Is MAGA lawyer John Eastman more pro-coup than ever?

31 July 2023

Editor's note: The headline was corrected.

In July, former President Donald Trump's legal problems have been going from bad to worse.

First, on July 16, Trump received a target letter from the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) in connection with special counsel Jack Smith's probe of his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results. Then, on Thursday, July 27, the news broke that Smith had expanded his prosecution of Trump in the Mar-a-Lago documents case, with three counts added. What was a 37-count prosecution before is now a 40-count prosecution.

Trump's post-2020 election activities are also the focus on an investigation by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis for the State of Georgia. If Trump is indicted in Smith and Fulton's election cases, he will be facing four separate criminal indictments.

A key figure in Trump's efforts to stay in the White House despite losing in 2020 was former law professor John C. Eastman, who wrote a memo that outlined a plan for then-Vice President Mike Pence to deny President-elect Joe Biden his 2020 Electoral College victory. In an article published by the conservative website The Bulwark on July 31, author Laura K. Field (a senior fellow at the Niskanen Center, a Washington, D.C. think tank) emphasizes that Eastman is not backing down from his false claims about the 2020 election.

"Two days after Trump received his target letter," Field explains, "16 Republicans in Michigan were charged with numerous felonies related to their roles as 'fake electors' in an attempt to subvert the 2020 election results for their state…. Not only are people being indicted on charges targeting actions Eastman prescribed in his memos, but legal theories he relied on to make his claims are being refuted in definitive ways."

Eastman has been inundated with scathing criticism from both Democrats and Never Trump conservatives, who see his far-right views as anti-democracy. And he is facing possible disbarment in California. But in the MAGA World, he is admired. Eastman is highly influential in the Claremont Institute, the most MAGA of the right-wing think tanks.

"As excruciating as the spectacle of the disbarment proceedings has been," Field observes, "I suspect that John Eastman remains unfazed by it. He might be physically present at the hearings, but his mind is traversing the intellectual upside-down of the Claremont universe, where hostile arguments can't touch him. Over two and a half years have passed since the 2020 election. The longer he pursues his empty claims of fraud, the further he gets from the norms and institutions that give shape to everyday American reality, and the deeper he gets into a different, darker place."

Meanwhile, in a Bulwark column published on July 28, Never Trump conservative Charlie Sykes lays out some reasons why Smith's Mar-a-Lago documents prosecution has become much worse for Trump.

"These were not the indictments we were waiting for, but that made them feel even more explosive and damaging," the Wisconsin-based journalist argues. "Three new felony charges against Trump: attempting to 'alter, destroy, mutilate, or conceal evidence,' inducing someone else to do so, and a new count under the Espionage Act related to a classified national security document that he showed to visitors at his golf club in Bedminster, NJ. The new indictments include a new defendant and dramatic evidence of an attempted coverup with serious mob boss vibes."

Sykes continues, "But the big one is the new charge related to the purloined war document that the former president had flaunted at his golf club. A document that he admitted he did not and could not declassify. A document he later said did not exist."

Sykes notes that federal prosecutors now have an "Iran war document" that was "marked top secret" and never should have left Washington, D.C.

"By adding an additional charge on that document," according to Sykes, "Jack Smith has made it far more likely that the damning Bedminster tape will be admitted as evidence in the trial and played for the jury."

Laura K. Field's Bulwark article is available at this link and Charlie Sykes' column can be found here.

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