'Under close scrutiny': DOJ investigators zero in on ex-Trump lawyer Eastman over fake electors scheme

04 July 2023

Although special counsel Jack Smith has been conducting two federal criminal investigations of former President Donald Trump, only one of them has resulted in an indictment so far. At this point, Smith's probe of Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results is strictly an investigation — not a prosecution, although former U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr has predicted that Smith will probably "pull the trigger" and prosecute that case as well.

In an article published by The Guardian on July 4, journalist Peter Stone reports that Smith's team has been zeroing on former Trump attorney John C. Eastman's post-election activities. Eastman, a major player in the Claremont Institute (a right-wing think tank that has taken a very MAGA turn in recent years), was the author of an infamous late 2020 memo that described a game plan for overturning the election results.

"John Eastman, who was in the vanguard of lawyers plotting schemes involving 'fake electors' and other ploys to help Donald Trump thwart Joe Biden's win in 2020, is now under close scrutiny in federal and state investigations of Trump's drives to stay in power — and faces possible disbarment in California, say former prosecutors," Stone reports. "The former California law professor is one of several lawyers whose legal stratagems have been heavily examined by special counsel Jack Smith's accelerating investigation into Trump and his allies' efforts to block Biden from taking office."

The state investigation that Stone is referring to is being conducted by Fulton County, Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis.

Former federal prosecutor Paul Rosenzweig told The Guardian that "it will be surprising" if "neither" Smith's investigation nor Willis' "ends in a criminal charge against Eastman as well, possibly, as other lawyers and Trump himself."

Columbia University law professor Dan Richman, a former prosecutor, told The Guardian, "By obtaining testimony from fake electors, Smith may be better able to nail down what information and advice passed between these soldiers in the larger scheme and those Trump lawyers who helped to concoct it. Testimony that, say, electors were advised to make false statements or given deliberately misleading advice would go far to showing a deliberate fraud by Trump's 'brain trust' of lawyers, including Eastman."

Read The Guardian's full report at this link.

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