PALM BEACH, Florida – Hundreds of attendees who paid $1,000 to $50,000 each filled up a sold-out event at Mar-a-Lago last week, where they watched a screening of a new documentary about the lawfare against Donald Trump’s former attorney and constitutional legal scholar John Eastman.
Madison Media Fund, launched by film producer Gary DePew to support “freedom focused filmmakers,” deliberately timed The Eastman Dilemma: Lawfare or Justice for release on January 6. Trump stopped by to watch the movie. Also with him were Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL).
The evening included a panel discussion with Eastman and others in Trump’s circle targeted by lawfare: Rudy Giuliani, Alan Dershowitz, General Michael Flynn, Jeffrey Clark, and Peter Navarro.
Trump took the stage before the screening and expressed his support for Eastman and the others. He said he was a “big fan of John Eastman,” who “was right” about election wrongdoing and advising him that Vice President Mike Pence could have delayed certification of the 2020 election.
He continued, “Nobody wants to talk about that, and Alan [Dershowitz] talks about it all the time, but [the 2022 Congress] changed the law. Those votes could have been sent back, as they should have been able to, and they said [Pence] is not allowed to … and they convinced him that he wasn’t allowed to as Vice President. … A lot of other legal scholars agreed with you, and some are very willing to say that.”
Congress changed the law in 2022 to state that the vice president did not have substantive authority to reject slates of electors. However, numerous respected legal scholars said they believe Congress did not have the authority to pass the law, believing it to be a “nonjusticiable” issue already established in the Constitution, so Congress cannot tell another branch of government what to do.
Flynn, who briefly served as former National Security Advisor until he was falsely accused of lying about whether he’d had a conversation with the former Russian ambassador in December 2016 related to limiting the Russians’ response to Obama’s sanctions for election meddling, said during that panel discussion that it was his faith that got him through the ordeal. He was eventually exonerated, and his criminal conviction was dropped.
Dershowitz, who said he believed the 2020 election was fair, and so would not have filed lawsuits over it, said he began using the word lawfare about 45 years ago when he coined the phrase “guerilla lawfare.” He said the current lawfare is worse than Stalinism. Under that communist regime, Secret Police Chief Lavrentiy Beria famously said, “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.” In contrast, Dershowitz said, the Left in America today isn’t even able to find crimes against conservatives, so they just make them up.
Navarro, denouncing the election corruption in 2020, declared that Trump “is the president today!” Sponsors of the event spoke briefly, as well as the producers, who said the movie was timed to be released on January 6 “peacefully and patriotically.”
The movie began with a question to Eastman about whether agreeing to represent Trump in the 2020 election litigation proved worth it. Eastman said he had no regrets and wished more people would have stood up. Trump wanted Eastman due to his extensive 25 years of experience in constitutional law, both as a law professor and at the Claremont Institute. His resume is over 100 pages long, and he has long been known as one of the leading constitutional scholars on the Right.
Eastman is a defendant in Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’s RICO prosecution (she has since been removed from overseeing that), Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes’ prosecution of Trump electors and others, and is named as a co-conspirator in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s prosecution of Trump for election interference. He was disbarred by the State Bar of California. He lost his professor job at Chapman University’s Dale E. Fowler School of Law and was dropped from banking at Bank of America.
Eastman discussed how he decided to get involved because he saw that laws were broken. “They cheated,” he said. “They got rid of signature verification. They went into nursing homes without the bipartisan team. They dumped absentee ballots in and out of a warehouse. … So there was lots of cheating, and the American people saw it. There was cheating that went on, and it never got its day in court, and I was trying to design a strategy that would let those arguments, and that evidence, see the light of day, because most of the court decisions were just saying we don’t have jurisdiction, and we’re refusing to take up the issues.”
Eastman was largely targeted over a confidential memo he wrote for Trump that outlined various options to deal with the election corruption. Some options included accepting the electoral slates from the disputed states, which would result in Joe Biden winning, but the mainstream media mostly failed to report that. The memo was not even given to Pence and instead was illegally leaked to the media.
Eastman said Pence never stated that he had no authority to reject electoral slates. Contrary to reports in the mainstream media that Pence opposed using his authority to reject slates of electors from states with suspected election fraud, Eastman said Pence specifically asked him if he had that authority.
Eastman explained that he never instructed Pence to reject electoral slates. He suggested delaying certification so the states could conduct investigations before January 20, 2024, when the election must be concluded for the inauguration since the date is fixed in the Constitution. Eastman even told Pence rejecting the slates was a “weaker argument.”
