo's Cristina Cabrera notes that on January 4, 2021, Eastman contacted Bowers directly "to pitch a legal theory on how Arizona's electors ought to be tossed away before Congress" certified "the electoral votes on January 6."

Arizona was one of the five states that went for Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election but flipped to now-President Joe Biden in 2020; the others were Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin. Trump falsely claimed that he was the real winner in Arizona but was deprived of a victory because of widespread voter fraud, but official bipartisan recounts confirmed that Biden, in fact, won the state.

Regardless, Trump lawyer Eastman was more than happy to promote Trump's false claims of widespread voter fraud. And because of Eastman, Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell and other Trump lawyers, the United States came dangerously close to a constitutional crisis during the late 2020/early 2021 lame duck period. The violent insurrectionist assault on the U.S. Capitol Building on January 6 was unprecedented in U.S. history.

Cabrera notes, "Eastman has claimed he was only…. offering hypotheticals and had no intention of overturning the election. But January 4, the day he spoke to Bowers, was also the day he presented his election-stealing scheme to (Vice President Mike) Pence. Both reported examples show Eastman pressing Republicans to subvert the election, not simply offering disinterested legal advice."

The fact that Eastman has been so prominent in the Claremont Institute is important. Founded in 1979, the right-wing think tank has been around for 42 years — and in the past, it favored a more traditional brand of conservation. Claremont's founder, the late Harry V. Jaffa, was a speechwriter for Sen. Barry Goldwater during his 1964 presidential campaign. But Claremont has taken an increasingly dark and authoritarian turn in recent years, fully embracing Trump's MAGA movement and pushing far-right conspiracy theories. In a notorious essay for the American Mind published on March 24 and headlined "Conservatism Is No Longer Enough," Glenn Ellmers (a Claremont senior fellow) argued that most people living in the U.S. are no longer Americans in the true sense. Ellmers' essay was right out of the Viktor Orbán/Vladimir Putin/Marine LePen school of hyper-nationalist far-right authoritarianism.

Eastman, like Ellmers, has championed the MAGA movement vigorously. And more traditional conservatives and libertarians such as those at The Bulwark have been appalled by his scheme, outlined in a two-page memo, for overturning the 2020 election results.

According to Cabrera, "Eastman's reported conversation with Bowers fell on the same day as the attorney's Oval Office meeting with Pence, during which Eastman laid out his now-infamous memo explaining how the vice president could hijack Congress' certification process to keep Trump in power. Eastman proposed that Pence throw out electors from the swing states Biden had won, including Arizona, and let the GOP-controlled state legislatures or U.S. House Republicans choose new electors…. The Arizona Republic's new report on Eastman apparently trying to personally lobby an individual state Republican leader reveals the extent to which the lawyer tried to make his cloak-and-dagger scheme, which was fully backed by Trump, a reality."

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/eastman-pitch-coup-plan-arizona-gop-leader

john Eastman, the conservative legal scholar who drew up a full scheme to have then-Vice President Mike Pence throw out certain states’ 2020 electoral votes to steal the election for Donald Trump, reportedly took his ideas straight to at least one Republican leader in a state Trump lost.

According to the Arizona Republic’s latest report in its multi-part series on Trumpworld’s efforts to invalidate Joe Biden’s victory in Arizona, Eastman reached out to state House Speaker Rusty Bowers (R) personally on Jan. 4 to pitch a legal theory on how Arizona’s electors ought to be tossed away before Congress certifies the electoral votes on Jan. 6.

Eastman has claimed he was only ever offering hypotheticals and had no intention of overturning the election. But Jan. 4 — the day he spoke to Bowers — was also the day he presented his election-stealing scheme to Pence.

Both reported examples show Eastman pressing Republicans to subvert the election, not simply offering disinterested legal advice.

bowers reportedly asked Eastman during their talk, “Has this ever been done before?”

The lawyer said no, but told Bowers he ought to do it anyway and let Trump’s legal team deal with whatever litigation might arise from the gambit, the Arizona Republic reported.

But the GOP leader reportedly wasn’t sold.

“It’s never been done in the history of the country, and I’m going to do that in Arizona?” he asked, according to the Arizona Republic. “No.”

Eastman’s reported conversation with Bowers fell on the same day as the attorney’s Oval Office meeting with Pence, during which Eastman laid out his now-infamous memo explaining how the vice president could hijack Congress’ certification process to keep Trump in power. Eastman proposed that Pence throw out electors from the swing states Biden had won, including Arizona, and let the GOP-controlled state legislatures or U.S. House Republicans choose new electors.

Since details about Eastman’s blueprint for his proposed coup came out this September, the lawyer has publicly insisted that he never thought that the memo’s legal theories carried any weight and that it was only intended to detail “available scenarios that had been floated.”

But Eastman’s denials utterly collapsed in late October, when the lawyer told an undercover progressive activist that he absolutely believed his reasoning in the memo was solid.

The Arizona Republic’s new report on Eastman apparently trying to personally lobby an individual state Republican leader reveals the extent to which the lawyer tried to make his cloak-and-dagger scheme, which was fully backed by Trump, a reality.

scott perry frdm cock --> bossert to trump

11 21 an

On January 2, Trump lawyer John Eastman called into Steve Bannon's War Room podcast to explain how to steal the election. Eastman told Bannon that Vice President Mike Pence could still overturn Biden's victory. The interview was part of an extremely public campaign by Trump and his closest allies to lobby Pence to steal the election during the certification ceremony.

One of Eastman's crackpot theories was that the vice president has the unilateral power to accept or reject electoral votes at his whim, or failing that, to somehow "send the election back" to Republican-controlled swing state legislatures that would disregard the will of their people and replace Biden's electors with Trump's.

Eastman was Trump's master of self-serving constitutional bafflegab. His job was to spin elaborate pseudo-legal theories to justify Trump's assault on democracy. It was Eastman who wrote the notorious memos outlining his fanciful legal arguments for why the vice president has the power to unilaterally reelect himself. Eastman also co-wrote a blueprint for how Trump could use the military, the police, and criminal gangs to hold onto power after a disputed election. Eastman even spoke at Trump's rally on the Ellipse, making wild allegations of election fraud before Trump set the mob on the Capitol.

To understand January 6, you have to think in terms of an inside game and an outside game. The inside game was to steal the election procedurally. The outside game was to gather a mob to terrorize officials into going along with it. Eastman was a conceptual architect of both the paper coup attempt and of the plan for the political repression that Trumpists expected to follow in the wake of the theft.

READ:**A growing threat is emerging from the theocratic wing of the GOP — but many liberals are missing it**

It all comes back to the Big Lie of massive Democratic voter fraud in the swing states. Trump used the fantasy of a stolen election to gather his supporters in Washington for a "wild protest" on January 6, whip them into a rage and set them on the Capitol. Eastman used the same lie to justify his schemes to overturn the election procedurally.

