LOS ANGELES—As the sunlight creeps in the windows of a downtown hotel lobby just blocks away from a courtroom in California, constitutional scholar John Eastman is unfazed, even jovial, in spite of having just spent 10 weeks on trial defending his license to practice law—and in spite of a ruling from a State Bar of California judge recommending that his law license be revoked.
Last summer, the State Bar charged Mr. Eastman, the former dean of Chapman University Law School, with 11 counts of misconduct related to his role in representing former President Donald Trump after the 2020 presidential election.
But Mr. Eastman told The Epoch Times in an exclusive interview on April 5 that he has no regrets about representing President Trump or alleging fraud and questioning the election results.
“What I saw at the time raised real serious questions in my mind about the validity of the election,” he said.
Since then, Mr. Eastman said, his investigation has confirmed his suspicions “tenfold.”
Mr. Eastman, who was accused of not having the evidence to back up those allegations, said he will appeal Judge Yvette Roland’s March 27 ruling recommending disbarment, but in the meantime, his law license has been suspended on “involuntary inactive enrollment,” which means he can’t practice law in California.
He’s still an active member of the District of Columbia Bar, where he is currently representing U.S. Reps. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) in a federal case against the California cities of Anaheim and Riverside for allegedly conspiring to suppress and shut down their political rallies, infringing on their constitutional rights to free speech.
“Some federal courts, as long as you’re licensed someplace, you’re allowed to continue. If you’re suspended in any place, even if you have active licenses elsewhere, there is a process to go through on whether they’re going to suspend you as well,” Mr. Eastman said.
In 2020, Mr. Eastman was invited to join an election integrity working group, formed in anticipation of post-election litigation in connection with the presidential election, organized at President Trump’s request, and on Dec. 6, 2020, Mr. Eastman received a formal engagement letter for legal services defining the scope of the agreement.
Democrat-appointed Judge Roland ruled that Mr. Eastman broke ethics rules by advancing President Trump’s challenges to the integrity of the 2020 election.
The judge stated in her ruling that “despite compelling evidence against him, ... Eastman remains defiant, refusing to acknowledge any impropriety whatsoever in his actions surrounding his efforts to dispute the 2020 presidential election results.”
“His lack of insight into the wrongfulness of his misconduct is deeply troubling,” she wrote.
“Eastman continues to hold the view that his statements were factually and legally justified. He demonstrated disdain for these proceedings by characterizing them as a political persecution, claiming that the disciplinary charges against him contained false and misleading statements, and that those who brought them should themselves be disbarred.
“[His] complete denial of wrongdoing, coupled with his attempts to discredit legitimate disciplinary proceedings are concerning.”
Mr. Eastman stopped short of criticizing the judge, but he noted that Rachel Alexander, a reporter at the Arizona Sun who covered the trial extensively, pointed out several examples of bias in the case and questioned the rationale behind the ruling, which dismissed the evidence Mr. Eastman brought forth.
“You would think that the ruling would at least confront the evidence and explain why it wasn’t sufficient,” he said. “What was the point? Not even mentioned!”
Mr. Eastman said he has solid grounds for appeal because Judge Roland dispensed with the First Amendment arguments “without really grappling with binding U.S. Supreme Court precedent.”
“This is an unprecedented move. It was initiated by hyper-partisan leftists that are trying to attack President Trump and anybody that supported him. This is a weaponization of our judicial system and our bar disciplinary processes that has never occurred in our history before,” he said.
“We even had former California Supreme Court Justice Janice Rogers Brown designated as a witness to talk about that, and she was prohibited from testifying as a witness.”
Mr. Eastman drew from evidence provided by Garland Favorito, a retired information technology professional and founder of VoterGA, a nonpartisan, nonprofit election integrity group.
Mr. Favorito is the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit filed on Dec. 23, 2020, that challenged the authenticity of 147,000 absentee ballots cast in Georgia’s Fulton County.
He discovered “thousands of ballots that were duplicated and counted multiple times” in deep blue areas of Atlanta in violation of state law, Mr. Eastman said.
“We also had Michael Gableman, former Supreme Court justice of Wisconsin ... who was retained by the Legislature to conduct an investigation, and they discovered hundreds of thousands of illegal ballots,” he said.
Mr. Gableman uncovered alleged nursing home fraud, which Mr. Eastman said accounts for much more than the 20,000-vote margin of victory for President Joe Biden, and voter turnout rates in nursing homes went from 20 percent to 30 percent historically to nearly 100 percent, including from within memory care wings.
“Many of the ballots are in the same handwriting, so the illegality opened the door for fraud, which Gableman proved ... and it affected way more than 20,000 ballots,” he said.
“There’s no question Wisconsin was stolen. To this day, there are 120,000 more ballots than voters in Pennsylvania, a state where the margin was 80,000.”
Americans used to go to a local polling place such as a neighborhood community room at the library or the local church to vote, but in 2020, mail-in ballots were counted in much larger facilities in big cities such as Atlanta, Detroit, and Philadelphia where it would be “much easier to sneak in a pallet of ballots,” he said.
