Lawyer Eastman promoted theory Pence could overturn election

The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol tipped its hand on Wednesday in a U.S. federal district court filing in Orange County, California.

The filing over the testimony of John Eastman, who has sued the committee to withhold turning over thousands of pages of his emails, suggests that when the bipartisan panel releases its final report this summer, it will recommend that U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland prosecute the former President Trump and several of his henchmen for criminal conspiracy to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, to defraud the United States and thus, to violate federal law banning the obstruction of an official proceeding.

Eastman’s emails — he’s a professor and founding director of the Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence, a public interest law firm affiliated with the conservative think tank Claremont Institute — allegedly provide further evidence of the former president’s conspiracy in the insurrection.

Eastman had advanced a fringe legal theory after Trump’s loss to Joe Biden, claiming Vice President Mike Pence could stop the certification of the 2020 election on Jan. 6, 2021. Pence after consultation with several people, including former Vice President Dan Quayle, who’s also from Indiana, concluded that he had no power under the Constitution to block certification of the election.

According to the court filing, Trump and his comrades entered into an agreement “to defraud the United States by interfering with the election certification process, disseminating false information about election fraud and pressuring state officials to alter state election results and federal officials to assist in that effort.”

Unfortunately, but understandably, Congress has no power to initiate a criminal investigation or to bring charges against Trump and his co-conspirators. That will remain in the purview of the Justice Department and federal prosecutors to determine whether Trump’s actions after the election amounted to crimes against the state.

Of course, such a referral to the DOJ would pressure Garland, who has sought to insulate the Justice Department from “partisan interference” after years in which Trump pressured the agency to prosecute political rivals and later to discredit the 2020 election.

Meanwhile, the racketeer-in-chief is facing an onslaught of criminal investigations and civil lawsuits — notably, the high-profile cases involving the former president pressuring Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, to change the state’s vote totals, as well as the civil and criminal investigations in New York revolving around more than a decade of Trump’s finances and taxes.

In addition, Trump faces more than a dozen civil lawsuits pursued by individuals and organizations for an array of alleged lawlessness, including defamation, civil conspiracy and causing assaults on Capitol police officers.

Trump very well could become the first former president to be indicted for crimes committed as commander-in-chief.

Gregg Barak is an emeritus professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Eastern Michigan University, co-founder and North American Editor of the Journal of White Collar and Corporate Crime and the author of “Criminology on Trump,” to be published in May.