Global Courant
John Eastman, once dean of the law school at Chapman University and adviser to former President Trump, should lose his law license for spreading a bogus legal strategy designed to overturn the 2020 election, the State Bar of California argued Tuesday .
The State Bar has charged Eastman with ethics violations for promoting false claims that electoral cheating cost Trump the election, even after the U.S. Attorney General dismissed claims of widespread fraud and dozens of courts sank fraud cases.
Despite President Biden’s election victory, Eastman, according to the bar, urged state officials not to disclose the election results and pressured Vice President Mike Pence to turn away voters in states Biden won.
The bar also accuses Eastman of fueling the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol by telling thousands of Trump supporters on the National Mall that the election was stolen, including allegations that “dead people voted.”
“All of his misconduct had a single purpose: to obstruct the January 6 election count and prevent Vice President Pence from certifying Joe Biden as the winner of the election,” said Duncan Carling, an attorney representing the bar.
His comments came on the first day of Eastman’s trial in the California Bar Court, which will hear the case in Los Angeles for the next two weeks.
Carling said Eastman’s legal theory that Pence might reject certain states’ voters or delay counting votes was “unfounded, completely unsupported by historical precedent or law, and contrary to our values as a nation.”
It represented “his last ditch effort in a long line of increasingly desperate attempts to overturn the election,” Carling said. He said Eastman tried to drum up slates of alternate voters “to stop the orderly transfer of power” and pressured Pence to flout the law and “override every branch of government.”
Carling said Eastman knew — and privately admitted — that his theory had no chance of prevailing in court, and that “he was fully aware that his plan was hurting the nation,” even after the Jan. 6 violence.
“All of Dr. Eastman’s conduct was fundamentally dishonest and designed to impede the lawful certification of the winner of the 2020 election on January 6,” Carling said. “It violated the most important ethical obligations of lawyers, namely honesty and adherence to the rule of law.”
Eastman’s attorney, Randall Miller, argued that his client could not be punished for putting forward a legal theory that was arguably tenable, and not “so utterly deficient in merit” as a reasonable attorney would believe. He said Eastman had just done his duty to vigorously advocate for his client, then-President Trump.
Former Chapman University law professor John Eastman, shown in 2021.
(Andy Cross/MediaNews Group/The Denver Post via Getty Images)
He said that two months before the November 2020 election, Eastman began working on an “election integrity team” created by Trump because of his decades of litigation and scientific experience.
“He wasn’t there to steal the election or figure out ways to make President Trump the winner if he did lose,” Miller said. “The focus was on ensuring that the elections were owned and legally conducted and certified, and that the votes were counted correctly.”
He said Eastman’s goal was to delay vote counting “so that there could be a reasonable investigation” into claims of election irregularities.
His goal was to ensure that “the rightful winner of the election was properly certified,” Miller said, adding that Eastman’s legal ideas were “viable, tenable” and “developed in good faith.”
Eastman’s comments to Pence about his power to refuse to certify the voters “was merely advocacy,” Miller said, but the final decision rested with Pence, and Pence rejected Eastman’s theory.
“There is no threat to democracy whatsoever. All roads went through Vice President Pence,” said Miller, who characterized the exchanges between Eastman and Pence’s lawyer as “two smart people talking about the scope of constitutional authority, which was far from clear – an honest debate that was too good faith is conducted and that lawyers do.”
The hearing continues on Wednesday. Eastman was the dean of Chapman’s law school from 2007 to 2010 and continued to teach there until 2021, when more than 100 faculty members and people associated with the school denounced his role in the January 6 events.