Although ballot harvesting is legal in California, it was illegal in many states during the 2020 election.
‘Jiu-Jitsu Move’
Mr. Eastman, who has held his California law license for more than 26 years, seems undaunted and unapologetic, holding steadfast to his belief he had every right to do what he did.His children are proud of him for taking a stand and for his courage and intellectual fortitude, he said, and although he is up to the challenge, he said he would “much rather be doing other things.”
“I’ve been involved in Supreme Court cases for over 20 years, designed a litigation strategy for the Claremont Institute to bring back a lot of original meaning of the Constitution, and a lot of my work is coming to fruition, and now I’m on defense instead of helping on the offensive,” he said.
The use of the disciplinary system to go after political opponents for doing nothing other than what lawyers are obligated ethically to do on behalf of their clients is lawfare, Mr. Eastman said.
“It’s an abuse of the legal system ... and a complete violation of separation of powers,” he said. “This is the kind of thing that banana republics do, or Stalinist Russia did. It’s not the kind of thing that America has ever done.”
He also criticized the corporate media for having entrenched narratives.
“They’ve got a narrative, and anything that doesn’t fit that narrative, they either distort or don’t cover it at all,” he said.
He said he thinks one of the reasons he has come under such a “vicious attack” is that he has “the credibility” to call out the media.
“I like the phrase that Rush Limbaugh came up with for the media,“ he said. ”He called them the drive-by media. [They] drive by and take potshots without ever having to defend the position [they’re] taking.”
The left, he said, is trying to tear him down to avoid examining the evidence.
“It’s the combination of the credibility: my credentials, my constitutional expertise, my tenacity, and the fact that I’m telling the truth,” he said. “That’s why when I put on true evidence in my bar trial, they’ve got to completely destroy it because what it means, if I’m right about this, is that they stole the election.”
So far, Democrats have successfully made it appear as though President Trump was trying to steal the election, Mr. Eastman said.
“You’ve gotta hand it to ’em. That’s quite a jiu-jitsu move,” he said.
De-Banked, Death Threats
Since he decided to represent President Trump, Mr. Eastman and his family have also been harassed and threatened by leftist activists in his hometown of Sante Fe, New Mexico.Vandals buried four-inch steel spikes into his dirt driveway, which blew two sets of tires on his vehicle, he said.
“We had people piling dog crap at the foot of our mailbox,” he said. “We had people spray painting on the road leading to our house with a big arrow, our address, my name, and basically doxing me, encouraging people to commit acts of vandalism against us.”
Three to eight protesters gathered every day at the end of the block for a year, Mr. Eastman said.
“We get death threats,” he said.
Mr. Eastman has referred some of these threats to the FBI, and the state police have stepped up patrols near his residence, he said.
“We live down the road a little bit from the governor’s mansion, so they’re regularly running patrols for the New Mexico governor, and so they ... put us on the patrol route,” he said.
Mr. Eastman has not only been threatened with disbarment but he has also been allegedly de-banked by Bank of America and USAA.
“We’ve been 40-year customers of Bank of America, and last September, they sent us a letter saying that they’d made the decision not to continue to do business with us and were closing our accounts,” Mr. Eastman said.
The bank provided a number to call for an explanation, but when Mr. Eastman called, no such explanation was given.
“It’s just a recording that says: ‘If you’ve gotten a letter saying we’re canceling your accounts, our explanation is we don’t give any explanations. Thank you very much, goodbye,’” he said.
Two months later, he received a similar letter from USAA, which had become the Eastmans’ primary bank, saying it was closing their accounts, with a similar recorded message saying its policy is not to give any further information.
“They closed the account,” he said. “USAA was really surprising because their clientele is all military or children of military. My wife’s father was in the Navy in World War II, and in the Marines in the Korean War, and that’s why we were eligible to have accounts there, and they just canceled them without any explanation whatsoever.”
His Early Life
Growing up, Mr. Eastman, who was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, moved from state to state as his father was transferred with every promotion at his job with Eastman-Kodak (no relation).“They had a policy: You never supervised your immediate past colleagues, so every little rung up meant a transfer. So we were like army brats. We’d do two years here and three years there,” he said.
He lived in Washington state, Kentucky, New Jersey, upstate New York, and Texas before moving to Orange County, California, to attend grad school.
By the 1980 election, Republican presidential nominee Ronald Reagan was “making sense” to Mr. Eastman, who said he remains a “Reagan conservative.”
Mr. Eastman graduated from high school in Texas and ended up at the University of Dallas.
Near the end of the campaign, Mr. Reagan made a whistle-stop tour to Dallas for rallies and fundraisers, where Mr. Eastman was the Dallas County Republican Party volunteer chairman. But as a 20-year-old student, that meant “you’re the guy that has the Secret Service clearance badge to load the luggage onto the plane,” he said.
