Former Trump Lawyer John Eastman Opens Up About Why He’s Not Backing Down in Fight Against Indictments, Disbarment

[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW] John Eastman is founding director of the Claremont Institute’s Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence. He is also a former law professor at Chapman University’s Dale E. Fowler School of Law and served as a law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas in the 1990s. He has represented over a dozen parties before the U.S. Supreme Court.

His life took a sharp turn when he helped President Donald Trump challenge the integrity of the 2020 election results.

He is facing disbarment and criminal charges in Georgia and Arizona. He has pleaded not guilty.

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

Jan Jekielek:

John Eastman, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.

John Eastman:

Thanks very much for having me. I’m looking forward to this discussion.

Mr. Jekielek:

Let’s talk about what’s called the Eastman Dilemma, of course, the name of a film, of which you’re a central character. But what is the status of the realities around the Eastman Dilemma right now? 

Mr. Eastman:

I want to first point out that with the Eastman dilemma title, I never had any dilemma. I had lots of evidence of illegality in the 2020 election, and I wanted to stand up and try to shine a light on that. The dilemma in the title of the documentary, I think, is for my colleagues in the legal profession. Are they going to stand by and let the lawfare attacks against me and others go on unchallenged, or are they going to stand with me to fight against it? That’s where the dilemma is. 

You know what’s really interesting? Like, I thought the dilemma was something different. I thought the dilemma was, as a lawyer, when faced with the reality of lawfare that might happen to you, do you take the case? Do you go for it? I thought that was the dilemma. That may well be. And I never had any dilemma about that. 

So that’s why I say I think the dilemma for my colleagues in the profession is, what do they do? And it’s very clear that the groups that are bringing the bar challenges and urging the criminal prosecution of Trump’s lawyers for challenging illegality in the 2020 election are very clear that they want to not only disbar all these lawyers but also send such a message to other lawyers that nobody will ever take on these kinds of cases again. And so the real dilemma is going to be, are you willing to stand up for truth?

Look, we’ve had a history in our legal profession in this country, a celebrated history, going back to John Adams representing the British soldiers of the Boston Massacre. He was roundly attacked for that, but he stood for the principle that everybody is entitled to representation. We’ve lost that in recent years here, and I think the dilemma is for my colleagues in the profession: are they going to recover that noble aspiration of the law? 

Everybody’s entitled to legal representation, and there are way too many people that are either cowering under the threats or joining with the people making the threats. What they’re trying to do is silence one side of an adversarial system and impose on us a government narrative in the election cases—that the election was perfect, nothing to see here—and that anybody who dared challenge it will be targeted. And the end result of that will be a skewing of the adversarial system of justice. 

We have an adversarial system under the theory that if you have strong advocacy on both sides, that’s one way to get to the truth. If you shut out and silence one side, all you have is a government narrative with nobody willing to stand up and say that narrative is false. As I say in the film, I sometimes feel like the little boy being the only one willing to stand up and say the king has no clothes. 

If nobody’s willing to stand up and challenge a blatantly false narrative, it takes root and all of a sudden takes on the mantra as if it’s true. The rule of law requires that we aim, in this adversarial system, to get to the truth. And if you cut that out, what you’re left with may not be the truth. In fact, it’s very likely not going to be the truth. 

Mr. Jekielek:

Let’s go back to the 2020 election. Let’s dare to a little bit, and let’s just talk about what right now, looking back, were the things that needed to be assessed?

Mr. Eastman:

Article II of the federal Constitution makes very clear that the power to direct the manner in which presidential electors are chosen is vested exclusively in the state legislatures. And throughout the first third of our nation’s history, most of the states chose the electors by the legislature themselves. Eventually, they went to popular vote, but that meant that the election code became the manner for choosing those presidential electors that the legislature had adopted. 

And what we saw in 2020, in a number of instances in the swing states, is that non-legislative officials—county clerks, secretaries of state, even lower court judges—altered the rules of the election code without legislative approval. And that meant the presidential election was conducted in a manner not authorized by the legislature. And that made it illegal. At that point, the question becomes, was the illegality so great that it affected the outcome of the election? Now, in my view, whether it affected the outcome of the election or not didn’t matter. It was still an unconstitutional election, and the power devolved back to the legislature to decide what to do about it. 

