Federal Judge Says Trump Knowingly Touted False Election Data ‘In Court,’ Orders Eastman to Surrender Emails
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A federal judge ordered a former Department of Justice official to hand over emails to the House select Jan. 6. committee. In doing so, he wrote that former President Donald Trump knowingly promoted false information about the 2020 election in court and in public.
On Wednesday, Judge David Carter of the Central District of California ordered former Trump DOJ official John Eastman to submit four emails to the committee after he tried to claim the correspondence is covered by executive privilege.
Eastman authored an ill-fated post-election plot to overturn the results after Trump spent weeks falsely claiming the election had been stolen from him. The FBI seized Eastman’s phone in June as part of a criminal investigation.
“The Court finds that these four documents are sufficiently related to and in furtherance of the obstruction crime,” Carter wrote in an 18-page opinion, which described some of the measures Trump took to stay in power:
Four emails demonstrate an effort by President Trump and his attorneys to press false claims in federal court for the purpose of delaying the January 6 vote. The evidence confirms that this effort was undertaken in at least one lawsuit filed in Georgia.
On December 4, 2020, President Trump and his attorneys alleged in a Georgia state court action that Fulton County improperly counted a number of votes including 10,315 deceased people, 2,560 felons, and 2,423 unregistered voters. President Trump and his attorneys then decided to contest the state court proceeding in federal court, and discussed incorporating by reference the voter fraud numbers alleged in the state petition. On December 30, 2020, Dr. Eastman relayed “concerns” from President Trump’s team “about including specific numbers in the paragraph dealing with felons, deceased, moved, etc.” The attorneys continued to discuss the President’s resistance to signing “when specific numbers were included.” As Dr. Eastman explained the next day:
Although the President signed a verification for [the state court filing] back on Dec. 1, he has since been made aware that some of the allegations (and evidence proffered by the experts) has been inaccurate. For him to sign a new verification with that knowledge (and incorporation by reference) would not be accurate.
President Trump and his attorneys ultimately filed the complaint with the same inaccurate numbers without rectifying, clarifying, or otherwise changing them. President Trump, moreover, signed a verification swearing under oath that the incorporated, inaccurate numbers “are true and correct” or “believed to be true and correct” to the best of his knowledge and belief.
Carter concluded by stating the emails demonstrate Trump knew the claims he made about election fraud in court and in public were not true.
“The emails show that President Trump knew that the specific numbers of voter fraud were wrong but continued to tout those numbers, both in court and to the public,” the judge wrote. “The Court finds that these emails are sufficiently related to and in furtherance of a conspiracy to defraud the United States.”
