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Feb. 22, 2025 - Epoch Times
18:37
How I Was Targeted with Lawfare: Former Trump Lawyer John Eastman
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Well, John Eastman, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.
Well, thank you for having me on.
It's a real pleasure to be with you.
So, you're one of the few people, I think, to have an actual dilemma named after you.
The Eastman Dilemma, okay?
Tell me about the Eastman Dilemma.
Well, you know, it was, somebody wanted to, Hollywood wanted to do a...
Documentary about all the lawfare I've been dealing with.
And I was happy to oblige because I think the story needs to be told.
And Americans really need to understand this aggressive weaponization of our criminal justice system that the Democrats did to go after their political opponents.
And so the Eastman dilemma, lawfare or justice, I think does a fabulous job exposing that.
And when we premiered it at Mar-a-Lago, President Trump came and watched it with us.
And that was just great fun.
But what is the dilemma?
Well, the question is, did I have a dilemma?
And when you see the film, you say, no, Eastman never had a dilemma.
The dilemma is, to my colleagues in the legal profession, are they going to sit idly by and watch this law affair go on without speaking up against it?
Or are they going to join with me and fight for justice?
You're also involved in a whole bunch of legal challenges as we speak, like working on them.
So I want to get into that before we go there.
Just kind of give me a picture of what you faced.
Well, you know, one of the greatest examples of psychological projection I've ever seen was when the Democrats said, if Trump wins, he'll weaponize the Department of Justice.
And I was sitting there saying, what have I been dealing with the last four years?
I was an unindicted co-conspirator in Jack Smith's criminal indictment against President Trump.
I'm indicted in Georgia and Arizona.
They've suspended my bar license out in California or made it inactive while we're appealing that decision.
It's an outrage because I gave advice to the president of the United States to challenge illegality in the 2020 election.
The Georgia prosecutors and the Arizona prosecutors don't seem to have gotten the message from the last election.
And they're doubling down and they're still fighting hard to keep those prosecutions alive.
So what was the advice that you gave?
Well, first thing was we got to bring challenges in the courts.
To talk about the illegality.
Because Article II of the Constitution quite clearly gives the sole power to the state legislatures to choose the rules, to direct the manner for choosing electors.
And in each of those swing states, the election officials refused to follow the rules.
That made it a fraudulent or a filed election.
And I said with a failed election, the legislatures need to weigh back in and try and ascertain what would have happened if the rules had been followed.
And my advice to Vice President Pence...
Pence, or my urging to Pence, was to accept requests from those state legislators to let them decide what the impact of that illegality was.
And by the way, I specifically wrote, if the impact is smaller than Biden margin, then that would be useful to know as well.
And then we could be more confident that Biden had actually won.
But Pence said, I'm not doing anything.
And so, you know, ultimately, these are all questions that you were expecting to be answered in the courts, right?
And the courts, they just took a pass.
In the movie...
Larry Lessig, prominent Harvard Law School professor, says he just don't think the courts did the work that was required.
They didn't look at the evidence.
They didn't look at the legal arguments.
They just thought, and he kind of gives them a bone and says, well, I think they just didn't think they had enough time.
I think it was worse than that.
They didn't want to address the significant illegality that occurred.
But the problem is, by leaving that stuff unaddressed...
You've got this open sore on the American body politic that will never heal because too many people knew there was stuff that went on that was fraudulent, that was illegal, and nobody did anything about it.
Right.
Right.
And so you can't even have the discussion of whether it was enough to shift things or not because you didn't address the core questions.
That's kind of what you're arguing here, right?
That's right.
And I think the American people deserve to have an answer.
And win or lose, they would feel more comfortable with the result.
But when you refuse to let people raise those questions and just pretend that what the government has spoken is true...
George Orwell wrote this in his famous book, 1984. You know, the government has said two plus two is five, and you've got to not only repeat the lie, but you've got to come to believe it.
Well, Americans are not too keen on being, you know, spoon-fed lies and have to repeat them.
And unfortunately, we didn't get a chance to actually vet those claims to see whether they were true or false.
And there are way too many people, myself included, that think the government's claims that this was the most secure election in our history.
It's just laughably false.
Lawrence Lessig is not someone I necessarily expected to see in the film.
He's an honest scholar on the left, but he thinks the importance of the alternate electors meeting and voting was critical.
Congress doesn't have any authority over the choosing of a president.
The founders did that by design, because if Congress got to pick the president, you would destroy separation of powers.
But the one authority they do have is to set the date that the electors meet and vote.
And the Constitution requires that that date be the same throughout the United States.
So if you've got pending challenges to elections that go your way...
And your electors have not met on Electors Day, quite arguably, those votes can't be considered.
This is why John Kennedy's electors in Hawaii in 1960 met and voted, even though Nixon had been certified as the winner, because there was an election challenge pending.
And when the election challenge went Kennedy's way, those electoral votes were there to be certified.
If they hadn't voted, there wouldn't be anything to certify.
