The State Bar filed 11 disciplinary charges against former Chapman Law School Dean John Eastman Jan. 26 for “false” and “misleading” statements about election fraud, including some he made during the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection.
“The 11 charges arise from allegations that Eastman engaged in a course of conduct to plan, promote, and assist then-President Donald 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,” the State Bar’s announcement of the charges reads.
California State Bar Chief Trial counsel George Cardona seeks to disbar Eastman, according to the State Bar’s release.
Eastman is the founding director of the Claremont Institute’s Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence, and served as dean at the Chapman University School of Law from 2007 to 2010.
Eastman responded to the State Bar’s investigation on his private newsletter shortly after the news of the charges was posted. He said the complaint is “filled with distortions, half truths, and outright falsehoods.” He said he will respond to each charge later, and for now relied on his response after the Bar announced its investigation in September. In that response, he said the advice he provided to Trump in a two-page memo mentioned by the State Bar’s notice of disciplinary charges was for purposes of discussion to explore possible scenarios of action on Jan. 6, 2021.
“There is nothing more sacrosanct to our American democracy than free and fair elections and the peaceful transfer of power,” said Cardona in the release. “For California attorneys, adherence to the U.S. and California Constitutions is their highest legal duty. The Notice of Disciplinary Charges alleges that Mr. Eastman violated this duty in furtherance of an attempt to usurp the will of the American people and overturn election results for the highest office in the land—an egregious and unprecedented attack on our democracy—for which he must be held accountable.”
The 35-page notice of disciplinary charges brings one charge of failure to support the Constitution and laws of the United States, two counts seeking to mislead a court, two counts of moral turpitude and six counts of moral turpitude-misrepresentation.
On the charge of failing to support the Constitution, the document says Eastman assisted Trump in executing a strategy for Trump to overturn the legitimate results of the election. He wrote a now-infamous two-page memo that told then-Vice President Mike Pence to take unilateral action to refuse to count the electoral votes from seven states that had voted for now-President Joe Biden. The memo told Pence to defer decision on those states until after they were finished finalizing election results from the other states. Then, Eastman said, Pence would announce that there were no valid electors from those seven states. This would allow Trump to win on a majority of appointed electors. If that plan did not work, Pence would allow the House of Representatives, which was Republican-controlled, to vote by state delegation.
Neither of these options were legally valid, the State Bar’s document says.
Eastman said on Jan. 2, 2021, that there was “massive evidence” of fraud involving absentee ballots in the election, according to the State Bar.
“Respondent knew, or was grossly negligent in not knowing, that these allegations regarding absentee ballot fraud were false and misleading, as respondent knew at the time that there was no evidence upon which a reasonable attorney would rely of absentee ballot fraud in any state in sufficient numbers that could have affected the outcome of the election,” the notice of charges said.
As to the counts to mislead a court, the court said that he filed false and misleading information about election results in a motion for the cases Texas v. Pennsylvania and Trump v. Kemp.
Read the charge notice here.