In his various memos and public appearances, Eastman presented several paths to overrule the will of the people, but his ultimate justification was always the same: Democratic "fraud" in the swing states invalidated their certified slates of Biden electors.

Therefore, he maintained, Mike Pence was entitled to unilaterally cast aside the electoral votes and count alternate slates of fake electors in their place or discard the votes from those states altogether, denying either candidate the necessary 270 votes and throwing the election to the state delegations in the House.

As Eastman wrote in his second memo, Trump would prevail, "if the Republicans in the State Delegations stand firm." At the time, the GOP caucus was deeply divided over whether to back Trump's paper coup, and Pence was signalling he was not willing to play his assigned role.

READ:**'Whole case is a mess': Internet stunned as judge lets Rittenhouse choose final jurors in raffle system**

Hence the need for extra muscle on the outside.

This fits with what another key conspirator has said about his reason for gathering a mob on January 6. "We […] schemed up putting maximum pressure on Congress while they were voting," said Stop the Steal organizer Ali Alexander, regarding his motives. He wanted to "change the hearts and the minds of Republicans who were in that body, hearing our loud roar from outside."

After an extended rant about the cowardice of Mike Pence, the last order Trump gave the mob before sending them down Pennsylvania Avenue was that they must give "boldness" to "weak Republicans."

Trump's command echoed Eastman's language in the longer of the two memos in which he described his own scheme as "BOLD, certainly."

Read:**'Conspiracy nuts': DeSantis is in the hot seat after his aide gets caught pushing anti-Semitic theory**

The label "coup" conjures up images of a military takeover, but a procedural coup under the threat of violence is still a coup.

Denialists try to mislead by pointing to the insurgents' relatively light weaponry and saying: "You don't think they meant to overthrow the US government with that, do you?" But the plan was never to physically seize control of the government. Insurgents just had to bully Pence and House Republicans into reversing the election for Trump.

Trump's advisors were well aware that reversing a free and fair election would provoke national outrage and widespread protests. Eastman's blueprint for leveraging the military, the police, and criminal gangs to hold onto power would work as well or better after a procedural coup as it would after an uncertain Election Night (the scenario nominally entertained in the report). A stolen election would putBiden supporters in the streets where the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers would be waiting for them, prepared to start or escalate violence wherever they could. This kind of unrest was exactly what Eastman warned local officials to be prepared to suppress.[see war game bs?]

We eagerly await what Bannon and Eastman will tell the January 6 committee, but what they've already said is utterly damning.

READ:**Ocasio-Cortez gives an impassioned speech blasting Kevin McCarthy after Gosar's 'incitement of violence'**

House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack has just issued more subpoenas for very close Trump associates, among them longtime Trump advisor Jason Miller, and former Trump National Security Advisor, QAnon conspiracist Michael Flynn.

Also on the list are the author of the memo detailing how Vice President Mike Pence could allegedly overturn the election, anti-LGBTQ group chairman John Eastman. Decades-long Giuliani ally Bernard Kerik is also among those subpoenaed.

One name many do not know is Angela McCallum, who served as aNational Republican Senatorial Committee War Room Lead,and as a National Executive Assistant, for Donald J. Trump for President.

Lastly, Bill Stepien, Trump 2020 campaign manager.

Axios' Andrew Solender posts the letter to Stepien.

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'Barely concealed bloodlust': Claremont Institute laid out detailed plan for using cops to overturn Trump’s election loss

Travis Gettys and Raw Story November 08, 2021

The right-wing Claremont Institute published a report in mid-October 2020 that gamed out a scenario where Donald Trump would remain in office through an alliance between law enforcement and militant extremists.

The report was prepared by attorney John Eastman, who authored a memo laying out another strategy for keeping Trump in office, and former Trump deputy national security advisor K.T. McFarland, as well as Kevin Roberts, then-executive director of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, alt-right figure Jeff Giesea and right-wing blogger Charles Haywood, reported The Bulwark.

"Despite the authors' pretensions to scholarship and rigor — 'for a simulation to be valuable, the other side gets a vote and actions must be based in realism' — the final document is a frenzied and paranoid piece of work, revealing of the anxieties and aspirations of the authoritarian right," writes columnist Christian Vanderbrouk. "Practically, the report is an instruction manual for how Trump partisans at all levels of government — aided by citizen 'posses' of Proud Boys and Oath Keepers — could, quite literally, round up opposition activists, kill their leaders, and install Donald Trump for a second term in office."

Most of the predictions in the report, titled "79 Days to Inauguration," did not come to fruition, such as the authors' belief that some states' voting results would be fatally tainted by cyber attacks and suspicious fires, and left-wing mobs did not converge on Washington, D.C., to incite violence, and police did not execute antifa/Black Lives Matter leaders as part of a federal operation.

"A barely concealed bloodlust runs through the report," Vanderbrouk writes. "This isn't a serious wargame or a policy study so much as a bowdlerized retelling of The Turner Diaries."

The report was produced in response to the bipartisan Transition Integrity Project's (TIP) exercise on "Preventing a Disrupted Presidential Election and Transition," which considered the prospect of Trump refusing to concede an election loss and made recommendations for avoiding a crisis -- which seems to be the opposite intent of the Claremont Institute's exercise.

"To the extent that the Claremont-TPPF report offers recommendations, they are mostly focused on how to emerge victorious from the chaos, including preparation 'for destructive urban unrest [with] potential targets includ[ing] ballot counting facilities, government buildings, especially state capitols and city halls, as well as television and radio studios,'" Vanderbrouk writes. "The Claremont task force seems either resigned to—or perhaps energized by—the view that 'prudent steps are likely to be spun as preparations for a military takeover or coup and may result in negative consequences either way.'"

"Either way. It's as if they're steering into the violence instead of trying to avoid it," he adds. "The message is clear:do whatever it takes to crush your opponents and all will be forgiven in the second Trump term."

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/11/the-claremont-institute/

no lnx twt

How a little known right-wing think tank continues to add fuel to Trump's 'Big Lie'

Meaghan Ellis November 05, 2021

Former President Donald Trump may have had an overwhelming number of supporters who stormed the U.S. Capitol to "stop the Steal, but one conservative think tank is still helping to perpetuate the big lie.

According to Vice News, the Claremont Institute and its top-ranking members played a dominant role aiding Trump as he attempted to overturn the presidential election.

Per Vice:

"Claremont Institute leaders' actions leading up to, during, and after Jan. 6 are the culmination of five years of increasingly alarmist rhetoric and calls to action from the think tank, whose embrace of Trump and Trumpism have helped mainstream fringe views into the Republican Party ecosystem by positioning themselves as the vanguard in an existential "cold civil war" between true Americans and anti-American progressives."

One leader in particular was Trump loyalists and lawyer John Eastman. Not only did he attempt to pressure former Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the election but he also echoed many of Trump's biggest lies about the election being stolen.

