This sort of fell through the cracks with all of the war coverage this past week.
The piece of shit insurrectionist Coup Plotter lawyer who wrote the “Coup Memos” lost his ridiculous privilege argument in court trying to obstruct the January 6 Commission from obatining his emails in which the Coup Plotters discussed their planned coup d’état for January 6 ,2021.
Huffington Post reports, ‘Coup Memo’ Lawyer Loses Bid To Hold Up Records He Warns Could Convict Trump:
The right-wing attorney who authored “coup memos” for Donald Trump and supporters on how to scuttle the presidential election lost a court battle Friday to hold back his documents from the House select committee investigating last year’s Jan. 6 insurrection.
Lawyer John Eastman had claimed the situation had turned him into a “pseudo-defense attorney for the former president” — so the emails are thereby protected by attorney-client privilege. (Read Eastman’s ridiculous arguments here.)
Eastman warned in his civil suit that granting the committee access to his emails involving the former president could amount to a historic legal finding that Trump may have committed a crime while he was a sitting president.
Yeah, so? You are more interested in keeping your own sorry ass out of prison as a co-conspirator and one of the principal Coup Plotters. Trump committed his crimes acting on your unsolicited advice (they did not have an attorney-client relationship). This “pseudo-defense attorney for the former president” argument may be the lamest argument I have ever seen from a lawyer, and I have seen a LOT of them.
“Were this Court to sustain the defendants’ claims, it may be the first formal finding of Presidential criminality by a federal court in United States history,” Eastman wrote in his suit seeking to hold up access to his records.
I’ll take that as an admission of guilt.
The committee argued Wednesday that Eastman’s records are indeed likely to show evidence of multiple crimes committed by both him and Trump, which would thereby trigger the “crime-fraud exception” to attorney-client privilege.
The explosive filing alleged that Trump and key allies conspired to defraud the U.S. and obstruct an official congressional proceeding: the certification of electoral votes.
Eastman also argued Friday that just as in a criminal trial, the committee should be required to turn over any exculpatory evidence it has — which could prove innocence — before he can cooperate.
U.S. District Court of Central California Judge David Carter dismissed Eastman’s objections late Friday.
Carter noted that battles over attorney-client privilege in a civil lawsuit — even when they involve criminal allegations — don’t merit protections for criminal defendants because there’s currently no risk of jail time.
From the judge’s ruling:
Here, Dr. Eastman’s liberty is not at issue—only his emails. The legislature raises allegations of crime in the limited context of privilege; but it is the executive branch that is solely responsible for deciding whether to prosecute. For Dr. Eastman to risk incarceration, there would have to be entirely separate criminal proceedings, where the Government would face a substantially higher burden of proof and Dr. Eastman would receive the full protections of criminal law.
Eastman’s records could be critical in the committee’s investigation. He devised a strategy to throw out election results, and discussed it in the Oval Office. He also fired off haranguing emails to Greg Jacob, counsel at the time for then-Vice President Mike Pence, over electoral votes as the men hid during the Jan. 6 insurrection from Trump supporters stormed through the Capitol.
You can bet this criminal will file an appeal in an attempt to run out the clock and obstruct the January 6 Committee.
In a tangentially related matter, Axios reports Scoop: High-powered group targets Trump lawyers’ livelihoods (excerpt):
A dark money group with ties to Democratic Party heavyweights will spend millions this year to expose and try to disbar more than 100 lawyers who worked on Donald Trump’s post-election lawsuits, people involved with the effort tell Axios.
The 65 Project plans to begin filing complaints this week and will air ads in battleground states. It hopes to deter right-wing legal talent from signing on to any future GOP efforts to overturn elections — including the midterms or 2024.
The group takes its name from a count of lawsuits that sought to invalidate the 2020 results.
https://twitter.com/marceelias/status/1479125070232576005
Details: David Brock, who founded Media Matters for America and the super PAC American Bridge 21st Century and is a Hillary Clinton ally and prolific fundraiser for Democrats, is advising the group.
