The disbarment trial of former President Donald Trump’s former attorney and constitutional legal scholar, John Eastman, finished its 32nd day on Thursday. California Bar Disciplinary Judge Yvette Roland could not get the former law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to express remorse for his actions, and she pronounced him “culpable.”
The proceedings began with more cross-examination and redirect of Eastman on the witness stand. The California Bar’s attorney, Duncan Carling, attempted to get Eastman to admit that he was inciting violence by giving a speech at January 6. He asked Eastman if his speech risked causing violence. Eastman responded and said there was a risk to the republic if the election was illegal and allowed to stand.
Next, Carling tried to get Eastman to admit that in history, vice presidents have never unilaterally adjourned a session of Congress after discussing whether to accept disputed electoral slates without congressional permission. Eastman said, “In 1857, the presiding officer adjourned over vociferous objections from members of the joint session.”
Carling asked Eastman about a retraction that American Thinker published regarding its articles about Dominion Voting Systems due to a libel lawsuit threat from Dominion’s attorneys. Eastman said the articles alleged that Dominion was deliberately seeking to change elections, whereas Eastman’s concern was with security vulnerabilities, which experts like Alex Halderman had found. Eastman said he hadn’t seen evidence that Dominion was deliberately doing it.
Carling asked Eastman about an interview he did with the Claremont Institute’s Tom Klingenstein. In it, he discussed an “existential threat to the survival of our nation.”
Eastman explained that he meant the Declaration of Independence and Constitution direct how we choose our elected leaders; he said “the government is accountable to we the people and not the other way around.”
He explained, “If the election was illegal, that’s a threat.”
By failing to address that threat, Eastman said he believes it’s “existential;” he added that there will no longer be free and fair elections if unable to challenge the illegal ones. Also, he said the violence in the summer of 2020, assassination attempts on Supreme Court justices, threats by members of Congress to Supreme Court justices, and threats to legislators constitute an existential threat as well to our governing institutions.
Roland, who donated to Democrats while serving on the bench, asked him in response, “Do you include the January 6 insurrection?” Eastman responded, “I don’t call it an insurrection, your honor, but it was a riot and violence, and I condemn it.”
Carling asked him about Trump’s former attorney Jenna Ellis pleading guilty in the Georgia Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act prosecution, attempting to equivocate Eastman’s statements to hers. Eastman said he had no idea what statements Ellis made that she said were false, prompting his attorney Randy Miller to object to the questions, pointing out that the trial is about Eastman’s activities after the 2020 election, not a recent guilty plea. Roland refused to sustain the objection and ordered Eastman to respond. Eastman said his own statements were prefaced by caveats, which made them all true. He doesn’t know if she did that with her statements. As a result, he said he would challenge that they were similar to his.
Next, Carling asked Eastman numerous questions regarding whether there was “outcome determinative fraud” in the 2020 election. Eastman said the problem with coming to that conclusion is once the ballots have been separated from the envelopes, it’s hard to go back and prove fraud. He said in Arizona, where there are accusations that 35,000 ballots were inserted into the system through a third party, that was fraud.
When asked if there was outcome determinative fraud in Pennsylvania, Eastman said yes, based on the sworn testimony from truck driver Jesse Morgan, who said he trucked in 200,000 ballots for USPS from another state.
Similarly, Carling pressed Eastman to say he believed ballots were “fraudulently manipulated.” Eastman explained that “illegalities” affected the outcome of the election, which weren’t necessarily fraud, but he pointed out that some of the election fraud investigators, including Garland Favorito and former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman, found fraud.
In previous days of the trial, Carling tried to get Eastman to admit that Trump considered having then-Vice President Mike Pence reject disputed electoral slates based on Eastman’s advice. Eastman again pointed out that when Trump tweeted in December 2020 about that option, he included “The Pence Card” memo with his tweet, which was presented to Trump earlier in December and authored by a different attorney. Another attorney who suggested that option to Trump was Ellis, who sent him a memo.
When it was Miller’s turn to conduct redirect with Eastman, he asked him about more instances where state legislators expressed concerns about illegalities in the 2020 election, including demanding to decertify the election. Two state senators in Michigan demanded an audit before certifying the results.
