Trump ally and January 6 architect John Eastman now on the verge of losing his law license
Far-right attorney John Eastman, who has spent the bulk of his professional career as a crusader for conservative causes, may soon be unable to practice law.
In a California hearing on Thursday, a judge made a "preliminary finding" that Eastman violated the ethics of his profession when he helped craft the legal arguments behind former President Donald Trump's attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Politico legal correspondent Kyle Cheney reported that following the preliminary finding, officials with the California bar will soon present "aggravating" evidence to justify permanently stripping Eastman of his law license. One of those pieces of evidence could be the speech Eastman delivered to the crowd of Trump supporters assembled on the morning of January 6, 2021.
"I didn’t have any thought about [the speech] one way or the other,” Eastman testified during his disbarment proceedings. "My point in speaking on Jan. 6 was to raise concerns about illegality in the conduct of the election that may well have led to the certification of somebody who did not win the election."
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John Eastman — a former law clerk for Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas — is known for authoring what's become known as the "Eastman memo," which is a two-page memo that outlined the six steps then-Vice President Mike Pence could have taken to steal the election from Joe Biden in favor of Donald Trump. Eastman theorized that as the official counter of electoral votes, Pence could use alternate slates of electors submitted by Republican-controlled legislatures in swing states like Arizona, Georgia, Michigan and Pennsylvania to justify not including those electoral college votes in the final count. With those states excluded, Trump would have more electoral votes than Biden, and Pence could then bang the gavel and declare Trump the winner of the election.
Once Democrats registered their objections, Eastman wrote that Pence could then send the matter of the election to the House of Representatives, where each state's delegation would have one vote apiece. Because Republicans had majorities in 26 state delegations at the time, Eastman predicted Trump would also be declared president by the House. The resulting stalemate could then be used to buy time for Republican states to formally submit their alternate slates of electors, "if they had not already done so."
Eastman is one of the 15 remaining co-defendants in Fulton County District Court in Georgia, where he has been charged with multiple felony counts under Georgia's RICO statute. If convicted, he could serve up to 20 years in prison.
READ MORE: 'Damning' reports shows why John Eastman's 'legal goose might be cooked': conservative
