Jack Smith’s latest move signals he may be close to indicting a major Trump associate

Department of Justice special counsel Jack Smith is requesting court records from a lesser-known case in California, and the dates of records requested line up with the dates that former Donald Trump attorney John Eastman took the stand.

Politico reported Thursday that Smith's team is asking for records from the State Bar Court of California pertaining to Eastman's disbarment proceedings. The far-right attorney has been in the Golden State defending his law license, which state bar officials are fighting to have stripped in the wake of Eastman's felony indictment in Fulton County District Court. Smith's team requested transcripts from October 30th, November 2nd and November 3rd. All three days correspond to days when Eastman was called to testify in-person. Bar officials reportedly asked Eastman about his conversations with Trump and other elected officials as part of his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

Smith didn't disband his grand jury after it indicted the former president. Because Eastman has been revealed to be "co-conspirator #2" in Trump's indictment, and because Smith's grand jury has gone quiet in recent weeks, Politico legal correspondent Kyle Cheney wrote that Smith may be planning to indict Eastman as part of his election interference investigation in Washington, DC.

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Following Eastman's testimony in California in October and November, a judge made a "preliminary finding" that Eastman violated the ethics of his profession by assisting Trump in his efforts to overturn election results in the courts. In recent weeks, California bar officials have been presenting "aggravating" evidence that would be used in arguments to justify stripping Eastman's ability to practice law, possibly including the speech he delivered to a crowd of Trump supporters on January 6, 2021.

John Eastman is the author of the so-called "Eastman Memo" that laid out the plan for Trump's legal team to postpone Congress' certification of Electoral College votes, with the help of Vice President Mike Pence. According to the memo, Republican senators would lodge objections to certifying counts in battleground states President Joe Biden narrowly won, like Arizona, Georgia, Michigan and Nevada, citing the submission of an alternate slate of electors. At that point, Pence would cite the alternate elector slates as reason to declare those states' results in dispute, thereby declaring Trump to be the winner of the 2020 election. Eastman theorized that Democrats would object to Pence'e declaration, meaning that the final decision would be punted to the House of Representatives.

Eastman's memo then hypothesized that because the US Constitution stipulates that each state's delegation gets one vote in the House of Representatives, Trump would be elected president by the GOP-controlled House. At the time, Republicans had control of 26 state delegations, with Democrats only having control of 24. Eastman then proposed Trump could invoke the Insurrection Act to have the military quell protests that would inevitably result from Trump's coup.

In addition to his role as one of Trump's attorneys, Eastman is a major player in the conservative legal world. The former law clerk to Associate Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas went on to become the Founding Director of the far-right Claremont Institute's Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence, and remains a senior fellow at the influential conservative think tank. He's also the board chair of the National Organization for Marriage, which opposes marriage rights for same-sex couples.

READ MORE: Trump ally and January 6 architect John Eastman now on the verge of losing his law license