Like many of the conspiracy theorists, Eastman claimed "dead people voted" and Dominion Voting Systems' "'machines contributed to that fraud' by 'unloading the ballots from the secret folder,'" Vice reports.

“All we are demanding of Vice President Pence is this afternoon at 1 o'clock he let the legislators of the state look into this so we get to the bottom of it and the American people know whether we have control of the direction of our government or not," Eastman claimed. “We no longer live in a self-governing republic if we can't get the answer to this question. This is bigger than President Trump. It is the very essence of our republican form of government and it has to be done. And anybody that is not willing to stand up and do it does not deserve to be in the office."

As proof of the think tank leaders' actions, the publication also pointed to tweets and messages that made their stance quite clear. Vice highlighted a tweet shared by Claremont Institute president emeritus and senior fellow Brian Kennedy's tweet just one day before the Jan. 6 insurrection.

"We have been on Capitol Hill all day. We are in a constitutional crisis and also in a revolutionary moment," Kennedy tweeted on Jan. 5. “We must embrace the spirit of the American Revolution to stop this communist revolution. #HoldTheLine."

Claremont Institute President Ryan Williams also echoed similar claims in a YouTube video saying, "The mission of the Claremont Institute is to save Western civilization."

Welcome to the Claremont Institute

www.youtube.com

Political analysts have weighed in to explain just how disturbing the Claremont Institute's actions are as there are concerns about similar incidents occurring in the future.

"Laura K. Field, a political theorist at American University, recently explained why it is so disturbing.

"It's incredibly concerning. They're desperate to take on the role of leading the charge in terms of providing arguments for the anti-democratic populism of Trump, Field explained. "They really want to do everything they can to keep Republicans in power, even if it means manipulating through bad-faith measures the levers of power."

There are also concerns about the future because ongoing attacks leveled at America's voting systems "could lead to more distrust and division and skepticism about various institutions in the medium-to-long run."

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Scathing new report sheds light on the most shocking aspect of John Eastman's involvement in the Capitol riots

Meaghan Ellis October 30, 2021

New damning developments pertaining to the insurrection on the U.S. Capitol have come to light. According to Washington Post, the latest investigative update involves former President Donald Trump's lawyer John Eastman.

The report, written by Washington Post reporters Josh Dawsey, Jacqueline Alemany, Jon Swaine, and Emma Brown, explains how Eastman attempted to build a case to persuade former Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the election. It has been revealed that "even as rioters overran the Capitol and a recalcitrant Pence was forced into hiding, Eastman emailed a Pence aide to actually blame Pence for the scene."

At one point, Pence's aide Greg Jacob also became embroiled in a heated exchange with Eastman telling him that "his 'bullshit legal advice was why Pence's team was 'under siege.' An accusation Eastman replied to with a suggestion pushing the blame off on Pence.

"The 'siege' is because YOU and your boss did not do what was necessary to allow this [election challenge] to be aired in a public way so that the American people can see for themselves what happened," Eastman replied.

The reporters also highlighted more damning details that occurred after U.S. Capitol Police managed to clear the breached federal building so lawmakers could reconvene.

Pence allowed other lawmakers to speak before they returned to counting the votes, and said he wasn't counting the time from his speech or the other lawmakers against the time allotted in the Electoral Count Act.

Eastman said that this prompted him to email Jacob to say that Pence should not certify the election because he had already violated the Electoral College Act, which Pence had cited as a reason that he could not send the electors back to the states.

"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," Eastman told The Post. "It seemed that had already set the precedent that it was not an impediment."

Based on Eastman's actions and his response to Pence's aide, it appears he was well aware of how they could possibly leverage the angry mob of rioters that stormed the Capitol.

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/10/john-eastman-2655408211/

https://www.alternet.org/2021/10/john-eastman-2655317174/

John C. Eastman — the far-right attorney, Donald Trump ally and Claremont Institute extremist who devised a memo outlining a game plan for preventing now-President Joe Biden's Electoral College certification by Congress on January 6 — is being slammed as dangerously authoritarian by his critics, while Eastman and his Claremont colleagues see him as a victim of cancel culture. But Niskanen Center senior fellow Laura K. Field, in an article published by the conservative website The Bulwark on October 18, lays out some reasons why Eastman's cancel culture claims are nonsense.

Field explains, "You may know the Claremont Institute as the intellectual home of John Eastman, the lawyer behind the infamous six-point memo, who helped President Donald Trump concoct his plan for rejecting the Electoral College results on January 6…. In recent weeks, the Institute has been entangled in a dispute with the American Political Science Association. APSA is the country's premier professional association for political scientists, and the dispute with Claremont concerned Eastman's participation in APSA's annual conference. Spoiler alert: The conference is over, Eastman did not participate, and Claremont is claiming it has been censored — and even affirmatively defending Eastman and naming him in its latest fundraising efforts."

Eastman's claim that widespread voter fraud robbed Trump of a victory in the 2020 presidential election is a lie. Biden enjoyed a decisive victory, defeating Trump by more than 7 million in the United States' popular vote and winning 306 electoral votes. And numerous vote recounts in the states that Biden won, from Pennsylvania to Arizona, have made it abundantly clear that Biden legitimately won both the popular vote and the electoral vote — period.

Field argues that if the American Political Science Association and others shun Eastman, their criticisms of him are well-founded.

"Most members of the American Political Science Association are not fools, and they see the clear and immediate threat that Eastman's actions posed to American democracy," Field notes. "And so, when some APSA members noticed that the Claremont Institute was still maintaining ties to Eastman and that Claremont would be featuring Eastman on two panels at APSA's big annual meeting, they started pushing back."

Field continues, "They tweeted. They posted on Facebook and on blogs. They debated the appropriate course of action. People noticed that Claremont has apparently been using its involvement at APSA as a fundraising tool. In the week leading up to APSA's meeting this year, a few hundred individuals signed an open letter requesting that Eastman and Claremont be ousted from the conference. It seemed all but certain that there would be in-person protests of the Claremont panels at APSA."

But Field goes on to offer a "full disclosure," noting that the open letter "cited my July essay for The Bulwark about Claremont."

"While I was glad to see the letter circulating, I did not sign it," Field writes. "I am uncomfortable with the idea of any kind of ideological test for participants in political science conferences."

The Bulwark article that Field is referring to, published on July 13 and covered by AlterNet that day, was a scathing critique of theClaremont Institute — a right-wing think tank founded in 1979 by students of the late Harry V. Jaffa, who was a speechwriter for conservative Sen. Barry Goldwater's 1964 presidential campaign. Field's article, headlined "What the Hell Happened to the Claremont Institute?", had no problem with Goldwater conservatism; The Bulwark, for all its Trump-bashing, is still a right-wing website. But Field slammed Claremont for rejecting traditional conservatism and taking a toxic plunge into Trumpism, conspiracy theories and election denial. As Field and others at The Bulwark see it, Claremont has degenerated into an abyss of authoritarian thinking.

