As the House January 6 panel unpacks the results of its months-long probe, lawmakers are expected to spend part of their Thursday hearing examining the role of John Eastman, a once-obscure legal scholar who vaulted into former President Donald Trump's inner circle ahead of the Capitolriot
Rudy Giuliani spoke in Washington, DC, on January 6, 2021.
When he filed a brief asking the Supreme Court to let Trump intervene in a longshot lawsuit to toss out election results in four swing states, he was a Trump lawyer.
As Trump's legal avenues to overturn his reelection loss became thinner, Eastman offered up an unconventional strategy based on fringe legal theories.
The plan to get swing state Republicans to sign off on "alternate electors" was part of the strategy.
He spoke at a Trump rally near the White House just hours before the January 6 riot, telling a crowd of Trump supporters "we know there was fraud" and election officials had "ignored or violated state law"
In March, federal Judge David Carter said it was more likely than not that President Trump and Dr. Eastman colluded to block the Joint Session of Congress.
Carter wrote that the campaign to overturn the election was unprecedented in American history. The peaceful transition of power would have been ended if the plan had worked.
There was still interest in the election after the riot. The Washington Post reported that on the day of the attack on the Capitol, Eastman sent an email to an aide of the vice president saying that he didn't do what was needed. White House attorney Eric Herschmann told the January 6 committee that he was called by Eastman to discuss legal efforts in Georgia. According to Herschmann, he encouraged Eastman to find a good criminal defense lawyer, and insisted that he only talk about an orderly transition in the future.
In November, the committee subpoenaed Eastman. He has argued that many of the documents the committee wants are protected by attorney-client privilege. Carter ruled that some records were privileged but ordered others to be handed over.
The records sought by the January 6 panel could provide new insight into the work. The emails between the committee and the right-wing activist who pushed to overturn Biden's win are not known. The New York Times reported Wednesday that the December 2020 email was related to a fight over whether the Supreme Court should take up an election challenge. The high court's deliberations are usually secret.
A graduate of the University of Chicago Law School, Eastman has been teaching constitutional law for decades. He was the dean of the law school at the university from 2007 to 2010 and is now a senior fellow at the institute. According to the New York Times, Trump invited Eastman to the Oval Office after he appeared on Fox News. When he suggested in a Newsweek op-ed that Biden and Harris might not be eligible for the vice presidency because of their immigration status, Trump took notice. The article was harshly criticized as both a bizarre reading of constitutional law and a possible wink to the "birther" conspiracy theory, which claimed former President Barack Obama wasn't born in the U.S. Trump told reporters that the author of the op-ed is a brilliant lawyer.
Some of his colleagues didn't like him. A few days after the Capitol riot, over 100 Chapman University faculty members signed an open letter arguing that Eastman doesn't belong on the campus. He retired from his position at Chapman less than a week later. The State Bar of California opened an ethics investigation into Eastman last year, according to a State Bar spokesman.
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