Court Orders John Eastman To Give Jan. 6 Committee More Emails

A federal judge on Wednesday ordered John Eastman, a conservative former law school dean and attorney to Donald Trump, to turn over even more emails related to efforts aimed at disrupting Congress’ certification of the results of the 2020 presidential election.

The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol can expect to see over 30 new documents by Friday, Oct. 28. Several are emails addressing Eastman’s attempts to persuade former Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the election’s outcome, according to court documents.

The communications are not protected by so-called work product privilege or attorney-client privilege, said Judge David O. Carter, due to the likelihood that they played a role in criminal or fraudulent activity.

Other messages purportedly show that Trump signed a document containing voting statistics and swore that it was “true and correct” when he actually knew it was false. The document laid out the five-figure quantity of supposedly fraudulent votes in the state of Georgia. Eastman said Trump had become aware that the numbers were wrong, but he filed a document saying they were correct anyway, according to Carter.

During his time as an attorney to the former president, Eastman had been central to Trump’s efforts to stop Joe Biden from replacing him as president, pushing the theory that a vice president has the power to disrupt or change the results of an election.

But as a lawyer for Pence bluntly put it while violence unfolded on Capitol Hill, that idea is “bullshit.”

In a chain of messages that had been previously released in court documents, Pence attorney Greg Jacob said it was “gravely, gravely irresponsible” of Eastman to “entice the President with an academic theory that had no legal viability.”

The Constitution includes the vice president in outlining how Congress should go about making election results official, but the role is largely ceremonial.

Eastman has provided testimony to the House but has also put up legal fights over his records. The Jan. 6 committee will eventually compile a final report on what it has uncovered since starting its investigation in the summer of 2021.

Several courts around the country have found no basis in Trump’s claim that the election had been “rigged” or “stolen.” However, that has not stopped the former president from continuing to push the idea two years on.