Judge Recommends John Eastman Be Disbarred for Efforts to Overturn 2020 Election

John Eastman, the Trump-allied lawyer who outlined the six-step scheme to block the congressional certification of President Biden’s 2020 victory, is ineligible to practice law and should be permanently disbarred, a judge in California ruled Wednesday.

Judge Yvette Roland found that Eastman’s repeated lies in service of his effort to help former President Donald Trump remain in power violated rules of professional ethics. “Eastman exhibited gross negligence by making false statements about the 2020 election without conducting any meaningful investigation or verification of the information he was relying upon,” Roland wrote in her 128-page ruling.

“This is a big deal,” Joanna Lydgate, the chief executive of States United, which filed the bar complaint against Eastman in 2021, told the New York Times. “In the fight to protect democracy and the rule of law, consequences are imperative.”

After the 2020 election, Eastman penned a memo outlining a six-step plan to keep Trump in power that relied on Trump supporters from seven states submitting fake electoral certificates to dispute Biden’s victory in those states. It also called for former Vice President Pence to reject the results from those states when presiding over the congressional certification of the electoral college vote, and argued that state legislatures had “the plenary power to determine the manner for choosing presidential electors” and thus could reject the valid electors because of measures undertaken to make voting easier during the coronavirus pandemic.

The plan was a key element in the Justice Department’s indictment of Trump for election interference, which implicates Eastman as “Co-conspirator 2.” In a separate case in Georgia’s Fulton County, Eastman was indicted for his role in trying to overturn the state’s election results.  

This week’s ruling against Eastman is a landmark win for accountability, and comes as others who aided and abetted the effort to upend U.S. democracy also face consequences for their roles. This includes former Justice Department lawyer Jeffrey Clark, who sought to use the department to advance Trump’s lies about election fraud and is now looking at potential disbarment, as well as Mike Roman, another Fulton County co-defendant who this week was subpoenaed in the Arizona attorney general’s investigation of the fake elector scheme.

American Oversight, which first obtained the fake electoral certificates in 2021, has investigated the post-2020 activities of Eastman, Clark, Roman and other Trump allies as they continued their efforts to undermine trust in U.S. democracy and election results.

Records we obtained indicate that Karen Fann, then the Arizona Senate president, may have met with Eastman in the weeks after the election. In a Dec. 13, 2020, email to a constituent who had demanded that the state’s election results be decertified, Fann appears to allude to Eastman and echoed the legal theory advanced in his memo: “With respect to the US Constitution Article 2 and 3 provisions, we spent an hour and a half with a nationally accredited constitutional attorney which was extremely interesting and I learned a lot,” she wrote. “He stated that the ‘plenary clause’ allowing us to convene ourselves with a simple majority applies ‘when there is no clear winner of an election.’”

We also obtained a February 2021 text message sent to Fann by Phil Waldron — a prominent election denier active in challenging the election, including having briefed members of Congress on fraud theories in the days before Jan. 6 — in which he told her he was “on [a] call with Prof Eastman.” Waldron’s firm, Allied Security Operations Group, was nearly hired by Fann to conduct the Senate’s partisan “audit” of Maricopa County’s 2020 results, and had been behind the thoroughly debunked report on alleged election irregularities in Michigan.  

Eastman was also invited to a recurring “Election Integrity Call” involving voter-fraud activists and high-profile election deniers like Waldron and True the Vote’s Catherine Engelbrecht, as well as sympathetic state officials like Arizona Rep. Mark Finchem. According to records we obtained, the calls appear to have begun before June 2021 and lasted at least through that September, and focused on “the election remedy process at the state level.” 

According to ABC News, prosecutors at Eastman’s August 2023 disciplinary trial presented a letter that ​​Eastman sent to former Wisconsin Rep. Timothy Ramthun in which he wrote that “state legislatures … do have the authority to de-certify the election of presidential electors.” We obtained that letter, dated Dec. 30, 2021 — at the time, Ramthun was calling for the state legislature to overturn the results from the election that had occurred more than a year before. 

Several witnesses for Eastman in his disciplinary trial, which began in June of last year, are part of a nationwide network of election deniers who have sought to undermine confidence in U.S. elections in the months and years after the 2020 vote. Through public records requests and litigation, American Oversight previously uncovered communications that several of the witnesses had with state leaders and right-wing activists about election and voting-related issues.

Jeffrey Clark’s own disciplinary trial began this week. American Oversight obtained emails Clark sent in the days after the Jan. 6 insurrection as well as records showing a top DOJ official’s handwritten notes on an email rejecting Clark’s scheme to falsely tell state officials that DOJ was investigating “significant concerns” that could change 2020 election results.