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Exclusive: Trump’s Team Setting Up Eastman to Take Blame for Jan. 6
Trump in recent weeks has told confidants that he sees no reason to defend the lawyer who tried to help him overturn the 2020 election, sources tell Rolling Stone
With the Justice Department and Jan. 6 committee taking a close look at
Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, he and his cronies could certainly use a fall guy, and it looks like they’ve found their patsy: right-wing lawyer
John Eastman.
Eastman worked for Trump as the attorney devised legal strategies to overturn the election to keep the outgoing president in power. But, in recent weeks, Trump has confided to those close to him that he sees no reason to publicly defend Eastman, two people familiar with the matter tell
Rolling Stone. The ex-president is also deeply annoyed with Eastman and all the negative “attention” and media coverage that the lawyer’s work has brought Trump and his inner sanctum, including during the ongoing Jan. 6 hearings on Capitol Hill.
Furthermore, to those who’ve spoken Trump about Eastman in recent months, the ex-president has repeated
an excuse he often uses when backed into a corner, as investigators confront him with an associates’ misdeeds: He has privately insisted he “hardly” or “barely” knows Eastman, despite the fact that he counseled Trump on taking a string of extra-legal measures in a bid to stay in power and wrote the so-called “coup memo,” which laid out the facsimile of a legal argument for reversing Trump’s election defeat.
Behind closed doors, Trump will occasionally ask questions about Eastman’s fortunes, including bluntly inquiring: “Is [John] going to jail?” according to a source who has heard the former president say this. But publicly, Trump has stayed silent. Over the past several months, Trump has been strongly advised by lawyers and several associates not to openly discuss Eastman or his work — and to personally avoid the man altogether, according to three sources familiar with the matter. At this time, Trump, his legal advisers, and various political counselors would prefer to cut ties with Eastman and keep their distance, in a perhaps vain attempt to build a firewall between the lawyer who enthusiastically pitched strategies for delegitimizing the 2020 election outcome and the ex-president who repeatedly sought his help.
“It has been repeatedly communicated to the [former] president that he should not even bring up Johnny Eastman’s name because he is maybe the most radioactive person [involved in this] when it comes to…any so-called criminal exposure,” a source with direct knowledge of the matter says. “Johnny does not have many friends in [the upper crust of] Trumpworld left, and most people loyal to the [former] president are fine with him being left out on his own, to deal with whatever consequences he may or may not face.”
Indeed, the infamously garrulous Trump has publicly kept his mouth shut about Eastman, a lawyer whose work became integral to the scandalous efforts to nullify President Biden’s 2020 victory. (Trump even considered Eastman as counsel for his post-insurrection
impeachment.)
Nowadays, in the top ranks of MAGAland, there’s a clear attitude towards Eastman (“Johnny,” as some Trump advisers derisively call him):
He might be going down. So be it, as long as he doesn’t take anyone else down with him.
Eastman and a Trump spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment from
Rolling Stone.
Eastman has become an increasing focus for the
January 6th committee for his role in spearheading many of the Trump campaign’s efforts to overturn the election. Exhibits posted by the committee last week included excerpts of a deposition by Trump White House attorney Eric Herschmann in which he described a heated confrontation with Eastman the day after the insurrection where he told Eastman to “get a great fucking criminal defense lawyer” because “you’re going to need it.”
Shortly afterward, Eastman emailed fellow Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani to say: “I’ve decided that I should be on the pardon list, if that is still in the works.”
“Any time you give legal advice and then feel compelled to ask for a pardon, it probably wasn’t good legal advice,” says Steven Groves, formerly a lawyer and then a spokesman in Trump’s White House.
In a nod to growing calls by the January 6 committee for a criminal investigation of Trump’s actions around the election, Trump released a 12-page statement, which
The New York Times reported contains the seeds of a potential defense against criminal allegations that the former president attempted to
thwart the transfer of power while knowing he had legitimately lost the election. The document cites a range of wild-eyed theories, including 14 references to the bogus election fraud conspiracy documentary
2,000 Mules, but it does not mention Eastman or his work that the former president relied on to make the case that his efforts to overthrow the election were within the law.
Eastman, a former clerk for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas turned conservative constitutional law professor, was first welcomed into Trump’s orbit during the penultimate year of Trump’s term in office. Trump, enamored of Eastman’s skepticism of the birthright citizenship afforded by the constitution, increasingly came to rely on the attorney’s crackpot views of election law as the the odds of overturning Biden’s 2020 election victory grew longer. On behalf of Trump, Eastman authored briefs for the Supreme Court to intervene in the election in Trump’s favor — both ultimately discarded by the justices.
When the Supreme Court ultimately shut the door on Trump’s attempts to leverage the courts to stop the democratic transfer of power, Eastman took up the mantle of cobbling together a legal rationale for why, in blatant violation of the constitution, Vice President Mike Pence somehow had the authority to stop the counting of electoral votes on January 6.
But the idea that Eastman is becoming something of a fall guy for Trump and various Republicans’ efforts in 2020 and early 2021 is now so prevalent in influential conservative circles that it’s now being acknowledged by some of the former president’s
favorite right-wing media stars.
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John Eastman Is Team Trump's Pick for Jan. 6 Scapegoat - Rolling Stone