I read the new 50-page John Eastman court filing so you don't have to

Eastman speaking at “Stop the Steal” rally on January 6

Let’s get the real news out of the way up front.  Trump attorney John Eastman, who is suing to keep over 600 emails out of the clutches of the January 6 Committee, made a court filing in the case late on Thursday in which he admitted regularly communicating with Trump in the months following Trump’s loss to Joe Biden in November of 2020.  Eastman told the court his communications with Trump were either in person, on the phone, or through what he called “six conduits” between himself and the then president.  Eastman’s court filing also reveals Trump’s personal involvement with those filing lawsuits on his behalf, including “two hand-written notes from former President Trump about information that he thought might be useful for the anticipated litigation.”  The Trump notes, or copies of them, are among the papers in Eastman’s possession he's trying to keep the January 6 Committee from seeing.

In a word, the Eastman filing is a doozy.  Reading like it was written by a team of second-year law students, the thing is a massive rehash of practically every case lawyers brought to challenge the outcome of the election on behalf of Trump – you remember those, don’t you?  Some 60 or 61 of the lawsuits were either dismissed out of hand, thrown out of court, or lost before they even reached the trial stage, but that didn’t seem to bother Eastman and whoever his lawyers are.  They cited case after case to prove something very interesting, as it turns out. 

Communications between lawyer and client are privileged, unless they involve discussions of a crime or discussions in furtherance of a crime.  The judge in the case is the one in California who recently wrote in one of his findings that Eastman and Trump “more likely than not” were involved in a conspiracy to illegally overturn the results of a legitimate election by obstructing the process by which Congress counts and certifies electoral ballots.  You see the problem:  in order for Eastman’s emails and other communications with Trump to be privileged, he has prove that they had good reason to believe that criminal activity had taken place in the election – in other words, that the election “was stolen” from Trump.  Thus the recitation of all those old cases that were filed with affidavits attesting to stuff like watching boxes filled with ballots being wheeled into the places where ballots were counted, presumably to stuff the ballot boxes with votes for Biden.  None of this took place, of course.  The affidavits were thrown out because real, actual election officials told courts that the “boxes” were all part of the normal way that ballots are gathered and counted.

But there they are again, all the charges filed by Rudolph Giuliani and his sidekick Sidney Powell and Eastman himself, regurgitated this time to “prove” that Trump (and Eastman) had a reasonable suspicion that election fraud had been committed and the election had been stolen from Trump:  Trump v Brad Raffensberger, Trump v Biden, Trump v Kemp, Trump v Wisconsin Elections Board…and on and on and on.

Not only the lawsuits, but emails between Eastman and state legislators counseling them that they should file alternate slates of electors for Trump in states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona, and Michigan, or they should just hold a vote in the state legislature and throw out the results of the election in their states and declare Trump the winner.

You know you’re in trouble in a legal filing when all the cases you cite are cases that were either lost or thrown out of court, but Eastman’s filing doesn’t stop with the lawsuits.  Prominent in his “proof” of election fraud that he and Trump were investigating and legitimately discussing as lawyer and client is the new documentary by certifiable right-wing loon Dinesh D’Souza called “2000 Mules” for some godforsaken reason.  The documentary presents “evidence” from GPS tracking data uncovered by D’Souza that somehow “proves” that election fraud was committed in states like Georgia and Pennsylvania.  The GPS “evidence” is so transparently phony that not even Fox News or Newsmax, normally reliable spewers of D’Souza’s previous garbage in his documentaries, won’t touch “2000 Mules.”  Not even right-wing fellow traveler Ben Shapiro, he formerly of Breitbart, now host of the podcast “The Ben Shapiro Show,” will talk about the D’Souza documentary. 

But it’s right there in the Eastman filing, big as life, the “revelations contained in a new documentary film by Dinesh D’Souza, 2000 Mules, supported by exhaustive analysis of geospatial cell phone data and drop box video surveillance footage, of a massive and illegal ballot harvesting scheme.”  You remember all those “drop box” conspiracies, don’t you?  The ones thrown out by 60 courts all over the country?  Well, they’re back, this time in “video surveillance footage” that apparently shows people dropping ballots in drop boxes…or doing something suspicious, anyway...like maybe voting.

The amazing thing about these guys is that the harder they fight to keep stuff out of the hands of the January 6 Committee, the more they reveal.  Here is the line from the legal filing that really caught my eye: “Seventy-two of the documents over which Dr. Eastman has asserted attorney-client privilege are communications between Dr. Eastman (or Dr. Eastman and other attorneys on the Trump legal team) and one or more of six conduits to or agents of the former President with whom Dr. Eastman dealt.”  There it is in black and white:  Eastman and some of the other legal-loons “communicating” through “agents” or “conduits” directly with Trump.

Why is Eastman babbling about this?  So he can cite six court decisions about “privileged persons” covered by the attorney-client privilege are the “agents of either the client or lawyer who facilitate communication between them.”  See the logic there?  In a legal court filing, you have to admit the communications in order to assert privilege over them.  That’s how we learned about the 50 documents in which Eastman communicated with seven state legislators, a party committeewoman, and “a citizen coordinating information sessions for state legislators.”  Remember those?  That was when Eastman got on group-calls with state legislators and told them it was within their power to throw out the results of the elections in their states.  That was “privileged” too, you see, because Eastman doesn’t want the January 6 Committee to see how bogus was the “legal advice” he was providing to Republican legislators around the country.

I’m sure the January 6 Committee already knew all of this, but wasn’t it nice of Eastman and his second-year law student “lawyers” to write this masterpiece so we could see it?  I can’t wait to see some of this stuff when it’s produced by the committee during its hearings which begin next month. You want to talk about must-see TV…

Watch this space.