The Patriot Post® · The Left's Lawfare Attack on John Eastman
It wasn’t always like this for John Eastman. He wasn’t always buried beneath malicious lawsuits, bar complaints, and subpoenas. He wasn’t always calling the state cops and the FBI about threatening emails and phone calls. He wasn’t getting feces thrown onto his property. He wasn’t replacing his car’s tires because someone kept burying four-inch spikes in his dirt driveway.
But that’s what a man gets for providing legal advice to former President Donald Trump in the wake of the 2020 election. He gets his cellphone illegally snatched by the FBI, and it goes downhill from there.
It doesn’t matter that Eastman has a law degree from the University of Chicago. Or that he clerked for Clarence Thomas. Or that he served for decades as professor of constitutional law and dean of Chapman Law School. Or that he founded the Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence at the Claremont Institute. It doesn’t matter that he’s been involved in more than 200 constitutional cases before the Supreme Court over the past 20 years, including advising Florida’s legislature in Bush v. Gore. Doesn’t matter that he was an Eagle Scout, a former Boy Scout troop leader, and that he sang in the church choir.
No, he provided legal counsel to Trump about a presidential election that two-thirds of Republicans believe was illegitimate. For that, Eastman must be destroyed. And lawfare is the weapon of choice among the Trump-deranged.
If you can’t beat your enemies at the ballot box or in the marketplace of ideas, lawfare suggests that you litigate them into oblivion. As the Wall Street Journal’s Daniel Henninger wrote recently in an article titled “The High Price of Democrats’ Anti-Trump Lawfare,” this weaponization of the legal system “sits before us now as a spectacle of political gluttony. How many lawsuits, court motions and judgments against Donald Trump can the Democratic Party chow down? More disturbing is the high price the American system may pay for this excess.”
Henninger is right. And Eastman’s high price just got even higher. Last week, hard-left California State Bar Court Judge Yvette Roland recommended that Eastman’s California law license be revoked due to his having provided legal counsel to Trump. As the Associated Press reports, “Eastman, a former law school dean, faced 11 disciplinary charges in the state bar court stemming from his development of a legal strategy to have then-Vice President Mike Pence interfere with the certification of President Joe Biden’s victory.”
“Interfere” is an intentional term and a tendentious one. The AP refers to Eastman’s consultations with Trump and Pence in the days leading up to January 6, 2021, regarding the electoral count and congressional certification of the 2020 election results. Eastman, in exploring Trump’s legal options, suggested that VP Pence, as the presiding officer of the Senate, could reject disputed electors or could send disputed electoral delegations back to their state legislatures to be corrected.
Eastman testified under oath that he told both Trump and Pence that the former action wouldn’t be prudent. Instead, as noted in an open letter from his adult children, Benjamin Eastman and Christina Wheatland, “He proposed that Pence accede to requests from more than 100 state legislators to send the matter back to the state legislatures to assess the allegations of fraud and the impact of illegality on the election.”
Pence never bought into that proposal. As recounted in his memoir, So Help Me God, he told Trump on New Year’s Day 2021, “You are my friend and you are my president, but I am persuaded that the oath I took to support and defend the Constitution informs me that the decision on objections to the Electoral College belongs to the House and the Senate.”
And yet, Eastman is still facing disbarment. As two of his fellow board members at the Claremont Institute, Thomas Klingenstein and Ryan Williams, write:
In his case, an activist group, States United Democracy Center, joined other activists in filing an ethics complaint with the California State Bar Association. As David Brock, one of the leaders in this lawfare, explains, the aim of these activists is “not only [to] bring the grievances in the bar complaints but shame [their targets] and make them toxic in their communities and in their firms.” Specifically, they aim not just to disbar but to destroy the 111 attorneys who were involved in legally challenging the 2020 election results.
Class acts, these Trump-deranged Democrats.
Eastman’s legal bills are mounting, and they’re considerable. As The Federalist’s Joy Pullmann noted last November, Eastman believes his legal bills will be in the neighborhood of $3-3.5 million.
And it isn’t just disbarment in California. As the AP continues, “Eastman separately faces criminal charges in Georgia in the case accusing Trump and 18 allies of conspiring to overturn the Republican’s loss in the state.” Eastman has, of course, pleaded not guilty in that case, which is being overseen by a DA, Fani Willis, who perjured herself with impunity while being questioned about her romantic affair with one of her lead prosecutors.
Eastman argues that he was simply carrying out his duties as Trump’s attorney by challenging the results of the 2020 election. You remember: the election in which a heretofore incomprehensible 43% of all votes were cast by fraud-friendly mail, and the election in which Basement Joe Biden lost 18 of 19 bellwether counties and yet still got more population-adjusted votes than Barack Obama in 2008.
As Eastman has pointed out, he and his colleagues have been targeted “for their zealous advocacy on behalf of their clients.” As his lawyer, Randall Miller, adds: “Dr. Eastman maintains that his handling of the legal issues he was asked to assess after the November 2020 election was based on reliable legal precedent, prior presidential elections, research of constitutional text, and extensive scholarly material. The process undertaken by Dr. Eastman in 2020 is the same process taken by lawyers every day and everywhere — indeed, that is the essence of what lawyers do.”
“John will appeal, of course,” say Klingenstein and Williams, “and we expect him to prevail. But his case is a warning to us all about the increasing criminalization of any challenge to the progressive orthodoxy, whether the subject is elections, climate, race, gender, the economy, public health, or the Constitution.”
That’s lawfare. And as master practitioners, the Democrats are light-years ahead of the Republicans.