And Lessig is honest enough to say that's what's required under the Constitution, and that's what Eastman was advising.
And I really appreciate him standing up.
I'm sure he got some heat from his colleagues on the Harvard faculty.
It was an honest thing to do, and I applaud him for it.
What is the status of...
You suggested that there's still some of these cases that are being played out.
What is your general situation?
We've got an appeal hearing in March in the California bar proceeding, and I have no idea what the appellate court or the California Supreme Court is going to do, but the criminal matters in Georgia and Arizona are still very much alive.
Fannie Willis in...
Georgia has been disqualified, but she continues to prosecute the case, filing appeals on other counts that have already been dismissed.
And she's still acting as if she's in charge, even though she's been disqualified.
So we're challenging that.
But even if the disqualification is upheld, there are other county DAs that are just chomping at the bit to get this case and continue it, to make their name on the Democrat-based side of the aisle.
So it's not going away anytime soon.
What I hope Kash Patel, now the FBI director, is going to do is investigate the prosecutors.
Because in my view, what's been going on here is a nationwide conspiracy to go after people for the exercise of their constitutional rights, right to speech, right to assembly, right to petition the government for redress of grievances.
And that's a federal felony.
And I think Kash Patel can investigate it.
And if he determines it's warranted.
Wrap it up with a bow and hand it over to Pam Bondi to prosecute.
Fascinating.
And what would be the determining factor whether a case like this would go ahead, would become legitimate?
The terms of a conspiracy.
We have a predicate, I guess, is the term, right?
Was there a meeting of the minds to violate people's constitutional rights through the exercise of this conspiracy?
And I think Cash is going to be able to prove that, particularly if he gets all the email and the text message traffic back and forth.
I'll give you one example.
The special prosecutor that Fannie Willis hired down in Georgia, Nathan Wade, he met a whole day with the White House.
And I believe under oath he said, I didn't talk about the Georgia case.
But it was reported down in Georgia that in fact he billed the Georgia case for that meeting.
So if that's true...
Then we've got the White House coordinating with a state prosecutor to bring charges against the White House's political opponent.
This is an egregious abuse of our criminal justice system, and it's a deprivation of constitutional rights, and that's a federal felony.
And that could be addressed?
Earnestly and honestly in the courts.
It could.
And people said, oh, it's vengeance.
No, it's not vengeance.
What went on here was unprecedented in American history.
This distortion and overreach of federal criminal or state criminal statutes to go after the political opposition.
The people that did that need to be held accountable for two things.
One, If they violated people's constitutional rights, they should be brought to justice.
But two, a very strong message needs to be sent so that nobody will ever entertain doing that again.
Well, I guess we'll see what happens, right?
Let's talk about the work you're doing now.
So there's some challenges around spending.
Nancy Pelosi famously said in response to a question years ago, She said, well, Congress can spend for whatever it wants.
Well, anybody can look at the Constitution.
It's Article I, Section 8, First Clause, gives Congress the power to raise taxes for only two purposes, to pay the debts of the United States and to provide for the common defense and general welfare.
And the people that wrote that language meant things in the national interest, not in the local interest.
So common defense is the U.S. Army.
Local defense is the Long Beach Police Force, right?
And the Constitution doesn't authorize us to tax the folks of Rhode Island to pay for the Long Beach, California Police Force.
And a lot of the spending that we've grown accustomed to over the last century has been in violation of that limitation on the spending power.
Congress passed in 1974 against a weakened Richard Nixon, the Impoundment Control Act.
Any time a president wants to not spend money that Congress has authorized, he has to ask Congress's permission.
And if they don't give it, the money has to be spent.
And I've taken the position, an article in The Federalist a couple months ago, Saying the President has an independent obligation to uphold the Constitution.
And if the spending that he's trying to cut violates that limit on spending in the Constitution, then he has an independent obligation not to make those expenditures, not to allow that money to be spent, and he doesn't need to ask Congress's permission to do so.
Fascinating, right?
I mean, all the things in the last few weeks that I've learned about spending, how it works, you know, just the idea that in the Treasury there isn't really like credible audits happening.
So, I mean, this is your legal argument.
Like someone presumably is coming from the other side and saying, no, John.
We should be able to spend whatever we need.
That's right.
And I just say, look at the language of the Constitution.
It's very clear.
I often joke, the Constitution is written so clearly, even lawyers should be able to understand it.
I think a lot of people appreciate that joke.
Tell me about birthright citizenship.
So birthright citizenship, this is another major area of my scholarship over the last 20 years.
And I'll give you a good example of how simplistic the other side has made it.
Senator Hirono from Hawaii, a couple weeks ago, after the president signed his executive order, she found it to be an egregious, unconstitutional action.
She says, because the Constitution is clear, anybody born in the United States dies.
That's what she posted on her Twitter account.
Well, the dot, dot, dot is the key language that she just wrote out of the Constitution.
It's all persons born here and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.
And for those that wrote it, it didn't mean just being here and subject to our laws while you're here.