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- Advisory board members include former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.); and Paul Rosenzweig, a conservative and member of the Federalist Society who was former senior counsel for Ken Starr’s Clinton-era Whitewater investigation and served in George W. Bush’s Department of Homeland Security.
- Former Utah Supreme Court Chief Justice Christine Durham; and Roberta Ramo, the first woman to serve as president of the American Bar Association, are also members.
- The project was devised by Melissa Moss, a Democratic consultant and former senior Clinton administration official.
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How it works: The 65 Project is targeting 111 attorneys in 26 states who were involved to some degree in efforts to challenge or reverse 2020 election results. They include lawyers at large national law firms with many partners and clients and lawyers at smaller, regional firms.
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- It will air ads in battleground states, including Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
- It also will push the ABA and every state bar association to codify rules barring certain election challenges and adopt model language stating that “fraudulent and malicious lawsuits to overturn legitimate election results violate the ethical duties lawyers must abide by.”
- It plans to spend about $2.5 million in its first year and will operate through an existing nonprofit called Law Works.
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Brock told Axios in an interview that the idea is to “not only bring the grievances in the bar complaints, but shame them and make them toxic in their communities and in their firms.”
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- “I think the littler fish are probably more vulnerable to what we’re doing,” Brock said. “You’re threatening their livelihood. And, you know, they’ve got reputations in their local communities.”
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What they’re saying: “With great power comes great responsibility. Lawyers have a special role in and special obligation to society,” Rosenzweig told Axios in an email.
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- “It is all the worse, then, when they use their special position to attack the foundations of the rule of law.”
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The group has three categories of targets, according to plans reviewed by Axios.
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- Trump’s legal inner circle, including lawyers such as campaign hands Jenna Ellis and Boris Epshteyn and post-election lawyers like Sidney Powell and Joe DiGenova.
- Lawyers who signed on as “alternate electors,” who planned to submit their names to the Electoral College in lieu of legitimate elector slates if Trump-aligned legal challenges succeeded.
- Licensed attorneys who participated in or were present at the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
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Between the lines: Some of the attorney targets already have been hit with bar complaints.
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- But The 65 Project is focused on starving any future efforts of legal talent as well as focusing on 2020.
- “This is mostly important for the deterrent effect that it can bring so that you can kill the pool of available legal talent going forward,” according to a person involved with the effort, who asked to remain anonymous.
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John Eastman, who authored the “coup memos” detailing Trump’s options for overturning the election, already is facing a bar complaint in California.
Jennifer Rubin writes, Finally, an initiative to hold Trump’s lawyers accountable. (Subcriber content).
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The Daily Beast reports, “These Two Lawyers Breathed Life Into Trump’s Big Lie, but Did They Even Believe It?”, https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-lawyers-john-eastman-and-jeffrey-clark-breathed-life-into-trumps-big-lie?ref=home
As dirt keeps coming out on former President Donald Trump’s last-ditch attempts to cling to power, a portrait has emerged of how attorneys provided him absurd legal advice—that they knew to be utter folly—in a toxic mix of opportunism and appeasement.
Trump’s despotic strategy relied on two main parts: interrupting congressional certification of the electoral ballot count and spreading lies about Joe Biden’s victorious election results, according to the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection. Both were legal quagmires that flouted the U.S. Constitution—and Trump had a lawyer for each one.
John C. Eastman, a conservative legal scholar from California, came up with a plan that would interrupt the certification of Joe Biden’s electoral victory. But a hijacked recount required justification that the original election shouldn’t count. And that’s where the other lawyer came in: Jeffrey Clark, a high-ranking Justice Department official who was willing to use the nation’s top law enforcement agency to intimidate state-based officials and cast doubt over election results.