Known for his encyclopedic memory, Eastman rattled off the illegal election activity in battleground states. “In Arizona, there was evidence of 35,000 ballots injected in the system that don’t have a chain of custody,” he said. “The margin in Arizona was just over 10,000. In Georgia, the margin was 11,779 and we had underage people that were registered and therefore illegally cast votes. To this day, the secretary of state continues to lie about that evidence. He [incorrectly states they were accused of being] underage when they voted. That was not the issue. The issue was whether they were too young to register when they were registered, and they broke [the] registration [laws].”
Eastman said observers were not allowed to watch the ballot counting in various locations, and officials violated the law by weakening the signature verification process. In Georgia, ballots were scanned more than once. In Wisconsin, where Trump lost by a little over 20,000 votes, “a major investigation that was conducted by a very prominent former justice of the Wisconsin Supreme Court estimates that as many as 200,000 ballots were illegally cast counted in that state — the nursing home phenomenon — in violation of state law, and that opened the door for fraud.” He said, “Many of the ballots were in the same handwriting. The turnout rates from nursing homes in the state went from a historic average of 20 to 25 percent to nearly 100 percent including in memory care wings.”
In Pennsylvania, where the margin of victory for Biden was over 80,000 votes, “there are more than 100,000 more ballots than people showing as having voted,” Eastman said. “That discrepancy was never resolved.”
Next, he said observers in Pennsylvania were not allowed to stand where they could see the ballot counting, which a court allowed. Additionally, the courts allowed officials to ignore statutes on how signature verification must be conducted.
Eastman said his “favorite” law officials ignored, which the courts allowed, was requiring voters to put information like their addresses on the return ballot envelopes.
In Democratic counties, ballots were cured illegally, he said, but not in Republican counties since they said it violated the law.
“The margin in Michigan was about 150,000,” Eastman said, “but the conduct that occurred in the TCF Center in Detroit was so astounding and documented by sworn affidavits by eyewitnesses that it really stuck, and it was all just discarded in the court acting to say, well, we don’t find these witnesses credible because somebody from the government said that everything’s fine.”
He went on, “And all of a sudden, 135,000 ballots show up in the mail tonight, when nobody’s there to observe what happened and nobody’s allowed to raise a question about it. That’s almost the entirety of the margin in Michigan, that one issue alone.”
Eastman continued, “These are the statutes that the legislature had put into place exercising their constitutional authority as a check on potential fraud, and we get rid of the checks and then they’re wondering, ‘Well I can’t prove that there was enough fraud’ — well you got rid of all the ways to check whether there was any fraudulent kind of thing could be wrong in all of the swing states and people are being prosecuted.”
Dershowitz was interviewed in the movie and brought up the disputed 2000 election, where alternate electors were considered, but no one was prosecuted over it. He denounced the prosecutions of Eastman for violating the Ex Post Facto clause of the Constitution, which says you cannot be prosecuted for something that was not a crime at the time it was committed.
“If you don’t know what that line is, you can’t be prosecuted,” he said. “Thomas Jefferson put it in a very colorful way. He said, ‘For a criminal statute to be fair, it has to be so clear that a reasonable person can understand it if he reads it while running.’ … What’s clear about the prosecutions in the Eastman case, it’s all up in the air, vague extrapolation.”
He warned, “It will make lawyers cowards.”
Left-wing Harvard Law constitutional professor Lawrence Lessig, who said he did not believe there was wrongdoing in the 2020 election, discussed how it was wrong to prosecute people like Eastman for exploring legal possibilities to deal with election problems. He compared the 2020 election to the 2000 and 1960 presidential elections. He explained that in the latter, where fraud was suspected, there were three electoral slates from Hawaii: two for Democrat John Kennedy and one for the incumbent Republican Richard Nixon.
“Nixon observed that he had three slates of electors in front of him,” Lessig said. “If the Kennedy electors had not voted, there would have been no votes to count for the Kennedy electors.”
He added, “I think it’s an important example of why it was right for the Trump electors to vote on election day in those states where there was some question about what the result would be, and I think the real mistake we’ve made is prosecuting those electors, calling them ‘fake electors.’ By that theory, the Kennedy electors were fake electors because they too said ‘we are the certified electors,’ so you’ve prosecuted them in Georgia, prosecuted them in Wisconsin, and in Michigan, and in Arizona. So thereby creating a stigma around the idea, which just seems to me really crazy.”