But while Field didn't sign the open letter, she remains vehemently critical of what Claremont has became.

"These days, though, the Claremont Review is not what it once was, and Claremont's web publication, the American Mind, routinely publishes pieces that damage the Institute's reputation for intellectual integrity," Field writes. "And so, their involvement in APSA is one of the few external legitimating elements remaining. Once that is lost, so goes much of the intellectual patina that is the Claremont trademark."

1021 an

legal expert **George Conway** is blasting the Claremont Institute for defending **John Eastman** (photo, with Giuliani on Jan. 6), the man who wrote the now-infamous "Eastman Memo" which many see as instructions to then-Vice President Mike Pence on how to overturn the 2020 presidential election on January 6.

"Claremont's statement that Eastman did not seek to have Vice President Pence unilaterally determine the validity of electoral votes and overturn the election is a bald-faced, disgraceful lie," says Conway, who successfully argued a case before the U.S. Supreme Court and won a unanimous decision, and had been under consideration to be Donald Trump's solicitor general or an assistant attorney general.

Conway was referring to a statement from the Claremont Institute, the pro-Trump conservative think tank where Eastman is employed as a senior fellow. Claremont has embraced right wing extremists, granting fellowships to Fox News' Laura Ingraham and Mark Levin, Daily Wire's Ben Shapiro, CRT conspiracist Christopher Rufo, and even Pizzagate conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec.

The Washington Post Monday accused Claremont of trying to "whitewash" Eastman's "road map for overturning Trump's loss."

Eastman, who happens to be the chairman of the nearly-defunct anti-LGBTQ group National Organization For Marriage (NOM) and supported Uganda's efforts to jail LGBTQ people for life, was forced to "retire" as a law professor after blowback from speaking at Trump's pre-insurrection rally, ginning up the troops, and falsely claiming Trump had won the election.

In its statement defending Eastman today, Claremont decried "a recent combined disinformation, de-platforming, and ostracism campaign," also known as holding Eastman accountable by using his own words.

Here's Conway's tweet...

trms blog

oct 6, 2021, 5:40 AM PDT

By Steve Benen

Since John Eastman's notorious anti-election memo came to the fore, the Republican lawyer has received considerable attention, but he's showing no signs of contrition. In fact, Eastman told The New York Times a few days ago that he's following through on his earlier antics.

"There are lots of allegations out there that didn't get their day in court and lots of people that believe them and wish they got their day in court," the GOP attorney said, "and I am working very diligently with several teams — statistical teams, election specialists teams, all sorts of teams — to try and identify the various claims and determine whether they have merit or there is reasonable explanation for them."

But while Eastman and his many "teams" chase down assorted conspiracy theories, some of the lawyer's critics are seeking a bar investigation into his controversial efforts. The Los Angeles Times reported yesterday:

A group of prominent lawyers, including former governors and judges, urged the California bar on Monday to launch an investigation into John C. Eastman's role in advising President Trump on how he could overturn his election defeat, including by having his vice president refuse to count the electoral votes in seven states won by President Biden.

"We write to request that the State Bar investigate serious evidence of professional misconduct by Professor John C. Eastman in connection with his representation of former President Donald J. Trump in efforts to discredit and overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election," the group wrote.

The signatories added, "The available evidence supports a strong case that ... Mr. Eastman violated his ethical obligations as an attorney by filing frivolous claims, making false statements, and engaging in deceptive conduct.... On January 6, 2021, Mr. Eastman continued this pattern of misconduct by giving the crowd at the 'Stop the Steal' rally on the National Mall another version of his misleading advice and stating that, by rejecting it, Mr. Pence had proved himself undeserving of his office."

For those who may need a refresher, it was last summer when Eastman published a bizarre piece that argued that Vice President Kamala Harris was ineligible for national office because her parents are immigrants. Soon after, he began working with Donald Trump — the then-president saw him on Fox News and was impressed — and as part of that work, Eastman filed the brief last December on Trump's behalf that asked the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the 2020 presidential election. (It was filled with factual errors — including an obvious one literally on the first page.)

Soon after, he authored what's become known as the Eastman Memo, which fleshed out a ridiculous six-step scenario in which then-Vice President Mike Pence, rather than honor the results of the election, would exploit ambiguities in the Electoral Count Act and set aside the Electoral College votes of seven states. That would put Trump in the lead, but it would also leave both candidates short of a majority.

From there, under Eastman's reported plan, the election would shift to the U.S. House, where Republicans controlled enough state delegations to keep Trump in power, despite his defeat.

This was, in other words, an apparent document — written by a lawyer representing the then-president — that effectively outlined how Republicans could execute something resembling a coup. Eastman even pushed his vision on Jan. 6, speaking at the pro-Trump rally ahead of the insurrectionist riot.

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-trump-feedback-loop-generated-eastmans-presidential-coup-memo

no lnx vids

John Eastman’s coup memo was the result of the Fox-Trump feedback loop

WRITTEN BY MATT GERTZ

PUBLISHED 10/04/21 1:59 PM EDT

The prominent conservative lawyer behind a memo explaining how to subvert the 2020 election for President Donald Trump reportedly first caught Trump’s attention while shilling on the president’s behalf during an interview on Fox News.

Trump’s obsession with Fox programming is well-documented. Throughout his presidency, he regularly tweeted in response to shows he was watching; staffed his administration and legal defense teams with Fox regulars; and shaped his decision-making around advice he received from its personalities, both in person and on the air. On issues as diverse as border wall contracting, pandemic response, and pardons, federal policy responded to what the president was seeing on the right-wing propaganda network.

John Eastman, a Claremont Institute senior fellow who spoke to the pro-Trump mob in the hours before the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, apparently put himself on Trump’s radar in similar fashion.

“Trump, who had never met Mr. Eastman, saw him on the Fox News talk show of the far-right commentator Mark Levin railing against the Russia investigation” in mid-2019, The New York Times reported Saturday. “Within two months, Mr. Eastman was sitting in the Oval Office for an hourlong meeting.”

Eastman remained in Trump’s orbit over the next year and a half, according to the Times, and, after Trump lost the 2020 election, the right-wing attorney created a plan by which Vice President Mike Pence and congressional Republicans could use bogus claims of voter fraud to keep Trump in power. Eastman’s six-step scheme to end American democracy, revealed last month by The Washington Post and CNN, was foiled largely because Pence was ultimately unwilling to go through with it.

“Mr. Eastman’s appeal to Mr. Trump,” the Times reported, “rested in large part on his expansive views of presidential power — and his willingness to tell Mr. Trump what he wanted to hear.”

That description matches Eastman’s performance during the Fox interview that initially captured Trump’s attention. That appearance, for the May 12, 2019, edition of Life, Liberty, and Levin, followed the release of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report detailing his investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election. Trump and his supporters tried to spin that document as vindicating him. But it was actually incredibly damning, documenting, among other things, a variety of ways Trump had sought to obstruct the probe.

