By The opinion
Mar 28, 2024, 01:30 AM EDT
A California judge formally recommended that Lawyer John Eastman loses his license for his role in the legal effort to keep Donald Trump in power after losing the 2020 presidential election.
Eastman, a prominent figure in conservative legal circles and former clerk to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, played a key role in developing and supporting a plan to have states send lists of fake pro-Trump electors to Congress so that the then Vice President Mike Pence could unilaterally block or delay the certification of Joe Biden’s electoral victory.
Eastman will lose his ability to practice law in a few days, because The court’s decision involuntarily revokes his license.a, according to the opinion, cited by CNN.
“Eastman’s wrongdoing constitutes exceptionally serious ethical violations that warrant severe professional discipline,” California State Bar Court Judge Yvette Roland wrote in her opinion.
“Eastman made multiple patently false and misleading statements in court documents, in public comments heard by countless Americans and others about the conduct of the 2020 presidential election and Vice President Pence’s authority to refuse to count or delay the counting of rolls of electoral votes. duly certified on January 6, 2021.”
Judge Yvette Roland’s opinion came after a lengthy trial over Eastman’s actions while he led some of the efforts to have Donald Trump challenge his 2020 election loss.
The opinion serves as a recommendation to the California Supreme Court, which will ultimately decide whether to uphold or reject the punishment. Eastman will have the opportunity to appeal Roland’s ruling.
Even so, the judge’s opinion marks an important step in the consequences for lawyers who pushed false theories of election fraud on Trump’s behalf.
“Eastman failed in his primary duty of honesty and breached his ethical obligations by presenting falsehoods to bolster his legal arguments,” Roland wrote.
“In short, Eastman exhibited gross negligence by making false statements about the 2020 election without conducting any meaningful investigation or verification of the information on which he relied,” he wrote.
The judge also rejected Eastman’s efforts to argue that she believed the lies about voter fraud were true, writing that “Eastman cannot avoid guilt through his willful blindness, a willful blindness that amounts to Eastman’s actual knowledge that the accusations about hidden votes were false.”
Eastman was accused by the California Bar of harming the country by conspiring with Trump to disrupt the transfer of power, knowing that there was no valid legal theory to block Congress’ certification of Joe Biden’s electoral victory in the election. 2020, according to disciplinary case records.
The California bar’s findings about Eastman are separate from the criminal charges he faces in Georgia, where he is accused of participating in a 2020 election extortion conspiracy led by Trump. In that case, he has pleaded not guilty.
A disbarment in California would be upheld by other state bar associations across the country.
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