Mr. Jekielek:

But this is in certain states. This isn’t everywhere, just to be clear. 

Mr. Eastman:

Yes, in certain states. And they were all the swing states, unsurprisingly; Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, Arizona to an extent, and Nevada. Things like changing the rules about the deadline for returning absentee ballots or changing the rules about requiring voter identification copies in mail-in ballots in order to validate them, or having witnesses swear under oath that the person submitting that ballot is who they say they are. Those rules were changed by county officials or secretaries of state without legislative approval, and it altered the manner of choosing presidential electors. 

Clearly, in Wisconsin, for example, the illegal human drop box effort in Madison to try and ballot harvest from students at the University of Wisconsin was subsequently held to be illegal by the Wisconsin Supreme Court, as we had asserted at the time, and the margin in that state was just over 20,000. You add to it then the alteration of the rules for gathering ballots out of nursing homes, which state law made explicitly clear you had to have bipartisan teams go into the nursing homes before anybody could gather ballots in those nursing homes. So these illegalities rendered the election illegal, unconstitutional. And in my view, in my assessment, the advice I eventually gave was to let the legislatures take some time to try and decide what to do about it. 

Mr. Jekielek:

One of the interesting elements in the film I’m just remembering is that Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Lessig focuses in the film on the reasonableness of having two slates of electors actually officially exist when these types of questions have arisen. You know, we go into the nuance of a lot of things that we just don’t really have to consider, but this sort of thing has been litigated before. 

Mr. Eastman:

It’s not been litigated before, but it has happened before, and that’s important. Congress was deliberately left out of any role in the choosing of the president. The one thing that’s very clear from the closing days and weeks of the federal convention in Philadelphia in 1787 is they determined that it would not be a good idea if Congress had any role in the selection of the president because that would destroy the separation of powers that they had spent the whole summer crafting so carefully. It would turn us into a parliamentary system rather than a separate checks and balances, co-equal branches of government system. 

The only role that Congress has is to set the date that the electors shall meet. And then the Constitution says such states shall be the same throughout the United States. So you can’t get early returns in one part of the country and then try to skew the results in another part of the country based on those returns. So the electors have to meet on the same day. And if they don’t, there’s a very serious question on whether electoral votes that were not cast on that day but subsequently determined to be the actual winners could be counted. 

And there’s a wonderful historical example of this in 1856 in the new state of Wisconsin, there was a blizzard, and the electors could not get to the designated place to cast their votes on the designated day. They met the next day and cast their votes and sent them to Congress. And then two very important things happened in Congress as a result of that. The acting president of the Senate determined to count the Wisconsin votes. People objected in the joint session of Congress, and he ruled those objections out of order because he had made the determination to count those votes. Very important. 

And then the second thing is that the issue was then taken up by both the House and the Senate for three days after that, after the joint session had concluded, and they argued about whether that was proper or not. And both of those debates were tabled, and we never got a resolution on whether those Wisconsin votes were properly counted. So fast forward to 2024. 

I can guarantee you if President Trump’s electors in Georgia and Arizona and elsewhere had not met on the designated day and a lawsuit that was pending at the time had ruled that Trump actually won that state, I’ll guarantee you the Democrats would have been arguing that those votes couldn’t have been counted, right, because they didn’t meet on the designated day. So these were alternative or contingent electors that met because there was pending litigation or other challenges to the election that might have altered the certified outcome. And if they hadn’t, there’s a serious question whether they could have been counted. 

Mr. Jekielek:

Basically, the idea was that if there is a question, those electors should meet. and cast their votes, and then the proper slate of electors will be chosen ultimately when the electoral college votes are counted. 

Mr. Eastman:

Yes, and that’s exactly what happened in Hawaii after the 1960 election. Richard Nixon won the election on election day. His electors were certified as the victors, but there was a legal challenge pending at the time the electors were required to meet. So the Nixon electors met and cast their votes, just like the Biden electors and all the swing states met and cast their votes. 

