hanimmal
Well-Known Member
https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/eastman-pence-email-riot-trump/2021/10/29/59373016-38c1-11ec-91dc-551d44733e2d_story.html
As Vice President Mike Pence hid from a marauding mob during the Jan. 6 invasion of the Capitol, an attorney for President Donald Trump emailed a top Pence aide to say that Pence had caused the violence by refusing to block certification of Trump’s election loss.
The attorney, John C. Eastman, also continued to press for Pence to act even after Trump’s supporters had trampled through the Capitol — an attack the Pence aide, Greg Jacob, had described as a “siege” in their email exchange.
“The ‘siege’ is because YOU and your boss did not do what was necessary to allow this to be aired in a public way so that the American people can see for themselves what happened,” Eastman wrote to Jacob, referring to Trump’s claims of voter fraud.
Eastman sent the email as Pence, who had been presiding in the Senate, was under guard with Jacob and other advisers in a secure area. Rioters were tearing through the Capitol complex, some of them calling for Pence to be executed.
Jacob, Pence’s chief counsel, included Eastman’s emailed remarks in a draft opinion article about Trump’s outside legal team that he wrote later in January but ultimately chose not to publish. The Washington Post obtained a copy of the draft. Jacob wrote that by sending the email at that moment, Eastman “displayed a shocking lack of awareness of how those practical implications were playing out in real time.”
Read: Pence aide Greg Jacob’s draft opinion article denouncing Trump’s outside lawyers
Jacob’s draft article, Eastman’s emails and accounts of other previously undisclosed actions by Eastman offer new insight into the mind-sets of figures at the center of an episode that pushed American democracy to the brink. They show that Eastman’s efforts to persuade Pence to block Trump’s defeat were more extensive than has been reported previously, and that the Pence team was subjected to what Jacob at the time called “a barrage of bankrupt legal theories.”
Eastman confirmed the emails in interviews with The Post but denied that he was blaming Pence for the violence. He defended his actions, saying that Trump’s team was right to exhaust “every legal means” to challenge a result that it argued was plagued by widespread fraud and irregularities.
“Are you supposed to not do anything about that?” Eastman said.
He stood by legal advice he gave Pence to halt Congress’s certification on Jan. 6 to allow Republican state lawmakers to investigate the unfounded fraud claims, which multiple legal scholars have said Pence was not authorized to do.
Eastman said the email saying Pence’s inaction led to the violence was a response to an email in which Jacob told him that his “bull----” legal advice was why Pence’s team was “under siege,” and that Jacob had later apologized.
A person familiar with the emails said Jacob apologized for using profanity but still maintained that Eastman’s advice was “snake oil.” That person, like several others interviewed for this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.
A Trump spokesman did not respond to a request for comment for this article.
The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack has said that it plans to subpoena Eastman as it investigates his role in Trump’s efforts, which included two legal memos in which Eastman outlined how Republicans could deny Joe Biden the White House.
In the days before the attack, Eastman was working to salvage Trump’s presidency out of a “command center” in rooms at the Willard hotel near the White House, alongside such top Trump allies as Rudolph W. Giuliani.
Jacob wrote in his draft article that Eastman and Giuliani were part of a “cadre of outside lawyers” who had “spun a web of lies and disinformation” in an attempt to pressure Pence to betray his oath of office and the Constitution.
Jacob wrote that legal authorities should consider taking action against the attorneys.
“Now that the moment of immediate crisis has passed, the legal profession should dispassionately examine whether the attorneys involved should be disciplined for using their credentials to sell a stream of snake oil to the most powerful office in the world, wrapped in the guise of a lawyer’s advice,” he wrote in the draft.
Robert Costello, a lawyer for Giuliani, said Jacob had a right to his opinion. “This is an opinion piece, and not surprisingly, he agrees with his own opinion,” Costello said.
A bipartisan group of former government officials and legal figures, including two former federal judges, has asked the California bar association to investigate Eastman’s conduct.
Eastman’s memos gave several options for Pence to use the vice president’s ceremonial role of counting electoral college votes to halt Trump’s defeat. Eastman has argued that the 1887 Electoral Count Act is unconstitutional, and that the vice president has power under the 12th Amendment to decide whether electoral votes are valid.
Under the most drastic of the options outlined in the memos, Pence would have rejected electoral votes for Biden from states where Republicans were claiming fraud, making Trump the winner — a proposal that Eastman has more recently tried to disown as a “crazy” suggestion he did not endorse.
Pence allowed other lawmakers to speak before they returned to counting the votes, and said he wasn’t counting the time from his speech or the other lawmakers against the time allotted in the Electoral Count Act.
Eastman said that this prompted him to email Jacob to say that Pence should not certify the election because he had already violated the Electoral College Act, which Pence had cited as a reason that he could not send the electors back to the states.
“My point was they had already violated the electoral count act by allowing debate to extend past the allotted two hours, and by not reconvening ‘immediately’ in joint session after the vote in the objection,” Eastman told The Post. “It seemed that had already set the precedent that it was not an impediment.”
Eastman, 61, is a veteran conservative legal activist who clerked for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. A longtime member of the Federalist Society, he has spent much of his legal career fighting same-sex marriage.