“It was very unfortunate that Trump had advisers who fed him nonsense about the election results and widespread ‘fraud,’ when the evidence—after a reasonable period of inquiry—did not justify those claims,” Ty Cobb, a former top Trump White House attorney, said in a brief interview. “I think the persisting in those claims, what has become known as ‘the Big Lie,’ was responsible for the tragic consequences of Jan. 6, and that only served to further polarize and divide the country in a way that, frankly, I view as dangerous and the gravest domestic threat to the country at present. There doesn’t appear to be leadership on either side that is likely to bridge the divide.”
Eastman guided the president during the final days before the Jan. 6 vote by crafting a plan that claimed—incorrectly—that Vice President Mike Pence could single-handedly refuse to count the legitimate electors from seven key states Trump lost. At the time, Eastman privately confided in Pence’s legal advisor, Greg Jacob, that the U.S. Supreme Court would inevitably rule that action unconstitutional. Jacob recounted the conversation during his sworn deposition before the committee last month, according to a transcript.
“If this case got to the Supreme Court, we’d lose 9-0, wouldn’t we, if we actually took your position and it got up there?” Jacob recalled asking Eastman.
“Yeah, all right, it would be 9-0,” Eastman eventually responded, according to Jacob.
“The advice provided has, whether intended to or not, functioned as a serpent in the ear of the President of the United States, the most powerful office in the entire world. And here we are,” Jacob wrote to Eastman. “Respectfully, it was gravely, gravely irresponsible for you to entice the President with an academic theory that had no legal viability, and that you well know we would lose before any judge who heard and decided the case. And if the courts declined to hear it, I suppose it could only be decided in the streets.”
Jacob criticized Eastman for using his access to the president to entertain “far-flung theories… in an incredibly constitutionally fraught moment” instead of remaining grounded in reality.
Despite being called out, Eastman actually continued to push for what he himself acknowledged to be clearly illegal behavior from the vice president—engaging in a delay tactic to toss the election back to Republican-controlled state legislatures.
“I implore you to consider one more relatively minor violation and adjourn for 10 days to allow the legislatures to finish their investigations,” Eastman said, referring to the conspiracy-charged political probes by Republicans desperate to find evidence of widespread voter fraud that didn’t exist.
Douglas Letter, the top attorney for the House of Representatives, at a federal court hearing on Monday in the committee’s ongoing attempt to get more of those emails, said “I don’t see how that can be legal advice. Vice President Pence should violate the law. That’s what Dr. Eastman said. Violate the law and let them sue. Boy, that’s not legal advice that I’ve ever given.”
Eastman’s conduct during the Trump-Biden transfer of power perplexed, or appalled, some of his friends and now-former colleagues. Multiple sources who worked with or have known Eastman for years uniformly told The Daily Beast this week that they simply did not buy, based on their personal interactions with Eastman over the years, that the attorney actually believed what he was pushing to then-President Trump.
One conservative lawyer who worked with Eastman during the tumultuous 2020-2021 presidential transition said it was “probably around zero to maybe 1 percent, in my view, that…Eastman would be dumb enough to believe all that.”
[It’s] unclear how Eastman was compensated for the task of helping Trump, given that he is not listed as having received any direct payments in documents filed with the Federal Election Commission, but the plan positioned him to be the architect behind the legal machinations that sought to keep him in power.
Meanwhile, at the Department of Justice, Clark was intent on leveraging his efforts on Trump’s behalf into a promotion. Internal emails show Clark was eager for the department to approve his draft letter 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.
Writing to his bosses, acting Attorney General Jeffrey A. Rosen and acting deputy AG Richard Donoghue, Clark openly debated whether he could sign the inappropriate letter with his new, higher title. Clark childishly toyed with the idea of using that as an opportunity to give his old deputy a nudge too.
“I continue to think there is no downside with as few as 23 days left in the president’s term to give Jon and I that added boost in DOJ titles,” Clark wrote.
[As] for Clark, his attempts to use the menacing draft letter to ingratiate himself with Trump—and elevate himself to the nation’s attorney general—backfired when his direct bosses at the DOJ all threatened to quit in unison. Last week, the Jan. 6 committee publicly revealed snippets of Donoghue’s sworn deposition in which he recalled the way he and others tore Clark to shreds at a tense Oval Office meeting during Trump’s final days in office.