Over the course of his hour-long sitdown with Levin, who introduced him as a “brilliant” legal scholar, Eastman explained how the Constitution and federal law supported all of Trump’s most corrupt and bigoted impulses, while decrying Mueller’s team as biased political partisans whose probe was itself illegal and perhaps deliberately “set up to create a media frenzy.”

According to Eastman, it is impossible for a president to violate the law by interfering with a federal investigation, even if that investigation’s purpose was to review his activities or those of his associates. “The notion that the president can’t determine the course of an investigation is the most basic violation of separation of powers,” he claimed. Even if Trump had successfully fired Mueller himself it would be legal, according to Eastman, because “the entire executive branch is headed by one guy and the only constitutional check on that is through an impeachment power, not through statutes and not through regulations internal to the Department of Justice, because the president has the authority to change those whenever he wants.”

After Levin described one such incident mentioned in the report, when Trump allegedly ordered White House counsel Don McGahn to fire Mueller, Eastman said that “directing McGahn to fire him is no different than him picking up the phone himself, and even that would not have been obstruction.”

Video file

CitationFrom the May 12, 2019, edition of Fox News' Life, Liberty, and Levin.

Eastman went on to agree with Levin’s claim that the Mueller investigation was itself “fundamentally illegal” because “nobody in the administration itself [was] accused with any evidence of a crime,” which is required under the special counsel statute. In reality, Trump’s 2016 campaign chair and his first White House national security adviser were among the litany of presidential associates who were ultimately convicted or entered guilty pleas through the probe.

When Levin asked later in the program, “This is really a rejection by the Democrat Party and the media and the rest of them, a rejection of the 2016 election, isn't it?” Eastman replied, “I think so. They still can't believe that they lost that election and they're trying to rationalize that there must've been something nefarious in order to produce it.”

He went on to say that “this is really a challenge to the results of the last election, which means it is a challenge to the American people and the very notion that we govern ourselves,” and that the intent is to create a “tyranny of the majority.”

Video file

CitationFrom the May 12, 2019, edition of Fox News' Life, Liberty, and Levin.

Eastman also expressed support for Trump on a variety of other legal issues. He rejected the notion that payments foreign countries make to Trump through his hotel are violations of the emoluments clause of the Constitution, and decried federal judges who blocked versions of Trump’s Muslim travel ban as “part of a resistance movement to undo the results of the 2016 election.”

At the conclusion of the interview, Eastman said that nothing Trump has done rises to the level of “high crimes and misdemeanors” required for impeachment under the Constitution.

“I've been stunned at how scrupulous Trump and his team have been in staying within the legal lines that they had,” he said, contrasting to how President Barack Obama “blew through the lines on executive power and constitutional authority on numerous occasions."

Video file

Citation From the May 12, 2019, edition of Fox News' Life, Liberty, and Levin.

Eastman was able to turn an interview on a Sunday night Fox show into a position of real political power because the president himself had been glued to the set. And after Trump and his propagandists at Fox created a web of lies about a “rigged” election, he was there to concoct a legal pretext to keep Trump in office. The coup plot failed -- but it did result in deadly violence when a crowd incited by speeches from Trump, Eastman, and others stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6 in hopes of preventing the peaceful transition of power.

Since then, the situation has only grown more dire, as the Republican Party and right-wing disinformation apparatus have institutionalized Trump’s lie that the election was stolen, laying the groundwork to rig future elections in favor of the GOP, through Eastman’s strategy or another one. And Fox was at the root of it all.

Trump lawyer John Eastman touted his plan to overturn the 2020 election in interviews with right-wing media

09/21/21 1:25 PM EDT

Broadcast news shows ignore Trump coup memo

09/22/21 4:32 PM EDT

CNN’s Brian Stelter highlights failure of news broadcasts to cover the Trump coup memo

09/26/21 2:44 PM EDT

no lnx newsweek

atorney Sidney Powell said the January 6 riot at the Capitol could have caused a delay which would have allowed Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito time to stop the certification of Joe Biden's election victory—but that chance was lost when Nancy Pelosi reconvened Congress to complete the process.

Powell, an attorney who has filed numerous lawsuits in a failed bid to overturn former President Donald Trump's 2020 election loss, made the comments during an appearance on the conservative Stew Peters Show on Friday.

She said that as a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol that day, her team was seeking an emergency injunction to prevent the certification of Biden's win.

"We were filing a 12th Amendment constitutional challenge to the process that the Congress was about to use under the Electoral Act provisions that simply don't jive with the 12th Amendment to the United States Constitution," she said. "And Justice Alito was our circuit justice for that."

She added: "Louie Gohmert was the plaintiff in our lawsuit, and we were suing the vice president to follow the 12th Amendment as opposed to the Electoral College Act."...

trms says fired from---?

John Eastman Retires From Chapman University - Forbes https://www.forbes.com › michaeltnietzel › 2021/01/13

Jan 13, 2021 — John Eastman, a law professor at the Fowler School of Law at Chapman University who had drawn increasing scrutiny over his controversial ...

Law professor John Eastman spoke at rally before Capitol ...https://www.washingtonpost.com › nation › 2021/01/14

Jan 14, 2021 — John Eastman, a conservative lawyer and professor, retired from ... Eastman's allegations as “repugnant” but added he would not fire the ...

Controversial law professor John Eastman retires from ...https://www.ocregister.com › 2021/01/13 › controversi...

Jan 13, 2021 — Sinha said she would have preferred to see Eastman fired and stripped of any school-related retirement benefits.

Faculty call for firing of Chapman University law professor who ...https://abc7.com › chapman-university-professor-john-eas...

John Eastman stood alongside Rudy Giuliani at a "Stop the Steal" rally, where the crowd was urged to march to the Capitol building. More than ...

Jan 11, 2021

Chapman University Faces Pressure To Fire Professor John ...https://losangeles.cbslocal.com › 2021/01/11 › chapma...

Jan 11, 2021 — Chapman University professor John Eastman (left) stands alongside Rudy Giuliani, personal lawyer to President Donald Trump, at rally near ...

Chapman University professor spoke out before Capitol riothttps://www.latimes.com › california › story › chapman...

Jan 13, 2021 —Chapman University will not fire law professor who spoke at pro-Trump Capitol rally. Chapman University professor John Eastman stands next ...

FIRE calls on CU Boulder to restore visiting Professor John ...https://www.dailycamera.com › 2021/02/03 › fire-calls-...

Feb 3, 2021 — Eastman's comments drew condemnation from DiStefano and the campus community. University leaders canceled his classes, citing low enrollment, on ...

Eastman retires from Chapman as CU Boulder faculty seek his ...https://www.dailycamera.com › 2021/01/13 › eastman-r...

