John Eastman has now joined the ranks of Rudy Giuliani, Michael Cohen and Lin Wood, lawyers whose association with Donald Trump has either lost them their law license already or is in the process of achieving that result. It’s a rule of ethics that you cannot assist a client in illegal conduct and you certainly can’t do it by creating an illusion that a baseless legal argument is in fact meritorious. Whether Eastman’s now famous six point memorandum on how Mike Pence could have assisted in overturning the results of the 2020 election did just that is now a topic under discussion. Washington Post:
A bipartisan group of former officials and legal heavyweights, including two former federal judges, asked the California bar association Monday to investigate the conduct of John Eastman, the adviser to then-President Donald Trump who mapped out a legal strategy to overturn the 2020 election results. […]
The complaint was written on behalf of the States United Democracy Center, a nonpartisan organization promoting election integrity co-chaired by former New Jersey governor Christine Todd Whitman, a Republican, and Norman Eisen, who served in the Obama White House and worked with House Democrats during the first Trump impeachment.
Eastman rejected the complaint in an interview Monday, saying he simply presented options to the White House and was asserting the right to petition “the government for redress of grievances.”
“One of the grievances was that nothing was being done about acknowledged illegality in the conduct of an election — asserting a constitutional right is not a disbarrable offense,” Eastman said. There has been no evidence of widespread fraud or illegal actions concerning the result of the election.
Eastman said he believes he “will be fully vindicated” once the full memo and his account of the meetings with Trump and Pence are reviewed.
Stephen Gillers, an expert on legal ethics at New York University’s law school, called the request for investigation “a very meritorious complaint. The ethics rules are clear: You cannot assist your client in illegal conduct by giving the patina of a legal argument that is actually baseless. This will be investigated — and of course we need to see Eastman’s full response.”
Eastman says he told Mike Pence that it was an “open question” whether the vice president had the authority to “simply declare Trump reelected unilaterally.” That interpretation of the law is singular and it is his. Nobody else sees it that way.
The complaint also notes that the First Amendment does not protect lawyers. Maybe Sidney Powell should take a look at this.
“A lawyer must avoid speech that is intentionally false or deceptive, . . . that asserts or advances frivolous claims, . . . or that knowingly assists the client in unlawful conduct,” the complaint says. It maintains that Eastman knew the claims were frivolous because by early December, Trump and his allies had lost more than 50 post-election lawsuits. […]
“The main thing here is that Pence should do this without asking for permission — either from a vote of the joint session [of Congress] or from the Court,” Eastman wrote in that memo.
A subsequent, longer memo elaborated on some of the proposals and suggested Pence could delay counting of electoral ballots until after state legislatures conducted their own audits of election results.
Eastman acknowledged that the scenario laid out in the later memo is “BOLD.” But he said that they are justified because “this Election was Stolen by a strategic Democrat [sic] plan to systematically flout existing election laws for partisan advantage” and because “we’re no longer playing by [Queensberry] Rules, therefore.”
I hope they throw the book at this guy. When he’s no longer a lawyer he can spend his time catching up on his reading. He obviously never read Everything Trump Touches Dies.
And Sidney Powell.
Eastman was pushing for unconstitutional acts that would have the effect of overthrowing a legitimate election. He should be disbarred just for that memo. Add in his previous lies, and he really should be behind bars.
“acknowledged illegality in the conduct of an election …”
“this Election was Stolen by a strategic Democrat [sic] plan to systematically flout existing election laws for partisan advantage”
Only in your sick, fevered dreams, A-wipe.