Eastman and Clark are now facing potential disbarment in California and the District of Columbia, respectively. If they do, they’ll follow in the footsteps of Giuliani, who was disbarred in New York and the nation’s capital last year.
The Guardian reports, “Trump lawyer knew plan to delay Biden certification was unlawful, emails show”, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/mar/10/trump-lawyer-plan-john-eastman-mike-pence
[L]awyer John Eastman – who helped coordinate the scheme from the Trump “war room” at the Willard hotel in Washington – conceded in an email to counsel for then vice-president Mike Pence, Greg Jacob, that the plan was a violation of the Electoral Count Act.
But Eastman then urged Pence to move ahead with the scheme anyway, pressuring the former vice-president’s counsel to consider supporting the effort on the basis that it was only a “minor violation” of the statute that governed the certification procedure.
The admission that the scheme was unlawful undercuts arguments by Eastman and the Willard war room team that they believed there was no wrongdoing in seeking to have Pence delay the certification past 6 January – one of the strategies they sought to return Trump to power.
It additionally raises the prospect that the other members of the Willard war room – including Trump’s former attorney Rudy Giuliani and Trump’s former strategist Steve Bannon – were also aware that the scheme to delay or stop the certification was unlawful from the start.
[T]he 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 to Jacob in his 9.44pm email, referring to the statute in the US criminal code.
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But in the second part of his email, Eastman claimed that because 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”.
That admission is significant since it demonstrates Eastman 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.
The House counsel, Douglas Letter, appearing on behalf of the select committee in federal court on Tuesday, referenced the admission as he postulated that Eastman knew what he was advocating violated both the Electoral Count Act statute and the constitution.
Letter also said of Eastman’s request of Pence: “It was so minor it could have changed the entire course of our democracy. It could have meant the popularly elected president could have been thwarted from taking office. That was what Dr Eastman was urging.”
But if Eastman knew the scheme violated the law, it raises the additional possibility that Giuliani also knew it was unlawful when he called the Republican senator Tommy Tuberville and asked him to object to Biden’s wins, after the Capitol attack had taken place.
In a voicemail recorded at about 7pm that evening, and published by the Dispatch, Giuliani implored Tuberville to object to 10 states Biden won once Congress reconvened at 8pm, a process that would have concluded 15 hours later and dragged the joint session into the next day.
“The only strategy we can follow is to object to numerous states and raise issues so that we get ourselves into tomorrow – ideally until the end of tomorrow,” Giuliani said.
The admission from Eastman came as part of a thread of emails with Jacob in filings submitted by the select committee seeking to challenge Eastman’s claim that more than a hundred emails demanded by the panel are protected by attorney-client privilege and should remain secret.
But the select committee said in the filings that it should be allowed to conduct an in camera review of the records to determine whether the crime-fraud exception applied, arguing in part they appeared to show Eastman was engaged in criminal conspiracy and common law fraud.
The judge in the case ruled in the panel’s favor after the hearing on Tuesday, allowing a review of around a hundred emails to determine whether the records were subject to privilege, though he did not comment on whether Eastman might have engaged in criminal activity.
UPDATE: Politico reports, “Judge to review disputed Eastman emails for possible disclosure to Jan. 6 committee”, https://www.politico.com/news/2022/03/09/eastman-emails-disclosure-jan-6-committee-00015869
A federal judge will [conduct an in camera review of] 111 emails that attorney John Eastman, a key ally in then-President Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election, has sought to shield from congressional investigators.
U.S. District Court Judge David Carter determined on Wednesday that the Jan. 6 select committee had raised enough legitimate questions about Eastman’s basis for blocking the documents that he would conduct a page-by-page review and determine whether to disclose them to lawmakers. Eastman has claimed the emails in question — all sent between Jan. 4 and Jan. 7, 2021 — should be protected by attorney-client privilege and attorney work-product privilege.
