John Eastman, the University of Colorado Boulders visiting scholar of conservative thought and policy, speaks about his plans to sue the university at a news conference outside of CU Boulder on Thursday, April 29, 2021.
Andy Cross | Denver Post | Getty Images
A federal judge ordered attorney John Eastman on Wednesday to show over multiple documents to the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, including emails allegedly showing efforts to disrupt Congress’ confirmation of former President Donald Trump’s 2020 election loss.
The 33 documents that should be handed over are either not protected by legal privileges, or are exempted from those privileges because they’re related to an attempted crime, Judge David Carter wrote.
Eight of Eastman’s emails were subject to that “crime-fraud exception,” in response to the order in U.S. District Court in Santa Ana, California.
In 4 of them, Eastman and other Trump attorneys suggest that a “primary goal” of a court filing “is to delay or otherwise disrupt” the Jan. 6, 2021, congressional vote to substantiate President Joe Biden’s electoral victory, the judge ruled.
One other 4 emails “exhibit an effort by President Trump and his attorneys to press false claims in federal court for the aim of delaying the January 6 vote,” Carter wrote.
The judge noted that Eastman had flagged to Trump’s attorneys that their supposed evidence of voter fraud in Fulton County, Georgia, was inaccurate. But Trump and his legal team nevertheless went on to file a grievance in federal court “with the identical inaccurate numbers without rectifying, clarifying, or otherwise changing them,” Carter wrote.
“The emails show that President Trump knew that the precise numbers of voter fraud were fallacious but continued to tout those numbers, each in court and to the general public,” Carter wrote. “The Court finds that these emails are sufficiently related to and in furtherance of a conspiracy to defraud the US.”
Lawyers for Eastman didn’t immediately reply to CNBC’s request for comment on Carter’s order. A spokesman for the Jan. 6 committee didn’t immediately comment.
Eastman, a pro-Trump former law school dean at Chapman University, was a key figure leading legal efforts to overturn Biden’s win. He penned a memo outlining a dubious legal strategy for Vice President Mike Pence to reject Electoral College votes for Biden while presiding over a joint session of Congress on Jan. 6.
Pence resisted Trump’s pressure to undo the election results, stoking the then-president’s ire and that of hundreds of his supporters, a few of whom chanted “hang Mike Pence” as they swarmed the U.S. Capitol.
In Wednesday’s ruling, Carter ordered disclosure of portions of a handful of emails related to Eastman’s plan for Pence to challenge the 2020 electoral count.
The select committee in January 2022 issued a subpoena searching for messages sent from Eastman’s Chapman email account between late 2020 and early 2021.
Eastman, who had previously declined to provide documents to the Jan. 6 investigators, promptly asked the Santa Ana federal court to dam Chapman from complying with the committee’s subpoena for his emails.
Carter ruled in March that Eastman disclose 101 emails to the select committee that were the topic of disputes over legal privileges. In that call, judge wrote that it was “more likely than not that President Trump corruptly attempted to obstruct the Joint Session of Congress” on Jan. 6.
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