But the Kennedy electors also met just in case the election challenge went their way. They met without any authority. They were not certified. They met on their own, just as the President Trump electors met on their own in these various states. But two weeks after the designated day for the meeting, the election challenge was resolved, and it was determined that Kennedy had actually won the election. 

So the newly elected Democrat governor of Hawaii quickly certified the Kennedy electors and sent that slate by plane, arriving in Washington, D.C. on the morning of the joint session of Congress on January 6th, and President Nixon opened all three slates of electors. He opened the one that was initially certified for him. He opened the uncertified slate of votes from the Kennedy electors, and then he opened the subsequently certified slate of electors. And he actually said, I’ve got three slates here; if there’s not any objection, I’m going to count the last one, the Kennedy ones, and nobody objected. There’s a question on whether objections would have been proper or not, but he was determined to count the Kennedy electors.

Mr. Jekielek:

Tell me a little bit about your background before we continue, because there’s also been debate about that. 

Mr. Eastman:

I have an undergraduate degree from the University of Dallas in politics and economics, and I earned a PhD in political philosophy from the Claremont Graduate School. I then went to the University of Chicago Law School, clerked for a very prominent Fourth Circuit judge, and then U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas at the Supreme Court. I went to work for a major national international law firm, created my own public interest law firm, and went into teaching, teaching for over 20 years at Chapman University School of Law until I represented President Trump, and that was just too much. 

I’ve been involved with my public interest law firm called the Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence, representing 24 different parties and clients before the Supreme Court, arguing cases before the Supreme Court, and then being involved in nearly 200 total cases with amicus curiae clients, raising questions of the basic original understanding of the Constitution.That’s our area of expertise. 

Mr. Jekielek:

What was it that was so contentious in your representation of President Trump? 

Mr. Eastman:

The Saturday after the election, when many of the major news organizations called the election for Biden, despite the fact that there were still very serious election challenges pending, there was a rush to judgment. What occurred that I’ve never seen before is because the media called the election, everything ought to stop. All the legal challenges ought to stop because it’s already been called. You’re undermining democracy if you don’t stand down in the face of this pronouncement from our betters. 

That just didn’t sit well with me because it was so blatantly not true. To this day, for example, in Pennsylvania, there are more than 100,000 more ballots that were cast and counted than people recorded as having cast ballots. It seemed to me that those kinds of things ought to have gotten a hearing. When the courts are refusing to take up these cases, you’ve heard the line, well, 65 courts ruled against Trump. It’s just not true. 

They didn’t rule against him on the merits in almost all of the cases. They ruled against him on technicalities: the wrong people brought the case, you brought it too soon, you brought it too late. There was something nefarious going on and a pronouncement, a narrative that the election was clearly won for Biden, and all these other things are just attempts to undermine democracy, to undermine the people’s support for the institutions, rather than the serious challenges to what had occurred that they were.That took on an Orwellian mantra: the government has spoken, and you better dare not challenge it, or we’re going to destroy you. Speaking up then led directly to the lawfare that we’ve seen for the four years since.

Mr. Jekielek:

So many of these challenges, which you’re telling me are serious, still have not been resolved. Is that right? Is it important at this point to resolve them? 

Mr. Eastman:

I often get that question, why not just move on? Look forward, let’s not look back. There are two reasons I continue to look back. One, I think the historical record of what occurred is important. When the courts themselves were refusing to look at the merits of the cases, that left a sore spot on the American body politic, a scab, if you will, that remains unhealed. I thought it was important to heal it. 

I urged at the time, let’s let these things be aired out. If at the end result of airing them out, Biden is certified anyway, then at least the American people will know that the appearance of illegality and fraud that they saw with their own eyes did not affect the outcome, and they’ll find some solace in that. But if you leave that unaddressed, then that sore festers.

The second reason I continue to insist on shining a light on that is if, in fact, what I believe occurred did occur and the people that did it are not held accountable, they’ll do it again. The ability for us to have consent of the governed—how do we give consent? None of us were around in 1787 when they ratified the Constitution. So how do we give ongoing consent to our system of government? We do it by free and fair elections. 