“After reading the emails, the Court will determine for each document whether any privilege existed, whether that privilege was waived, and whether any exceptions apply,” Carter, who sits in the Central District of California, indicated in a four-page order. [link: https://www.politico.com/f/?id=0000017f-70bb-dea5-afff-f3fba1960000%5D
Carter made no comment on the select committee’s claim that Eastman might have engaged in a criminal conspiracy with Trump to obstruct Congress. Rather, he said he would defer more detailed comment until after he reviews the emails and determines whether to provide them to the select committee.
Carter has repeatedly ruled in the committee’s favor in recent weeks, ordering Eastman to review 90,000 pages of emails subpoenaed by the committee from Eastman’s former employer Chapman University. And he has sided with the committee’s multiple requests to expedite the effort and focus on the Jan. 4 to Jan. 7 time frame.
Carter said his decision was based on the fact that the committee had shown many of Eastman’s contacts are likely to be “third parties” who have no privileged relationship with Eastman. He also said that the committee raised sufficient doubts about whether Eastman’s efforts were “in anticipation of litigation,” a key requirement to invoke attorney-client privilege.
Carter emphasized that just because he would be reading the emails did not mean he would disclose them all to the committee.
“Ultimately, the Court will issue a written decision including its full analysis and its final determination of which, if any, documents must be disclosed to the Select Committee,” he said.
Carter provided no time frame for issuing his final determination.
UPDATE: Apparenltly there was a subsequent hearing in this case on Tuesday. CNN reports, “Judge challenges John Eastman’s privilege claims in hearing over January 6 documents”, https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/08/politics/eastman-documents-hearing/index.html
A federal judge peppered former Donald Trump attorney John Eastman with tough questions about his subpoenaed emails at a marathon court hearing Tuesday, suggesting that he’s skeptical about Eastman’s claims that the emails shouldn’t be given to the House select committee investigating January 6 because they’re protected by attorney-client privilege.
Judge David Carter challenged Eastman’s privilege claims with sharp questions that line up with some of the arguments coming from the House lawyers.
These questions included, where is the line between legal advice and political strategizing? What litigation was Eastman advising Trump about when he sent the emails? And wasn’t Eastman trying to circumvent the courts by pressuring then-Vice President Mike Pence to take unilateral action on January 6, 2021.
Carter, of the Central District of California, didn’t issue a ruling Tuesday during the virtual hearing and it’s unclear when he will announce his decision about his emails in question, which are a subset of messages from around January 6. Eastman has been producing some emails for the committee, just not the emails he claims are privileged.
Also during the hearing, the select committee’s lawyer made clear that the panel believes former President Trump committed crimes while trying to overturn the 2020 election.
The House’s top lawyer, Doug Letter, emphasized the House committee’s language from an explosive court filing last week, which said the panel believed Trump and Eastman were part of a “criminal conspiracy,” and therefore, Eastman couldn’t shield his emails with attorney-client privilege.
“Trump was ignoring all of the very clear evidence because he wanted something different. He wanted the vice president to do something that was plainly against the Constitution,” Letter said, describing Trump as the primary actor.
“It’s unclear to me how any of this could be a ‘minor’ violation of the law, when we’re talking about an insurrection that sadly came very close to succeeding,” Letter said. “…It would’ve been so ‘minor’ that it could’ve changed the entire course of our democracy. It could’ve meant that the popularly elected President of the United States would’ve been thwarted in taking office.”
Neither Trump nor Eastman has been charged with any crimes [yet]. Despite the House’s filings, lawmakers aren’t prosecutors and can’t bring charges. And there is no public indication that the Justice Department is seriously investigating their attempt to subvert the 2020 election [yet].
[T]he House’s claims of alleged crimes are secondary to the main legal arguments about Eastman’s emails, and it’s possible that the judge sidesteps that issue in his eventual ruling.