Miller asked Eastman about an article where legal scholar Alan Dershowitz discussed how Trump was considering ways to reject electoral slates for Biden from states suspected of election fraud. Dershowitz spoke of the option as a normal option; his only skepticism was whether enough officials would agree.
“You need a perfect storm for it to work,” he said. “You need to get enough states, enough state attorneys general, or state departments, or whoever, secretaries of state or governors that are Republican that legitimately refuse to certify the results because they’re under challenge on the day the Electoral College meets by statute.”
Eastman discussed a lawsuit that former Representative Louie Gohmert of Texas filed against Pence in order to try and determine whether Pence had substantive authority regarding accepting disputed electoral slates. Pence responded to the lawsuit and said he was the wrong defendant but never disputed the merits of the lawsuit, Eastman pointed out.
Roland responded, “How is this relevant?”
When Eastman discussed the 1857 historical controversy over accepting Wisconsin’s disputed electoral slate, Roland pointed out that the vice president of the Senate, Senator James Mason of Virginia, denied that he’d used his substantive authority when he accepted the disputed slate from Wisconsin. Eastman responded and said the other members of Congress expressed their disagreement with Mason when he made that claim later; they said it wasn’t true that Mason hadn’t exercised substantial authority since Mason said members of Congress who tried to object to the Wisconsin electoral slate were out of order.
Miller asked Eastman about testimony that the California Bar’s witness Matthew Seligman gave regarding the 1857 controversy. Eastman said after the votes were counted, including Wisconsin’s, by the president of the Senate, one of the members of Congress, Senator William Stewart of Nevada, said members of Congress didn’t have any power over that.
With the trial close to wrapping up, Roland asked Eastman whether he felt any remorse for his behavior after going over all of the information that came out in the trial. Eastman responded and said it further confirmed his view that breaking the laws changed the election results and opened the door for a significant amount of fraud. He said he still maintained his position that who has the legal authority to decide whether to accept disputed electoral slates isn’t clear, but there is stronger evidence that the vice president has that authority.
At that point, Roland declared that she had made a “preliminary finding of culpability” and would begin taking “aggravation” testimony in order to determine what Eastman’s punishment should be.
For their first aggravation witness, the California Bar brought back its witness Justin Grimmer, who holds himself out as a statistician, but much of his work consists of articles stating that there was no election fraud and articles like “A Women’s Voice in the House: Gender Composition and Its Consequences in Committee Hearings.”
Initially, the California Bar said their aggravation witness would be Seligman, who appeared to have an inactive bar license while helping the California Bar with their case against Eastman, including drafting one of the charges against him. Bar complaints have since been filed against him, which may be why he was removed from testifying.
Grimmer refused to admit that comparing signature rejection rates in Georgia’s 2020 election to 2016 was meaningful, even though those were presidential election years. He said it was better to compare 2020 to 2018, a non-presidential election year. Grimmer attempted to bolster his previous testimony from October 25, where he said the signature rejection rate declined slightly in Georgia’s 2020 election. That day, Eastman pointed out that the rate declined 46 percent. Eastman said that amounted to 6,500 votes, “more than half the total margin [that Biden won by] in the whole state on just that one issue.”
Also, Grimmer attempted to refute the claim that 58,221 ballots in Pennsylvania were returned on the mailed-out date or prior to it. He said almost all of them were returned on the mailed-out date. He implied that the voters got them in the mail and then voted them early in person, but he wasn’t very clear. When asked about the claim that more people voted in Pennsylvania than were eligible, Grimmer blamed poor voter roll maintenance.
Grimmer spent a significant amount of the afternoon attempting to refute the vote spikes report compiled by several statistical PhDs, which found abnormally large numbers of votes for President Joe Biden in certain large counties in certain states. He argued they were big Democratic cities, and voters may have preferred Biden over Hillary Clinton four years earlier. He did not address the fact that in Philadelphia, Biden received fewer votes than Clinton.
Throughout the trial, Roland frequently refused to allow testimony from Eastman and his witnesses related to documents and events after January 2021 while allowing the same from the California Bar’s witnesses.
The parties have agreed to waive closing arguments and submit final briefs instead, which are due by November 22.
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Rachel Alexander is a reporter at The Arizona Sun Times and The Star News Network. Follow Rachel on Twitter / X. Email tips to [email protected].