If the elections are not free and fair, and if you’re not allowed to raise questions about it, then we no longer are giving consent to the government. Somebody else is deciding for us the direction that the government ought to be going. It’s both backward-looking because I think it’s important to shine a light on what went on, but it’s very forward-looking as well to make sure that that kind of thing never happens again.

Mr. Jekielek:

Some people might say, and I guess have said, look, Trump won. So isn’t that proof that we’ve dealt with these issues? 

Mr. Eastman:

I think it’s proof that the American people were so fed up with the way they had been dealt with. They let that disgust be known by the way they voted in the November 2024 election. He didn’t just win the electoral vote by a landslide, but he won the popular vote, which Republicans in recent years have not been doing. I think that demonstrated a reaction of the American people to what they had been observing, both with the 2020 election and the lawfare that had occurred since, and they want to put a stop to it. But Trump’s election itself is not going to put a stop to it. 

As we’ve seen, the prosecutors in counties in Georgia and Wisconsin, the attorneys general in Michigan, Arizona, and Nevada are continuing to prosecute what they call the fake electors in order to get a pound of flesh. That means they didn’t get the message from the American people in November of 2024, and a significant percentage of their supporters continue to think that Trump’s claims about the 2020 election are corrosive to democracy and that he’s an authoritarian, that he’ll bring on the Fourth Reich or whatever, you know, the accusations are just blatant lies. Yet there’s a large portion of the country that continues to believe it. If we don’t talk about these things, then those falsities take root.

Mr. Jekielek:

You’re telling me there’s numerous active cases going on against this second slate of electors just for the fact that they did it, that they dared to cast the votes as an alternative slate.

Mr. Eastman:

I think in each of the swing states, I’m involved in two of them. I didn’t have any involvement during the election in Arizona except to respond to a request from a legislator to speak to the speaker to say, you’ve got authority to convene the body and take a look at this. That was all. For that, I’m indicted in Arizona. In Georgia, I’m indicted along with all the electors. 

One of the charges against me there was that when I responded to an invitation to testify before a legislative committee about the constitutional authority of state legislatures, and remember, they asked me to testify, but I was charged with soliciting the legislators to violate their oath of office because I answered their questions during that testimony. That charge was thrown out both by the trial court and the court of appeals. But the district attorney, Fani Willis, has filed an appeal to the Georgia Supreme Court, even though she’s been disqualified and has no lawful authority to continue to prosecute the case.

But she’s still prosecuting the case. In Arizona, the Attorney General was caught with her hand in the cookie jar, essentially. They inadvertently attached to some of the search warrants a memo. from one of these hyper-partisan nonprofit groups called the States United Democracy Center, and they attached it as the proof of probable cause to get a search warrant. And by the way, the search warrant was for my email accounts on Gmail. It included my former secretary’s email account, which I took over when she passed away at her request to deal with family affairs and her estate. It included my wife’s father’s email account that we had taken over when he died, and her brother’s account. 

There could not plausibly be any probable cause to have been searching my brother-in-law’s, my father-in-law’s, or my secretary’s email accounts, and yet they were part of this because of the States United Democracy Center. And the States United Democracy Center is the same group that filed a bar complaint against me in California and has been filing bar complaints against others around the country. And what’s been disclosed here recently is that the same group or its affiliate was paying her legal fund $200,000 at the same time that she’s asking them to prepare this prosecution memo.

It’s a conflict of interest at best and an egregious violation of the ethical obligations of the prosecuting attorney general at worst. But that’s still going on in Arizona. The case against electors in Nevada was thrown out because it was brought in the wrong forum, but the attorney general re-brought it. Jim Troupis in Wisconsin is being subjected to bar disciplinary proceedings, but also criminal indictment for his work with the electors to get them to cast their contingent votes. And the same thing’s going on in Michigan. 

So these local prosecutors, hyper-partisan prosecutors, are continuing to state during the interviews for my documentary that it’s perfectly appropriate and, in fact, required for these alternate electors to have cast their votes if there was any legitimate concern that the litigation would result in a different outcome. And if they hadn’t done that, as I said before, there’d be a hue and cry if they did late cast their votes that they couldn’t be counted. 