Jan 13, 2021 — John C. Eastman (University of Colorado Boulder / Courtesy photo) ... theories” and “repugnant,” but stating he would not fire Eastman.

John Eastman lays groundwork to sue CU Boulder for ...https://www.denverpost.com › 2021/04/29 › john-east...

Apr 29, 2021 — University leadership accused him of spreading “repugnant” and baseless conspiracy theories about election fraud — but stopped short of firing ...

CU Boulder won't fire John Eastman, conservative scholar ...https://www.denverpost.com › 2021/01/08 › john-east...

Jan 8, 2021 —CU Boulder won't fire conservative scholar who spread “repugnant” conspiracy theories at D.C. rally. John Eastman, CU's visiting scholar in ...

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chapman kochademic, OC

the fed (not fedsoc, tho that too) and AmGreatness’ Julie Kelly, who Swift describes as a “nutty, bad-faith operator,” has called social distancing a left-wing plot to “get control” that is “far scarier than any virus.”

Josh Hammer, the editor of Newsweek’s increasingly right-wing opinion section and co-author of a note defending the once-respectable news outlet’s racist “birther” smear [eastman] aimed at Democratic vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris, was one of the fairly prominent Twitter users to share the article. Hammer has previously praised Trump’s attacks on institutions like legitimate news organizations, and shared articles making unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud.

signed open ltr support cei on 1st amend rico BS

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/birtherism-2-0-right-wing-lawyer-john-eastman-questions-kamala-harris-eligibility-for-vice-presidency/

Eastman, a well-connected right-wing lawyer and anti-LGBTQ activist, published a column on Newsweek Wednesday questioning whether Kamala Harris meets the constitutional requirement to be vice president. As Right Wing Watch reported in a 2016 profile, law professor Eastman has a long record of activism on behalf of right-wing causes.

In his Newsweek op-ed, Eastman argued that even though Harris was born in Oakland, California, and her parents entered in the U.S. legally, she might not qualify as a natural-born U.S. citizen if her parents were not permanent residents at the time of Harris’ birth. Eastman’s constitutional interpretation is outside mainstream legal thinking; questions about Harris’s eligibility have been rejected by nonpartisan fact-checking sites and prominent conservatives. The column generated a wave of backlash on social media from critics calling Eastman’s argument racist.

Newsweek published an editor’s note late last night rejecting claims that Eastman’s column was racist. Editors Josh Hammer and Nancy Cooper stated:

Some of our readers have reacted strongly to the op-ed we published by Dr. John Eastman, assuming it to be an attempt to ignite a racist conspiracy theory around Kamala Harris’ candidacy. Dr. Eastman was focusing on a long-standing, somewhat arcane legal debate about the precise meaning of the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” in the Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment. His essay has no connection whatsoever to co-called “birther-ism,” the racist 2008 conspiracy theory aimed at delegitimizing then-candidate Barack Obama by claiming, baselessly, that he was born not in Hawaii but in Kenya. We share our readers’ revulsion at those vile lies.

Eastman has been one of the most vocal advocates for eliminating the 14th Amendment’s protection of birthright citizenship. He has argued that it would not take a constitutional amendment, just a court decision or act of Congress to change what he believes to be an erroneous interpretation of the 14th Amendment. These ideas put him on the fringes of the right-wing legal movement.

Citizenship and immigration are not the only issues on which Eastman pushes hard-right positions.

Eastman chairs the board of the anti-LGBTQ-equality National Organization for Marriage and has called homosexuality an indicator of “barbarism.” He described the Supreme Court’s 2003 Lawrence ruling, which overturned state laws criminalizing consensual gay sex, as a “despotic” decision. He attacked the 2015 marriage equality ruling as “illegitimate” and encouraged state officials to resist it. Eastman even supported Uganda’s notorious Anti-Homosexuality Act, which would impose life imprisonment in some cases. He has aligned himself with anti-equality and anti-choice efforts globally, speaking at the World Congress of Families summit in 2019.

At a Senate hearing convened by Sen. Ted Cruz after the marriage equality ruling in 2015, Eastman argued that a simple majority of states should be allowed to override “egregiously wrong” Supreme Court decisions. He urged Congress to advance some of his proposals to restrict the court before citizens’ patience “runs out” and they assert the right expressed in the Declaration of Independence to abolish the government that is oppressing them.

Eastman’s support for the Supreme Court’s infamous 1905 Lochner decision—which ushered in an era in which the court rejected economic and labor regulations—puts him in opposition to the late Antonin Scalia, who opposed the Lochner ruling.

Eastman has also taken a fringe position—one taken by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, for whom Eastman clerked—that the First Amendment’s ban on the establishment of religion does not apply to the states, and has argued that a state taxing people to support an official church, as some states did early in the nation’s history, was not all that coercive.

Harris and Eastman do have something in common. Both were candidates in the 2010 election for attorney general in California. Harris won, while Eastman was defeated in the Republican primary.

Tags: John Eastman Birthers birthright citizenship Election 2020

CV 100pp on federalism 2019 testimony

https://docs.house.gov/meetings/JU/JU10/**2019**1017/110084/HHRG-116-JU10-Bio-EastmanJ-20191017.pdf

CHOLARLY PUBLICATIONS:

“‘Religiously Scrupulous’: Freedom of Conscience at the Founding,” Ave Maria L. R. (forthcoming, Vol. 17)

“The Significance of ‘Domicile’ in Wong Kim Ark,” 22 Chap. L. Rev. 301 (Spring 2019), at

https://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1442&context=chapman-law-review

“Congress Has Both Textual and Inherent Authority to Regulate Immigration, and a Good Thing That It Does,” Cato

Unbound: A Journal of Debate (Sept. 2018), available at https://www.cato-unbound.org/2018/09/26/johneastman/congress-has-both-textual-inherent-authority-regulate-immigration-good#disqus_thread

“The Religious Wars in Twenty-First-Century America,” 21 NYU J. of Markets & Morality 23 (2018)

“Deference Meets Delegation: Which is the Most Dangerous Branch?,” transcript of panel debate, 2015 Federalist

Society Lawyers Convention, with C. Boyden Gray, David Rivkin, Neal Katyal, moderated by Judge Brett

Kavanaugh, 43 Dayton L. Rev. 31 (2018)

“Live by the Executive Pen, Die by the Executive Pen?”, 65 Drake L. Rev. 997 (2017)

“The President’s Pen and the Bureaucrat’s Fiefdom,” 40 Harv. J. L. Pub. Policy 639 (2017)

“The Power to Control Immigration is a Core Aspect of Sovereignty,” 40 Harv. J. L. Pub. Policy 9 (2017)

“No Free Lunch, But Dinner and a Movie (and Contraceptives for Dessert)?” 10 NYU J. L. & Liberty 282 (2016)

...