Lessig said the lawsuits weren’t “properly investigated” by judges. He said, “Democrats will typically say there were 63 lawsuits; not a single one showed any results in Trump’s favor that would come anywhere close to changing the result. But if you look at the lawsuits in the way they were determined, many of them were determined by judges who felt that they had no time to really do anything else. So they would invoke all sorts of doctrines for really avoiding doing the work that the lawsuit was asking for them to do. … What the courts did was find ways to ignore what we were trying to say and just reach the conclusion that the results should be as they were originally.”
Eastman discussed how the State Bar of California investigated him for a year and a half and pressed charges against him, claiming he had no evidence of election illegalities. The trial against him was scheduled for two weeks but ended up lasting 10 weeks.
The Arizona Sun Times covered the trial every day, featuring numerous election integrity experts discussing the wrongdoing they found. Eastman said it cost over $750,000 to defend himself in the trial.
In the movie, Clark, who is also fighting suspension of his law license and criminal prosecution for drafting a letter that was never sent for Trump to give to Georgia officials advising them of their options dealing with the 2020 election problems, said, “If …America does not fight back against this, if ultimately John does not prevail in his challenge to the California bar, then the signal that’s going to send to the U.S. legal community is you represent a group of people, conservatives, mega conservatives — however you want to describe them — populists, populist conservatives, at your peril. If you do that, you will be disbarred. There will be attempts to destroy you, your family and your reputation and your name will be ruined, and you may even have to go to prison. That’s never happened before in any past situation in America.”
The film included clips of the slanted reporting from the mainstream media. It showed photos of the graffiti outside Eastman’s home as he spoke about the protesters outside his home present almost every day for over a year and someone putting spikes in the dirt on his driveway.
The producers interviewed Democrats about Eastman, who said things like, “I’m fine with cancel culture.”
Dershowitz said the Left tried to disbar him in Massachusetts. “They don’t want [attorneys] to defend Donald Trump,” he said. “That’s just left-wing McCarthyism.”
“The solution,” Dershowitz proposed, “is to dismantle organizations like The 65 Project. Nobody should be supporting that McCarthyite, despicable group. The answer is to get judges who will apply the Constitution honestly and objectively and not play along with this lawfare and weaponization of the criminal justice system. There are a few of them but not enough.”
Lessig concluded his remarks, “The most important [aspect], in my view, is to make sure that electors have the freedom to vote on electors’ day if there’s a genuine question about which candidate, which set of electors was appointed on election day, so if there’s a recount, if there’s a contest about whether ballots should have been counted, or should not have been counted, any legal theory that plausibly could flip the result to the other side, should provide a basis for electors meeting and voting.”
Eastman wrapped up his interview in the movie, “People said, ‘Eastman, you know, you keep raising these questions, and it’s undermining public trust in our institutions.’ And my first response is ‘me shining a light on the illegality is not what’s undermining the public trust. It’s them committing the illegality in the first place. That’s undermining the public trust. … The ability to question the government when they go astray is critical to the notion that the government works for us rather than the other way around. … The first words of the Constitution are ‘We the People,’ not ‘We the Government.’”
The Sun Times spoke with Flynn about various topics, including lawfare and election corruption. He said an important key to stopping illegal activity in elections is to combat it locally with “teams of grassroots leadership.” He pointed out that Election Day is when people come together and “everyone is equal.” He expressed his relief that Trump won the election. “Trump would be in prison for life if he lost,” Flynn told The Sun Times.
He expressed outrage at the Russia-Ukraine war.
“Ukraine money should be going to the homeless … [including] homeless veterans,” the former National Security Advisor said.
Flynn added, “Ukraine has lost its youth” due to the fatalities of soldiers. He said Biden has never said what the U.S.’s objective is there.
He predicted that the mainstream media would reach its demise by the end of the Trump administration. “People will move to who they like” for their news instead. He said he no longer turns his TV on or receives a newspaper when he gets up in the morning but instead looks at his smartphone.
Both Eastman and Clark continue to raise money for their legal defense funds. Eastman has raised $909,100 of the $1.5 million needed. Clark has raised $136,295 of the $500,000 needed. At this time, the film is available free of charge here. DePew comes from a lengthy career in Hollywood, producing 24 independent motion pictures.
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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].