Mr. Jekielek:

The point that we’re trying to look at is, is it reasonable for these electors to do what they did? 

Mr. Eastman:

Perfectly reasonable. And in each of the swing states, you had election challenges that were still pending. Some of them, as in Arizona, had already been resolved in the state courts. But there was a U.S. Supreme Court petition request to take the case still pending. And if any of those cases had gone the other way and determined that in fact the illegality affected more votes than the margin, then Trump should have been certified. We’ve had this happen a couple of times in our recent history and more times in our full history. 

So in the 1990s, there was a state senate election in Pennsylvania, and after the election was certified, after the fellow that declared victor was sworn in. And several months after he’d been in office, it was discovered that he and his campaign people had engaged in a pretty massive voter fraud. And they threw out the election, and they were able to determine without the fraudulent votes, the other guy had won. So they then retroactively certified him as the winner, and he then took the seat in the Senate because they were able to determine based on the best evidence who had actually won. 

More recently, in 2018, a congressional race in North Carolina, also an illegal ballot harvesting scheme by one of the candidates threw the election out, but they could not determine who had actually won the election because of the anonymity of ballots and what have you. So they called a new election. So those were the two options depending on what the factual circumstances demonstrated. 

But that was all closed off. We’re not allowed to talk about it. The press and the government have told us there’s nothing to see here. It’s like that old movie with everything blowing up in the background and saying nothing to see here, or more modernly, just mostly peaceful protests, right? With cars burning over the shoulder of the news anchor making that ridiculous claim.

Mr. Jekielek:

The role of the media in these scenarios, right? In these, you know, lawfare, arguably lawfare scenarios, it seems to me a critical, the media plays a critical part in this. And can you give me a picture of that? 

Mr. Eastman:

Yes, so one of the reasons why we continue to have such consternation over this is because of narratives that are just demonstrably false, and those narratives would not have nearly the traction that they have if it weren’t for the media echoing them and not only echoing the false narrative but demonizing and trying to discredit anybody that stands up with the counter with the evidence that shows the narrative is false. You see this happen in the business records trial against President Trump, the felony charges for what was largely a bookkeeping error by somebody on his staff if the allegations are true, and I don’t think they were true at all, but they rushed to judgment. They put this before a Manhattan jury, which is 90% anti-Trump, and then he gets convicted with egregious due process errors in the whole conduct of the trial, undoubtedly going to get overturned on appeal eventually. 

But then when he gets elected in November, the judge rushes forward to get a sentencing date three or four days before he’s inaugurated, and when the judge would no longer have jurisdiction over the sitting president. And the sentence was no time served, no fine, so that he has no basis to appeal the sentence. And what was the purpose of that? It was simply to bolster a narrative. And you see it in every major news story about anything that Trump does that the left doesn’t like. 

There’s the line in every one of those stories, this president, the convicted felon. And because of the conviction, you can’t say a convicted felon just by the jury verdict. You’ve got to wait for the sentencing for that to be a formal thing. And so they rushed this through to bolster a narrative that they think will further their agenda against President Trump.

Same thing with me. Every time I, you know, I’m a very strong advocate of the president’s executive order on birthright citizenship. I’m, you know, one of the leading scholars on that subject. And my briefs in the case, you know, when a news media outlet covers my brief, it now includes Eastman, who’s, you know, been disbarred in California, which is not true, only recommended so far, or indicted. And it always includes those to undermine my credibility, to discredit me, and therefore to discredit the arguments without ever having to confront the arguments. 

Mr. Jekielek:

I’m thinking about the so-called Trump hush money case, right? Which, you know, Alan Dershowitz calls the worst case he’s seen in 60 years of jurisprudence. I mean, because they invented, you know, I guess the crime in itself in his view. There’s this element of a lot of reporting that’s done, right? I think they want a Pulitzer for it. And then there’s an investigation that is triggered somehow basically, but validated by the fact that there’s all this reporting. So it’s almost like the two go hand in hand. 

