The fundamental message implicit in the California Bar’s vendetta against Trump’s former lawyer is this: “We’re the government. We’ve defined what is truth.
How dare you question us.”
The January 6 Committee may have shut up shop, Liz Cheney may have scuttled back to her constituency in Georgetown and at CNN, but the great Democratic vendetta machine is still fired up and pounding along, looking for people to smash and livelihoods to destroy.
Those who dared to walk around the Capitol that fateful day are still being apprehended and jailed. Many face multi-year prison sentences for such misdemeanor torts as “parading” or “obstructing an official proceeding.” Anyone associated with Donald Trump is fair game, as the names Peter Navarro, Rudy Giuliani, Steve Bannon, and Jeffrey Clark remind us.
At the top of that hit list is John Eastman, the distinguished constitutional scholar who made the unforgivable error of offering legal advice to President Trump in the turbulent aftermath of the 2020 election.
I have written about Eastman before, both in this space and elsewhere. He has had his life turned upside down. He was shuffled out of his position as dean of the Chapman Law School and has been treated as a pariah by colleagues in his profession. Anti-Trump protestors regularly congregate at the foot of his driveway—fortunately, a long one—to vilify him and his association with the Bad Orange Man.
Now the State Bar of California has announced that it has filed an official complaint of 11 charges against Eastman, alleging that he endeavored to “plan, promote, and assist then-President Trump in executing a strategy, unsupported by facts or law, to overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 presidential election by obstructing the count of electoral votes of certain states.”
Not a single one of those charges is true. Wikipedia and other left-wing megaphones keep repeating the canard that Trump and his advisors attempted to “overturn” the results of the 2020 election. No, they didn’t. As Eastman explains in meticulous detail in his response to the California Bar’s attack, what he did was review the election law in order to advise Trump and Vice President Mike Pence on the various legitimate strategies they could employ to address the rampant irregularities that had infected the 2020 election.
In other words, he did what lawyers in our adversarial legal system are supposed to do. He looked at the law and advised his client on what courses of action he could legally take in order to achieve his ends. Had he done otherwise, he would have betrayed the interests of his client.
Remember, Eastman was not operating in a void. The attorneys general of several states had raised serious questions about the integrity of an election in which COVID was used as cover to change voting rules by executive fiat rather than, as the 12th Amendment to the Constitution stipulates, through the legislative processes of the individual states. Those governors and secretaries of state who bypassed their legislatures to change their election laws acted...
