The New York Times reports, John Eastman Pressed Pennsylvania Legislator to Throw Out Biden Votes:
Even by the standards of other ideas promoted by the conservative lawyer John Eastman to keep President Donald J. Trump in the White House after his election loss in 2020, a newly revealed strategy he proposed to take votes from Joseph R. Biden Jr. in Pennsylvania stands out as especially brazen.
Mr. Eastman pressed a Pennsylvania state lawmaker in December 2020 to carry out a plan to strip Mr. Biden of his win in that state by applying a mathematical equation to accepting the validity of mail ballots, which were most heavily used by Democrats during the pandemic, according to emails from Mr. Eastman released under a public records request by the University of Colorado Boulder, which employed him at the time.
The emails were the latest evidence of just how far Mr. Trump and his allies were willing to go in the weeks after Election Day to keep him in power — complete with anti-democratic plans to install fake pro-Trump electors and reject the votes of Biden supporters. Mr. Eastman would go on to champion the idea that Vice President Mike Pence could unilaterally block congressional certification of Mr. Biden’s Electoral College victory, an idea Mr. Pence rejected even as Mr. Trump was promoting the protests that turned into the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol.
On Dec. 4, 2020, using his university email account, Mr. Eastman wrote to State Representative Russell H. Diamond, Republican of Pennsylvania, with plans for the legislature to appoint pro-Trump electors.
He suggested that a mathematical equation could be applied to the vote tallies to reject mail-in ballots for candidates at “a prorated amount.”
Mr. Eastman said he was basing his recommendations on his belief that the Trump legal team had presented “ample evidence of sufficient anomalies and illegal votes to have turned the election from Trump to Biden” at public hearings around the country, including in Pennsylvania. But he admitted that he had not actually watched the hearings.
He also ignored the fact that Rudy Giulliani’s “elite strike force team” of horseshit lawyers, including John Eastman, had brought over 60 cases in court and all were dismissed for failure to present any credible evidence of election fraud. There was no basis for what this corrupt lawyer was proposing. This was a sore loser strategy to steal an election.
“Having done that math, you’d be left with a significant Trump lead that would bolster the argument for the legislature adopting a slate of Trump electors — perfectly within your authority to do anyway, but now bolstered by the untainted popular vote,” Mr. Eastman wrote. “That would help provide some cover” [to steal the election.]
This corrupt lawyer is also not good at math, as the Washington Post’s Phillip Bump explains, John Eastman’s Pennsylvania gambit was even weaker than it might seem (excerpt):
Let’s start with that ridiculous idea that one should simply throw out more than 3 percent of mail-in ballots because the rate of rejection — that is, the number of submitted ballots that were deemed unacceptable — had dropped relative to past elections. Before the election, recognizing that the pandemic would spur more mail-in voting, states made broad efforts to ensure that rejection rates were low, launching educational campaigns about ensuring ballots were completed and submitted accurately. Advocates bolstered this message. In other words, one reason that a lower percentage of ballots was removed is that people were better informed about how to properly complete the ballots.
If we set that explanation aside and simply grant Eastman his math, it doesn’t matter anyway. Rejecting an additional 3.66 percent of mail-in ballots relative to each candidate’s total in every county means that Biden loses about 73,000 votes from his total. That’s about 7,000 votes fewer than his 80,000-vote margin in the state.
But then Trump also loses votes: nearly 22,000. So Biden’s back up to a nearly 30,000-vote lead.
Eastman’s other plan — to reject those 10,000 ballots received after the deadline — suffers from a more severe problem: The votes weren’t included in the certified results anyway. But let’s just humor the good attorney and, for no reason besides elevating the subtext here, we just take those 10,000 votes away from Biden.
Congratulations to Eastman and Diamond for showing that the “untainted” results in the state also gave the win to Biden.
The Times Continues:
He also encouraged Mr. Diamond to have the legislature make a specific determination that “the slate of electors certified by the governor,” and chosen by the voters, was “null and void.”
In one email, Mr. Diamond responded that Mr. Trump’s lawyers had not presented strong evidence of fraud at the Pennsylvania hearing.
“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,” he wrote.
On Dec. 13, the day before all 50 states were set to cast their votes in the Electoral College, Mr. Eastman again urged Mr. Diamond to keep up with the plot to create an alternate slate of electors in Pennsylvania.
“The electors absolutely need to meet,” Mr. Eastman wrote to the lawmaker. “Then, if the legislature gets some spine, AND (politically) proofs of fraud and/or illegal votes sufficient to have altered the results of the election is forthcoming, those electoral votes will be available to be certified by the legislature.”