OPINION COLUMNS:

“Alito’s Strategic Vote Signals Reining In of ‘Law by Regulation,’”RealClearPolitics(June 25, 2019), at

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/06/25/alitos_strategic_vote_signals_reining_in_of_law_by_regulati

on.html

“The Supreme Court, citizenship, and the census – What’s really at stake,” FoxNews (June 22, 2019), at

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/john-eastman-supreme-court-citizenship-census-questionsovereignty?fbclid=IwAR131bdW8X3xrZn_XRx_dzeySJyVNZFsu6k7-nMXMtdAT7SybqPdCSU2SDQ

“Trump can and should cite emergencies act,” Newsday (Feb. 10, 2019), at

https://www.newsday.com/opinion/commentary/southern-border-wall-emergency-trump-1.27065437

“Trump Can Build a Wall—and Should!”,American Greatness (Jan. 9, 2019), at

https://amgreatness.com/2019/01/09/trump-can-build-the-wall-and-should/

“The Court Will Consider Justice Scalia’s Invitation, Posthumously,” Los Angeles and San Francisco Daily Journals

(Dec. 13, 2018), at https://www.claremont.org/crb/basicpage/the-court-will-consider-justice-scalias-invitationposthumously/

“Federalism and Sanctuary Cities: The New Nullification Crisis,” 60 Orange County Lawyer 37 (Nov. 2018), at

http://www.ocbar.org/All-News/News-View/ArticleId/2475/November-2018-Cover-Story-Federalism-andSanctuary-Cities-The-New-Nullification-Crisis

“Double Standards Galore in the Attorney General Fracas,” American Greatness (Nov. 17, 2018), at

https://amgreatness.com/2018/11/17/double-standards-galore-in-the-attorney-general-fracas/

“Dred Scott? Seriously?” American Greatness (July 26, 2018), at https://amgreatness.com/2018/07/26/dred-scottseriously/

“Repudiating the judicial coup d’etat,” Scotusblog (June 27, 2018), at

http://www.scotusblog.com/2018/06/symposium-repudiating-the-judicial-coup-detat/

“The President's Power to Keep Congress at Work,” Los Angeles and San Francisco Daily Journals (June 4 2018), at

https://www.claremont.org/crb/basicpage/the-presidents-power-to-keep-congress-at-work/

“The Supreme Court vs. The Wild, Wild, West,” Los Angeles and San Francisco Daily Journals (March 6, 2018), at

https://www.claremont.org/crb/basicpage/the-supreme-court-vs-the-wild-wild-west/

“With amnesty, how many times will Lindsey Graham play the fool?”The Hill (Jan. 25, 2018), at

http://thehill.com/opinion/immigration/370772-with-amnesty-how-many-times-will-lindsey-graham-play-the-fool

“Supreme Court should reverse the 9th Circuit's flawed deference to administrative state,” Washington Examiner

(Jan. 15, 2018), at https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/supreme-court-should-reverse-the-9th-circuits-flaweddeference-to-administrative-state

“The CFPB and the Swamp,” Los Angeles and San Francisco Daily Journals (Dec. 1, 2017), reprinted as “The SelfPerpetuating Swamp,” CRB Digital, at https://www.claremont.org/crb/basicpage/the-self-perpetuating-swamp/.

“Supreme Court To Decide Whether Faith Is Between You And God, Or You And Government,” The Federalist (Dec.

2017), at http://thefederalist.com/2017/12/04/supreme-court-decide-whether-faith-god-government/

“Did Mueller Misfire?” Los Angeles and San Francisco Daily Journals (Nov. 1, 2017), reprinted as “Misdirection by

Indictment?” at http://www.claremont.org/crb/basicpage/misdirection-by-indictment/

“Napolitano’s Chutzpa,” Los Angeles and San Francisco Daily Journals...

820

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/newsweek-should-disavow-racist-insinuation-that-kamala-harris-is-not-a-citizen/

no lnx pix twt prof of law chapman u, sr fellow claremont inst

newsweek should disavow racist insinuation that Kamala Harris is not a citizen

Written by Jim Naureckas / FAIR August 14, 2020

Less than 24 hours after Kamala Harris became the first person of color to be chosen as a vice presidential candidate on a major party ticket, Newsweek ran an op-ed (8/13/20) insinuating that she was not a citizen and therefore ineligible to run.

The piece, by former Clarence Thomas law clerk John Eastman, disregarded almost two centuries of Supreme Court jurisprudence to pretend that there is an actual debate over the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” which appears in the 14th Amendment passage that grants automatic citizenship to people born here:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.

Newsweek: Some Questions for Kamala Harris About Eligibility

Newsweek (8/12/20) gives a platform to a fringe legal theory that holds Kamala Harris is not actually a US citizen because her parents were immigrants.

Long before the 14th Amendment was passed in 1868, however, the Supreme Court made it clear that children born to residents of the United States were citizens. In Inglis v. Trustees of Sailor’s Snug Harbor, an 1830 case, the Court declared:

Nothing is better settled at the common law than the doctrine that the children even of aliens born in a country while the parents are resident there under the protection of the government and owing a temporary allegiance thereto are subjects by birth.

Generations later, in the 1898 ruling United States v. Wong Kim Ark, the Supreme Court spelled out its understanding of what the 14th Amendment means for citizenship, listing all the categories of people who were not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the US:

The Fourteenth Amendment affirms the ancient and fundamental rule of citizenship by birth within the territory, in the allegiance and under the protection of the country, including all children here born of resident aliens, with the exceptions or qualifications (as old as the rule itself) of children of foreign sovereigns or their ministers, or born on foreign public ships, or of enemies within and during a hostile occupation of part of our territory, and with the single additional exception of children of members of the Indian tribes owing direct allegiance to their several tribes.

(Indigenous Americans were recognized as citizens by Congress in 1924, removing one of the very few exceptions to the birthright citizenship rule.)

Most of a century later, in Plyler v. Doe (1983) the Court reaffirmed that “jurisdiction” is to be understood in “predominantly geographic sense.” The ruling held that “no plausible distinction with respect to 14th Amendment ‘jurisdiction’ can be drawn between resident aliens whose entry into the United States was lawful, and resident aliens whose entry was unlawful.”

In 2018, when President Donald Trump threatened to issue an executive order that he claimed would strip US citizenship from the children of unauthorized immigrants, the Congressional Research Service (11/1/18) summed up the legal situation:

At least since the Supreme Court’s decision in the 1898 case United States v. Wong Kim Ark, the prevailing view has been that all persons born in the United States are constitutionally guaranteed citizenship at birth unless their parents are foreign diplomats, members of occupying foreign forces, or members of Indian tribes…. Because none of these exceptions permits the denial of birthright citizenship based on the alienage of parents who are not diplomats, the case is most often interpreted as barring the federal government from accomplishing such denial through any means other than a constitutional amendment.

Newsweek: Eastman's Newsweek Column Has Nothing to Do With Racist Birtherism

Contrary to Newsweek‘s editors’ note (8/13/20). the column it ran is entirely in the spirit of racist birtherism.