The Monday night after the weekend event, future President Reagan and future First Lady Nancy Reagan were preparing to fly on the campaign jet to Century City, California, for the election night watch party the next day, but their flight clearance had been delayed by 45 minutes.
Mr. Eastman recalled that when Mr. Reagan noticed him waiting on the tarmac, he said to him: “So, young fellow, every time I turn around the last couple of days, you’re there working the line or working the luggage. Why don’t you come up and have a cup of coffee and doughnuts with me and Nancy?”
Mr. Eastman worked for the Reagan administration near the end of the last term but always regretted never getting a photograph with President Reagan, so in 1992, he wrote the former president and asked him if he’d mind posing for a picture with him and his wife in Century City.
In the letter, Mr. Eastman recounted his memory of meeting the Reagans in Dallas.
“He remembered the event on the tarmac. He was very gracious,” Mr. Eastman said.
But on the drive from Diamond Bar to meet President Reagan in Century City, an oil tanker crashed on the CA-60 highway delaying traffic for an hour and a half, and he couldn’t call the former president until he finally reached a gas station that had a payphone. When he did call, “very apologetically,” President Reagan was kind enough to wait with the photographer.
“The first thing he does is apologize because he’s not in his formal suit-and-tie,” even though he was still “dressed to the nines” in a more casual sport coat because he was heading to an event at a country club, Mr. Eastman recalled.
Double Standards
The double standards in today’s political power structure are blatant and have reached the point at which most conservatives won’t question the state, he said.“You’re not allowed to ask, unless you’re a Democrat,” he said. “Hillary Clinton is still out on the stump saying that the 2016 election was stolen from her and they perpetrated the biggest political fraud in American history with illegal money laundering through their law firm to pay for the Fusion GPS, false story on the Russian dossier. And then they used that false story, which everybody knew was false, including the higher-ups at the FBI and the Department of Justice. They used that and doctored the evidence ... to get FISA warrants to spy on the opposing political campaign.”
Yet those who perpetrated this plot against President Trump haven’t been charged with any crimes or threatened with disbarment and lawsuits, he said.
“They spied on him during the campaign. They continued to spy on him after he won, and they continued to spy on him after he was inaugurated. This is the biggest political scandal in our nation’s history,” Mr. Eastman said. “That was an attempted coup, and they’re all off the hook because the power structure supports them.”
Deborah Pauly, whose Conservative Patriots of Orange County group hosted a rally for Mr. Eastman in August 2023, told The Epoch Times that what the media, left-wing activists, and even some Republicans have done to Mr. Eastman and his family is “flat out evil.”
Her group supports Mr. Eastman’s efforts to protect the United States’ constitutional form of government, she said.
“What is happening here—not just with Dr. John Eastman, but in other cases, too—is a direct threat to our form of government,” she said. “Anyone who cares about our Constitution should be very concerned.”
Cancel culture has gone from censorship on social media to silencing doctors who dared express “divergent thought” during the COVID-19 pandemic, and “attacking the nation’s top constitutional law attorney,” she said.
Ms. Pauly said that although Mr. Eastman is “standing strong,” the threats to his means of livelihood and the safety of his family have prevented others from speaking out about election integrity.
“All he did was put forth an untested theory,” she said. “The fact that someone who is so highly regarded as a constitutional law authority is being silenced and subjected to great humiliation and great pain and suffering quite frankly—not just in his professional life, but in the personal toll that it takes on someone to be under attack like this—is significant.”
The United States’ success as a nation hinges on the balance of power among the three equal branches of government and a balance between the states and the federal government, but it is up to the people and the media to keep that balance, Ms. Pauly said.
“That’s not happening for many reasons, and that’s a real problem. Everything is out of whack,” she said.
It’s infuriating to watch other attorneys and conservative leaders who once cozied up to Mr. Eastman when he transformed Chapman University Law School into a nationally recognized program turn their backs on him now, Ms. Pauly said.
“That, to me, is the most repugnant part of it,” she said. “They’re part of the swamp.”
Mr. Eastman said the federal government has become more authoritarian under the Biden administration.
“We’ve gotten to the point where when the government speaks, you better bend your knee and repeat what they say or they’ll try to destroy you. It doesn’t matter whether it’s the election or CRT [critical race theory] or DEI [diversity, equity, and inclusion] or vaccines or masks or whatever the hot issue is; the government has spoken, and we’re all supposed to just act like little sheep and obey,” he said.
The government’s actions have violated the First Amendment, he said.
Mr. Eastman said he believes his legal challenge is a calling to push back against this oppression and threat to self-governance and freedom, which he said is part of a spiritual and cultural war happening in the United States.
“This country is on the precipice of losing what we’ve had,” he said. “I’m on the ramparts. I’ve been cast at the forefront of this battle. ... It’s one of the greatest honors of my life.”
All of his life choices and experiences have equipped him to confront this battle.
“Anybody of faith would be remiss in not recognizing the hand of providence in that. I do think it’s a spiritual battle,” he said.
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