Leaked Emails Showed Trump Lawyer Boasting ‘Wild Chaos’ on Jan. 6 Would Get Supreme Court to Hear Election Arguments

A new report on John Eastman’s emails shows he and other Donald Trump lawyers discussed whether the Supreme Court would hear the former president’s arguments for overturning the 2020 election if they came to fear an outbreak of “chaos.”

The New York Times examined a series of emails obtained by the January 6 Committee, and they focused on Eastman’s correspondence with a pro-Trump lawyer, Kenneth Chesebro. Eastman — who was a clerk for Justice Clarence Thomas before he took up pitching conspiratorial plans to overturn elections — told Chesebro he had insight into the Supreme Court’s internal deliberations, and they discussed how they might incorporate that information into their legal efforts against the 2020 results.

The emails show Eastman claiming that the Supreme Court was having a “heated fight” on whether to hear Team Trump’s argument about an election case in Wisconsin.

“So the odds are not based on the legal merits but an assessment of the justices’ spines, and I understand that there is a heated fight underway,” Eastman wrote, according to the Times report. Referring to the process by which at least four justices are needed to take up a case, he reportedly added, “For those willing to do their duty, we should help them by giving them a Wisconsin cert petition to add into the mix.”

From there, Chesebro responded that the odds of Supreme Court action before January 6 “will become more favorable if the justices start to fear that there will be ‘wild’ chaos on Jan. 6 unless they rule by then, either way.” The Times notes that this correspondence came days after Trump called upon his supporters to attend his January 6 rally in Washington, the same rally that turned into the mob that violently laid siege to the U.S. Capitol.

“Be there. Will be wild!” Trump said on Twitter at the time.

As the Times focused on the exchange between Eastman and Chesebro, they also corroborated the Washington Post’s report that Ginni Thomas, Clarence Thomas’ wife, was in communication with Eastman while he was pressuring Vice President Mike Pence to go along with his plan for overturning the election. Mrs. Thomas was already under scrutiny between her conspiracy theories, correspondence with former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, and Jan 6 rally attendance, but the Post’s report on the Eastman emails suggests her election overturn efforts “were more extensive than previously known.”