One Step Closer
For those who still somehow need to be convinced that Trump is a criminal through and through, the House Select Committee investigating the coup attempt and 1/6 insurrection filed court papers yesterday indicating that it now has enough evidence to conclude that Señor Trumpanzee and some of his allies "conspired to commit fraud and obstruction by misleading Americans about the outcome of the 2020 election and attempting to overturn the result."
Last night, Luke Broadwater and Alan Feuer reported that in a California civil case, the committee's lawyers "for the first time laid out their theory of a potential criminal case against the former president. They said they had accumulated evidence demonstrating that Trump, the conservative lawyer John Eastman and other allies could potentially be charged with criminal violations including obstructing an official proceeding of Congress and conspiracy to defraud the American people. The filing also said there was evidence that Mr. Trump’s repeated lies that the election had been stolen amounted to common law fraud."
It said, for example, that Jason Miller, Trump’s senior campaign adviser, had told the committee in a deposition that Trump had been told soon after Election Day by a campaign data expert “in pretty blunt terms” that he was going to lose, suggesting that Trump was well aware that his months of assertions about a stolen election were false. (Trump subsequently said he disagreed with the data expert’s analysis, Miller said, because he thought he could win in court.)
The evidence gathered by the committee “provides, at minimum, a good-faith basis for concluding that President Trump has violated” the obstruction count, the filing, written by Douglas Letter, the general counsel of the House, said, adding: “The select committee also has a good-faith basis for concluding that the president and members of his campaign engaged in a criminal conspiracy to defraud the United States.”
...[T]he filing contains the clearest indication yet about the committee’s direction as it weighs making a criminal referral to the Justice Department against Trump and his allies, a step that could put pressure on Attorney General Merrick Garland to take up the case. The Justice Department has said little of substance about whether it might ultimately pursue a case.
The filing laid out a sweeping if by now well-established account of the plot to overturn the election, which included false claims of election fraud, plans to put forward pro-Trump “alternate” electors, pressure various federal agencies to find irregularities and ultimately push Vice President Mike Pence and Congress to exploit the Electoral Count Act to keep a losing president in power.
“As the president and his associates propagated dangerous misinformation to the public,” the filing said, Eastman “was a leader in a related effort to persuade state officials to alter their election results based on these same fraudulent claims.”
The court filing stemmed from a lawsuit filed by Eastman, who is trying to persuade a judge to block the committee’s subpoena for documents in his possession, claiming “a highly partisan” invasion of his privacy. The committee issued a subpoena Eastman in January, citing a memo he wrote laying out how Trump could use the vice president and Congress to try to invalidate the 2020 election results.
...“In addition to the legal effort to delay the certification, there is also evidence that the conspiracy extended to the rioters engaged in acts of violence at the Capitol,” the filing said.
On Tuesday, the State Bar of California announced an investigation into Eastman over whether he engaged in conduct that violated California law and ethics rules.
Eastman’s memo to Trump suggested that Pence could reject electors from certain states. Eastman also participated in a briefing for nearly 300 state legislators, during which he told the group that it was their duty to “fix this, this egregious conduct, and make sure that we’re not putting in the White House some guy that didn’t get elected,” according to the committee.
He met with Trump and Pence to push his arguments, participated in a meeting of Trump advisers at the Willard hotel and spoke at the “Stop the Steal” rally on the Ellipse on Jan. 6, before the Capitol assault. As violence broke out, he sent a message blaming Pence for not going along with his plan.
As a mob was attacking the Capitol, chanting “Hang Mike Pence,” Eastman sent a hostile message to the vice president’s top lawyer, blaming Pence for the violence.
“The ‘siege’ is because YOU and your boss did not do what was necessary to allow this to be aired in a public way so that the American people can see for themselves what happened,” he wrote to Greg Jacob, Pence’s chief counsel.
In a recent filing in his suit, Eastman said Trump had retained him “because of his election law and constitutional expertise” in the fall of 2020 for “federal litigation matters in relation to the 2020 presidential general election, including election matters related to the Electoral College.”
On Sept. 3, 2020-- two months before Trump lost the election-- Eastman was invited by the pro-Trump lawyer Cleta Mitchell to join an Election Integrity Working Group to begin preparing for anticipated postelection litigation. Eastman said Trump had asked Mitchell to undertake the effort in August.
The judge in the case has already denied a request from Eastman to shield nearly 19,000 emails from the committee, saying that congressional investigators have the authority to see the messages and that the First Amendment does not protect his communications. Eastman has so far turned over about 8,000 of the emails.
