John Eastman Trump Attorney with Alternate Elector Theory Turns Over 10,000 Emails to Committee

Sit back and try to imagine for a moment all that we wouldn’t know were it not for the fact that Nancy Pelosi pushed forward and established the House Select Oversight Committee. Among the texts to Meadows, and many other messages is the structural framework for the “legal theory” that Trump attorney John Eastman put together, a theory that led directly to the January 6th attempted coup. According to Politico, 10,000 pages of communication from Eastman to Trump’s team will go to the Committee, and the information found within will help fill in the remaining holes in the structural framework. From Politico:

Attorney John Eastman, a key architect of Donald Trump’s legal effort to overturn the 2020 election, is preparing to provide another 10,000 pages of records to the Jan. 6 select committee, his attorney revealed late Friday. It’s the latest breakthrough for investigators in their ongoing fight to obtain details of Trump’s last-ditch plans to overturn his election loss.

Eastman had claimed attorney-client privilege over 37,000 pages of post-election emails related to his work for Trump. But under pressure from U.S. District Court Judge David Carter — who ruled in March that Eastman and Trump likely entered into a criminal conspiracy to overturn the election — Eastman withdrew privilege claims for nearly a third of that total.

It doesn’t take a legal scholar to understand that if one is planning a bank heist with his attorney, that planning isn’t covered by the attorney-client privilege.

To get more stories like this, subscribe to our newsletter The Daily.

These documents are particularly important because, as was reported this week on this website, the powerful and conservative retired appellate court judge J. Michael Luttig calls the alternate electors portion of the plan, the plan that centers around Eastman, the Republican plan for 2024. Luttig believes that Republicans plan to use the 12th Amendment to assert that a state legislature has the right to ignore the state’s votes and send electors chosen by the legislature, should it choose to do so. The amendment even implies that the action isn’t reviewable by any court, including the state supreme court. You can see the implications. Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, all with strong GOP majorities in the state legislature, all could have simply voted on the electoral college electors that the legislature preferred, with a waive to “rigged” and fraud, no proof required.

The documents will surely include references to such a plan. Beyond that, one can only guess what the committee will learn. One truism has held throughout the process. Nothing seemed to be out of bounds. At no point have we seen anything indicating that anyone said, “this is wrong,” other than Mike Pence’s decision to simply do what the Constitution clearly requires. Amazing, but Pence is truly the hero of the 2020 election, based only on the fact that he did what was clearly required by the Constitution. Others were not so constrained.

Jason Miciak

@JasonMiciak believes a day without learning is a day not lived. He is a political writer, features writer, author, and attorney. He is a Canadian-born dual citizen who spent his teen and college years in the Pacific Northwest and has since lived in seven states. He now enjoys life as a single dad of a young girl, writing from the beaches of the Gulf Coast. He loves crafting his flower pots, cooking, and currently studies philosophy of science, religion, and non-math principles behind quantum mechanics and cosmology. Please feel free to contact with any concerns.