Are there lawyers who believe that the Supreme Court could and should overturn the 122-year-old precedent of Wong Kim Ark and find some new ground for declaring certain US residents not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States? Yes, and they are generally regarded as fringe theorists, motivated by a desire to denaturalize millions of US citizens, overwhelmingly people of color, who are every day recognized as full-fledged Americans for purposes of paying taxes, serving on juries, registering to vote—and running for office. That Newsweek chooses to give a platform to this xenophobic legal quackery is dismaying.

Newsweek‘s global editor in chief Nancy Cooper and opinion editor Josh Hammer published an editors’ note (8/13/20) hours after Eastman’s op-ed appeared, saying that “some of our readers have reacted strongly to the op-ed we published by Dr. John Eastman, assuming it to be an attempt to ignite a racist conspiracy theory around Kamala Harris’ candidacy.” The editors assert:

His essay has no connection whatsoever to so-called “birther-ism,” the racist 2008 conspiracy theory aimed at delegitimizing then-candidate Barack Obama by claiming, baselessly, that he was born not in Hawaii but in Kenya. We share our readers’ revulsion at those vile lies.

Eastman’s column, they claim, “is not an attempt to deny facts or to make false claims. No one is questioning Harris’ place of birth or the legitimacy of an obviously valid birth certificate.” But it is an effort, based on the most far-fetched legal speculation, to assert that Harris is literally not an American because her parents were immigrants. It is the exact same impulse that prompted hatemongers like Donald Trump to question Barack Obama’s right to run for office, motivated by the identical racist ugliness.

ACTION ALERT: Please contact Newsweek‘s editors and demand that they retract the op-ed insinuating that Kamala Harris (like millions of other Americans) is not a US citizen.

CONTACT: You can contact Newsweek here or via Twitter: @Newsweek.

John Eastman

Constitutional Law Professor/Appellate Attorney

Orange County, California Area 500+ connections

Chapman University Dale E. Fowler School of Law

University of Chicago Law School

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Experience

Chapman University Dale E. Fowler School of Law

Henry Salvatori Professor of Law & Community Service and Former Dean

Chapman University Dale E. Fowler School of Law

Aug 1999 – Present 21 years 1 month

Associate Professor (1999 to 2002)

Professor (2002 to present)

Interim Associate Dean for Administration (2006-07)

Henry Salvatori Professor of Law and Community Service (2006-07, 2011-present)

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Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence

Founding DIrector

Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence

1999 – Present 21 years

The Center for constitutional Jurisprudence was founded by Dr. Eastman in 1999 as the public interest law arm of the Claremont Institute. Its mission is to restore, through strategic litigation, the principles of the American founding to our nation's jurisprudence. The Center represents clients and appears as amicus curiae before the Supreme Court of the United States and the lower federal and state courts in matters of constitutional significance, defending the core structural provisions of...

Candidate for Attorney General

Jan 2010 – Jun 2010 6 months

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Kirkland & Ellis

1997 – 19992 years

United States Supreme Court

Law Clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas

United States Supreme Court

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University of Chicago Law School

Doctor of Law (JD)

1992 – 1995

Activities and Societies: Federalist Society, Edmund Burke Society, Law Review

Claremont Graduate UniversityClaremont Graduate University

Claremont Graduate University

Ph.D.Government

1982 – 1993

Activities and Societies: Pi Sigma Alpha

The University of DallasThe University of Dallas

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1978 – 1982

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1977 – 1978

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1974 – 1977

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California ProLife Council

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Everything you need to know about Hickenlooper v. Kerr, the Guarantee Clause case before the Supreme Court

Tomorrow, the Supreme Court will consider a petition for a writ of certiorari in *Hickenlooper v. Kerr*. Colorado legislators challenged an enacted ballot initiative that prohibited legislative tax increases from taking effect without a popular vote, arguing that it violated the Guarantee Clause. A federal district court, and the Tenth Circuit, agreed that the legislators had standing and that the Guarantee Clause claim was justiciable.

I started tracking this matter over a year ago. I provide the background in these links; below that, I'll discuss the briefs in the case that the Court will consider.

Tenth Circuit considers justiciability of Guarantee Clause today (Sept. 23, 2013)
More thoughts on the Guarantee Clause from Michael Ramsey (Oct. 10, 2013)
BREAKING: Tenth Circuit finds Guarantee Clause claim justiciable (Mar. 7, 2014)
Kerr v. Hickenlooper: Exploring the Tenth Circuit's Dubious Legal Reasoning, JURIST (Mar. 31, 2014)
Colorado files petition for rehearing en banc in Guarantee Clause case (Apr. 4, 2014)
BREAKING: Over four dissents, 10th Circuit denies en banc hearing in Guarantee Clause case (July 22, 2014)

Several amici were filed in the case, available at SCOTUSBlog. Of note (and these are very brief summaries of the major arguments):

The Colorado Union of Taxpayers Foundation, the Mountain States Legal Foundation, and 22 Colorado state legislators filed a brief in support of the petitioner. They focused primarily on the fact that respondents' injury was abstract, because legislators never enacted a tax increase for the people to vote upon--instead, they simply alleged a dilution of legislative power. That cannot comport with existing standing doctrine. Only if the Colorado legislature enacted a tax increase, then saw the people reject it, would standing exist.
The National Federation of Independent Business, along with several policy institutes, filed a brief in support of the petitioner. They emphasized the breadth of the impact of a finding that such a case is justiciable, because the decision invites judicial invalidation of direct democracy in a number of states on matters ranging from marijuana legalization to charter schools. They also noted that in the partisan gerrymandering context (Vieth v. Jublier), the Supreme Court has essentially required an articulation of judicially-manageable standards before the case could proceed. Here, the district court insisted (in a rather bizarre fashion) on holding a trial to determine what the Guarantee Clause demands.
The Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence (with John Eastman) filed a brief in support of the petitioner. It focused upon the inability of the Tenth Circuit to distinguish existing precedent finding the Guarantee Clause usually non-justiciable. Regardless, the case presents a good vehicle for clarifying the language in cases like New York v. United States (1992) suggesting that the Guarantee Clause may be justiciable, and articulating that the standards for justiciability are not met in this case.
Texas joined by five other states filed a brief joined in support of the petitioner. They argue that the text of the Guarantee Clause protects not the state legislature, but the people, and the States. They also cite other provisions like line-item vetos and supermajority voting requirements that may be called into question if this case is found justiciable.
The Cato Institute (with Ilya Shapiro)and several other policy institutes filed a brief in support of the petitioner. It asked the Court to avoid addressing the issue of whether the Guarantee Clause is per senon-justiciable and instead emphasized that Colorado's Taxpayer Bill of Rights met the standard of a "Republican Form of Government," drawing heavily from source material at the founding.

The Supreme Court will consider the case tomorrow--and we'll eagerly await their decision as to whether to hear this case.