Government

Court Finds Even More Crime-Frauding In Last Batch Of John Eastman Emails

MAGA: Make Attorneys Get Attorneys

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It’s impossible to say who got the worse end of the deal when Donald Trump hooked up John Eastman and started listening to his cockamamie theories about overturning the election by substituting slates of weirdos cosplaying as swing state electors for those won by Joe Biden. With Rudy Giuliani playing matchmaker, things were always bound to go sideways. But now this date from hell has put both the attorney and his client in potential legal jeopardy, and both of them are probably wishing they’d swiped left on the whole thing.

Nowhere has this disaster been more publicly on display than in the courtroom of US District Judge David Carter, where Eastman landed after suing the January 6 Select Committee to block it from accessing the coup-plotting messages he sent using his Chapman University email account. (Eastman, the onetime dean of the law school, retired approximately five seconds after his involvement in the January 6 plot came out.)

While other January 6 civil litigants are in suspended animation as the federal court in DC groans under the weight of hundreds of prosecutions of rioters from that day, Eastman filed his case in the Central District of California, which moved at lightning speed … although perhaps not in the way he’d hoped. In March, Judge Carter ruled that it was more likely than not that Eastman and Trump had “attempted to obstruct an official proceeding by launching a pressure campaign to convince Vice President Pence to disrupt the Joint Session on January 6,” and thus attorney-client privilege was abrogated under the crime-fraud exception for at least one of the disputed emails.

And last night he said it again, only louder and with more specificity, concluding that “the crime-fraud exception applies to a number of emails related to President Trump and Dr. Eastman’s (1) court efforts to delay or disrupt the January 6 vote; and (2) their knowing misrepresentation of voter fraud numbers in Georgia when seeking to overturn the election results in federal court.”

Well, it’s not great, Bob. And frankly it did not get better for Eastman and his client.

Here’s Judge Carter explaining that you don’t get to claim work product privilege when “irrespective of the merits—the primary goal of filing [litigation] is to delay or otherwise disrupt the January 6 vote,” i.e. when your purpose is actually to obstruct Congress.

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In one email, for example, President Trump’s attorneys state that “[m]erely having this case pending in the Supreme Court, not ruled on, might be enough to delay consideration of Georgia.” This email, read in context with other documents in this review, make clear that President Trump filed certain lawsuits not to obtain legal relief, but to disrupt or delay the January 6 congressional proceedings through the courts. The Court finds that these four documents are sufficiently related to and in furtherance of the obstruction crime. Accordingly, the crime-fraud exception applies, and the Court ORDERS Dr. Eastman to disclose the four documents.

“The evidence confirms that this effort was undertaken in at least one lawsuit filed in Georgia,” the court writes ominously.

But wait, there’s more! Because these brain geniuses actually typed out queries to each other debating the wisdom of having Trump sign verifications in Georgia attesting to things which he knew were untrue. And instead of smashing the delete button, they hit send and then went out for a round of congratulatory margaritas. (Probably!)

The disputed emails involved a state election challenge filed in Georgia on December 4, 2020 alleging that 10,315 deceased people, 2,560 felons, and 2,423 unregistered voters had illegally voted in Fulton County. The claim was immediately debunked, and indeed Trump’s own Justice Department investigated and told Trump that it was nonsense. Nevertheless, when Trump’s legal team went to file a federal challenge to the Georgia result, it sought to incorporate the state case by reference, implicitly endorsing the false claims contained in it.

“Although the President signed a verification for [the state court filing] back on Dec. 1, he has since been made aware that some of the allegations (and evidence proffered by the experts) has been inaccurate. For him to sign a new verification with that knowledge (and incorporation by reference) would not be accurate,” Eastman wrote on December 31, 2020, demolishing any doubt that Trump had actual knowledge that his public claims about election fraud were bullshit.

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And yet, Trump did sign the verification, albeit with a mealymouthed qualifier buried in a footnote that he was simply relying on what others had represented to him. But finding someone willing to tell you the lie you want to hear doesn’t make it true, particularly when, as here, you and your lawyer both have actual knowledge that it is not.

President Trump and his attorneys ultimately filed the complaint with the same inaccurate numbers without rectifying, clarifying, or otherwise changing them. President Trump, moreover, signed a verification swearing under oath that the incorporated, inaccurate numbers “are true and correct” or “believed to be true and correct” to the best of his knowledge and belief. The emails show that President Trump knew that the specific numbers of voter fraud were wrong but continued to tout those numbers, both in court and to the public. The Court finds that these emails are sufficiently related to and in furtherance of a conspiracy to defraud the United States.

All of which will no doubt be of interest to the grand juries in Georgia and DC investigating the fake electors scheme and attempts to interfere with swing state ballots by lobbing false fraud charges.

Too late, Donald Trump discovers that real lawyers do take notes. Although most of them endeavor not to do it when they’re committing crimes with their clients.

Eastman v. Thompson [Docket via Court Listener]

Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.

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