In one email, Mr. Diamond introduced Mr. Eastman to the Republican House majority leader in the state, crediting Mr. Eastman with “opening my eyes to our ability to exercise our plenary authority to decertify presidential electors (without ANY ‘evidence’ of retail ‘voter fraud’).”
[In] a brief interview on Tuesday, Mr. Diamond said he first learned about Mr. Eastman and his theories about the power of state lawmakers to shape elections when the lawyer testified in front of the Georgia legislature in early December 2020. [The bogus Independent State Legislature doctrine.]
Mr. Diamond added that when he started to correspond with Mr. Eastman about election results in Pennsylvania, he thought that Mr. Eastman was merely a law professor and did not realize that he was associated with the Trump campaign. Mr. Diamond said he never pursued the idea of disqualifying mail ballots containing votes for Mr. Biden, though Pennsylvania Republicans tried multiple avenues to fight the election results, including filing a lawsuit, appealing to members of Congress and conducting a forensic investigation.
The university released more than 700 of Mr. Eastman’s emails and other documents to The New York Times in response to a public information request. The documents were released earlier to the Colorado Ethics Institute, and were reported earlier by The Denver Post and Politico.
The Colorado Ethics Institute, a nonprofit that tries to hold public officials accountable to ethics and transparency rules, provided the emails on April 19 to the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack.
Curtis Hubbard, a spokesman for the nonprofit, called for a “thorough audit” of Mr. Eastman’s tenure at the university to “determine the school’s connection — wittingly or unwittingly — to one of the darkest days in the history of this country.”
A spokesman for the committee declined to comment.
Justice Department officials have said they are investigating some of the schemes that Mr. Eastman supported to overturn the election — chief among them, a plan to use so-called alternate slates of electors in key swing states that were won by Mr. Biden. But Mr. Diamond said he had not been contacted by anyone from the Justice Department. [So is the DOJ actually investigating?]
The records show the university paid for Mr. Eastman’s trip the weekend after the election to an academic conference in Philadelphia, where he told The Times that his role in Mr. Trump’s efforts to remain in power began. At the time of the trip, Mr. Trump’s closest aides, including Corey Lewandowski, were at a nearby hotel putting together a legal brief to challenge the results in Pennsylvania. One of Mr. Trump’s aides reached out to Mr. Eastman to see whether he could go to the hotel to help Mr. Trump’s team.
In the beginning of December, Mr. Trump called to see whether Mr. Eastman could help bring legal action directly before the Supreme Court. In the days that followed, Mr. Eastman filed two briefs with the court on Mr. Trump’s behalf, but those efforts quickly failed.
The emails also paint a portrait of Mr. Eastman as a visiting professor in Colorado who was respected as a conservative thinker — winning praise from conservative students, including one who thanked him for “having the courage to stand up for your beliefs” and complained of being harassed by liberal professors “for being a white male” [The white supremacist’s lament] — until he fell into disrepute at the university as his efforts to overturn the election became known. [A traitor to his county who tried to overthrow a democratic election and the Constitution.]
After more than 200 professors and students signed a petition against him for questioning the results of the election on Twitter, he wrote: “Oh, brother. These people are indefatigable.”
And he complained in emails that he was overworked, as he rushed to challenge the election on behalf of Mr. Trump and teach his classes over Zoom.
For a while, he retained the support of his supervisors, including one who cheered him on when Mr. Eastman told him he was doing legal work for Mr. Trump.
But after Mr. Eastman spoke at the pro-Trump rally on Jan. 6 that preceded the riot at the Capitol, baselessly claiming that Democrats had placed ballots in “a secret folder” inside voting machines in a bid to rig the results, he became a lightning rod for criticism.
That same afternoon, a former colleague at the university wrote him to say that he had engaged in “seditious actions” during his speech. Within hours Mr. Eastman fired back, calling the accusation “defamatory.”
As the days went on, Mr. Eastman defended himself against a blizzard of attacks from those who called him “a traitor” or worse.
He often disavowed the violence that erupted at the Capitol and sometimes blamed it on the leftist activists known as antifa.
Citing low enrollment, the university canceled Mr. Eastman’s spring courses and his contract expired with the college.
In the months since, more information has emerged about Mr. Eastman’s central role in trying to overturn the election, including writing a memo laying out steps he argued Mr. Pence could take to keep Mr. Trump in power.
In March, a federal judge ruled in a civil case that Mr. Eastman and Mr. Trump had most likely committed felonies as they pushed to overturn the election, including obstructing the work of Congress and conspiring to defraud the United States.