They called that partial or territorial jurisdiction.
It meant a complete jurisdiction.
Do you owe allegiance to this country?
Have you become part of our political community with our consent?
If temporary visitors, they specifically said, are not covered by that mandatory automatic citizenship.
And if temporary legal visitors are not covered, then clearly temporary illegal visitors are not covered either.
And that's all President Trump's order does.
It says those two characters, those two categories of people were never understood to be granted automatic citizenship by the 14th Amendment.
And so we need to restore the original meaning of that citizenship clause.
Okay, that's fascinating.
I mean, so you've been working on this for 20 years?
Yeah, yeah.
So how does that work?
And so before we continue, actually, tell me about your background, because this is the other thing.
You know, you were really...
You know, there's a lot of really negative things said about you, including that you're not competent.
So I want to give you a chance to tell me what you've done over these last 20 years and, of course, much longer.
So if they don't think I'm competent, why do they avoid debating me on these issues?
So I was at the University of Chicago last Monday to talk about birthright citizenship, and they were so outraged.
The faculty held another meeting to have their two experts, who don't know anything about this issue, talk about all the ways that I was wrong, but they wouldn't actually...
I could say it in front of me where I could challenge them.
I have a PhD in the political philosophy of the American founding.
I have a law degree from one of the top law schools in the country, the University of Chicago.
I clerked at the Supreme Court of the United States with Justice Clarence Thomas, probably the greatest originalist judge on the court today.
And I've been doing this for 25 years.
I created my own public interest law firm to advance the originalist understanding of the Constitution in major constitutional cases.
Before the Supreme Court, and I've been involved in over 200 cases there.
The Obamacare cases, the takings case, the Kelo case, the property rights cases, the separation of powers cases, the federalism cases.
The limits on the Commerce Clause cases.
I was even hired by the state of South Dakota to press this argument on the Spending Clause 15 years ago.
So, you know, the state legislatures, the state governments are recognizing I'm the expert, the go-to person on this.
And I think that's one of the reasons why I'm so targeted by the lawfare.
They want to keep me on my heels so that I can't weigh in with these originalist constitutional arguments that are persuading the courts.
You know, it's so fascinating because, well, for starters, you know a little bit about the Constitution.
I think hopefully no one would dispute that.
The other thing that's coming to my mind, you know, as you describe this birthright citizenship reality, it actually changes how I think about it because it's not that there is no birthright.
It's a very specific thing.
The birthright is a very specific thing.
That's what I hear.
Yes.
Right?
Well, and, you know, look, the people that are on the other side of this battle say we've had what's called youth solely, the old English common law rule.
If you're born on the king's soil, you were the king's subject.
And they said, well, we've had that our whole history.
Well, the youth solely ruled, if you were born on the king's soil...
You owed allegiance to the king forever.
You could never renounce it.
Look at the closing paragraph of our Declaration of Independence.
These united colonies are and of right ought to be free and independent states, and we hereby renounce all allegiance to the king.
That was the most eloquent repudiation of that old common law rule ever written.
And that was at the moment of our founding that we repudiated that doctrine.
So what's next for you?
Well, I'm still fighting Georgia and Arizona.
I hope we win the appeal on the California bar thing.
Right now, my license is in inactive status, so I'm not allowed to practice in the state courts in California, and several of the federal district courts have followed suit.
But happily, the Supreme Court has not.
They sent me a letter.
After the original recommendation for disbarment, he said, we know that's just an interim step.
Thank you for advising us.
Let us know if they actually take that action.
But in the meantime, I'm still allowed to practice before the Supreme Court of the United States.
Not in the Superior Court in Los Angeles, but I can practice before the Supreme Court of the United States.
Because they understand what a farce that bar proceeding has been.
And hopefully the appellate courts will fix it.
I mean, I won't attribute kangaroo court to that proceeding.
But everybody that watched it was calling it a kangaroo court and coming up with memes and all that stuff.
And I think if one were to look at it, that might be the conclusion one would draw.
Well, and with the Supreme Court, one would think that, you know, 200 arguments, odd arguments being done probably contribute to your reputation there.
Yeah.
I've not argued 200 times, but I've been involved in 200 of the cases.
I just want to correct that so nobody says fact check.
But I have argued there.
But our briefs became known for being the best originalist briefs that the court would look at.
I've had several justices tell me.
Justice Alito gave a big speech and said, when I see a brief come in from John Eastman and his Center for the Constitutional Jurisprudence, it's the first one I look at.
Because if they want to understand the history and the political philosophy that led to those clauses to give them meaning, we're the ones that are putting that information before the court.
Well, John Eastman, it's such a pleasure to have had you on.
Thank you.
Thank you so much for having me.
And thanks to your audience for all that you do.
By the way, if they can want to watch the film, it's still available for free streaming at eastmandilemma.com.
And they can go read more about it at givesandgo.com slash eastman, where we post a lot of information.
Fantastic.
Thank you.
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