The actions taken by Mr. Trump and Mr. Eastman, the judge found, amounted to “a coup in search of a legal theory.”
The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent warns that what these Leaked emails from Trump’s lawyer show is a blueprint for a 2024 coup:
The House committee examining the insurrection attempt has obtained new emails from the lawyer who helped concoct Donald Trump’s plot to overturn the 2020 election. They reveal a whole new level of scheming behind that effort, which was even more nefarious than previously thought.
But the emails also raise forward-looking questions: What do these new revelations tell us about how the subsequent efforts to steal a presidential election might unfold? And could conditions be different next time in a way that might facilitate such a scheme?
The answers to these questions are unsettling. But they also point toward a way we can protect ourselves from the worst. Will Congress act?
The emails from lawyer John Eastman show him urging GOP state legislators in Pennsylvania to cast doubt on 2020 vote totals, to create cover to certify a slate of presidential electors for Trump. Politico reported on the emails, which the Jan. 6 select committee obtained from the University of Colorado, where Eastman worked at the time.
The key revelation: Eastman’s scheme had an additional layer to it. We already knew his plan centered on urging Trump’s vice president to abuse his role in the congressional count of electors to subvert the election’s conclusion.
Now, in these new emails, Eastman is seen devising a pretext for state legislatures to invalidate Joe Biden’s electors and certify sham Trump electors. He advises a Pennsylvania legislator to use a complex formula — based on treating mailed-in ballots as illegitimate — to extrapolate that enough Biden votes are invalid to show Trump won the popular vote.
Eastman advises the legislator to argue that Biden electors certified by the governor are thus “null and void.”
This is extraordinary stuff. Eastman advised that a state legislature should concoct a fig leaf justification for declaring the correct Biden electors certified by the governor invalid and certifying Trump electors instead.
First note that Trump himself also did something like this. When Trump pressured the Georgia secretary of state to “find” votes to make him the winner, this was designed to create a similar pretext for replacing Biden electors with Trump ones.
“Eastman wasn’t doing anything that Trump wasn’t doing himself,” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), a member of the Jan. 6 committee, told me. “They were both trying to get officials in the electoral process to substitute a counterfeit for the actual vote totals.”
“Eastman was seeking to implant a new mathematical calculation contrived to produce a Trump win in Pennsylvania,” Raskin said.
These Eastman emails show that manipulating vote totals to create “cover” for state legislatures to appoint sham Trump electors was more central to the scheme than we knew.
Whether this creates more exposure for Eastman and others remains to be seen. But this also has other important implications: It reveals with more clarity an avenue by which nefarious actors might seek to subvert a future election.
Note that Eastman says, almost as an aside, that state legislators have the “authority” to appoint new electors even if the popular vote totals don’t justify it.
“Eastman’s view is that the legislature has absolute power in terms of picking presidential electors,” elections expert Richard L. Hasen told me, even if that means “ignoring the will of the voters” or “the legislature’s prior rules on how to pick those electors.”
In the future, Hasen notes, bad actors might see this as “a path to steal an election.”
There’s more: Right now many Republicans in thrall to Trump’s 2020 lies are running for positions of control over election machinery at the state level, including secretary of state positions.
Crucially, such people would be in a position to create exactly the pretext that Eastman envisioned. How? By using official stature to cast doubt on popular vote outcomes, manufacturing “cover” for a state legislature and/or governor to certify fake electors for a losing candidate. A GOP-controlled House could then count those electors and flip a state or even an election.
Eastman has laid out the blueprint. “This shows the country one more strategic booby trap that was improvised by Trump’s team that can sit there for use by bad-faith actors in future elections,” Raskin told me.
[A]ll this underscores the dire need to reform the Electoral Count Act of 1887 to minimize the risks of such a thing being attempted.
Done properly, reform could help thwart a rerun of exactly the scheme Eastman developed. It could create a requirement that if a state-level attempt is made to certify sham electors, Congress must count only the slate that the courts deem the legitimate one.
“Congress absolutely must reform the ECA to clarify that no state officials — not governors, not state secretaries of state, and not state legislators — can manipulate which electoral votes it will count,” legal scholar Matthew Seligman, an expert on the ECA, told me.
“The only way to do that is to require that Congress follow courts’ decisions about which electors are valid,” Seligman said.
History should record that John Eastman is one of the worst traitors to his country in the history of the United States. He should spend the rest of his miserable life rotting away in a prison cell. The DOJ had damn well better prosecute him.