Mr. Eastman:

I think Nancy Pelosi at one point called it a wraparound smear. Some elected official makes a smear. The press picks it up, supposedly does an independent investigation that confirms the smear. And then that goes back to the elected official and say, see, the New York Times has confirmed what I said, even though their story is based on what I said. And therefore, what I said must be true, even though it’s blatantly false. The wraparound smear. 

And you see it with the hush money case. By the way, you don’t see it in the real hush money case. So the other Pulitzer Prize the New York Times won was for the Russiagate scandal. And let’s just unpack the allegations against President Trump that they falsely reported on his business records that a payment to Stormy Daniels to keep her quiet in order to prevent that story from coming out that might have harmed his election chances in 2016. This is the basis of it, even though the false reporting didn’t occur until after the election. 

But that’s the kind of narrative. And it was designed to help his reelection campaign and therefore should have been treated as a campaign expenditure using campaign funds and reported on the campaign reports. This is the basis of it. One of the things the judge refused to allow was testimony from the former chairman of the Federal Election Commission that that’s not a federal election violation. It was a personal expenditure. In fact, if he had used campaign funds to do that payment, it would have been illegal, a personal benefit with campaign funds, right? And the whole case, as Alan Dershowitz pointed out, is just crazy. 

But now compare that to what happened in 2016 on the other side of the political aisle. Hillary Clinton’s campaign sent millions of dollars to its law firm, Perkins Coie. Perkins Coie used that money to hire a foreign intelligence agent, creating a false narrative about Russia involvement with Trump. The FBI was fully aware that all of this was phony. They did not report that this expenditure was for opposition research. Their campaign finance report said it was for legal compliance.

That’s a false entry to the Federal Election Commission on something that hides a pretty significant issue in the campaign and tries to keep it from the American public to influence the outcome of the election, right? That’s where actual crimes were committed, and yet nobody has said anything about that. There was a fine imposed on the Hillary Clinton campaign for this falsity, but it was a fine; there were no criminal charges, so the disparate treatment demonstrates that what went on against President Trump was manufactured to affect the outcome of the election. And of course, the media playing into that story and keeping it alive and pushing this false narrative had a dramatic impact on how that was viewed, and that was part of their goal. It was an agenda-driven rather than a truth-seeking driven media operation. 

Mr. Jekielek:

What is the status of your license to practice law? 

Mr. Eastman:

In March of 2024, the California Bar Court trial judge issued an opinion recommending that I be disbarred. Now the California Bar Court judges don’t have any authority to actually impose such a sanction, whether disbarment or suspension; only the California Supreme Court can do that. So it’s only a recommendation at this point. But what accompanied the recommendation is a statutory automatic rendering of my license inactive pending the appeal. And they’ve been able to kick the can down the road for nearly a year before we even got our appeal argument. 

The next step would be for the California Supreme Court to decide what to do; accepting whatever recommendation comes to them, just rubber-stamping it, taking it up and reviewing it anew, or what have you. And very significantly, the egregious violations of my First Amendment rights, my free speech rights, and my right to petition the government for redress of grievances that the trial judge just gave the back of the hand to by applying wrong standards of First Amendment law. Those are federal constitutional issues. That means that the U.S. Supreme Court would have jurisdiction to take the case up from the California Supreme Court if it rules against me. And so we have that in place as well. 

So we may be looking at another year or two before it gets resolved. Interestingly, when we tried to get the inactive status put on hold so that I could continue to practice, the judge said, I have no authority to accept your motion because this is not a suspension. And yet other courts are treating it as if it’s a suspension. And so I can’t practice in other courts as well. Although the U.S. Supreme Court has said I can continue to practice there. So I’m practicing in the Supreme Court of the United States, but not in the local courts out in California.

Mr. Jekielek:

Something just struck me. You know, many cases, I mean, you’re involved in a number of criminal cases right now, right? And typically, as I understand it, people who are involved in such cases are advised to not talk to people like me. Why is it that you’re outspoken? I mean, there’s a whole film out. And of course, you’re talking about all sorts of things like birthright citizenship and the riots in L.A., which we’ll talk about still. But why are you speaking with me about all these things?

Mr. Eastman:

So I quickly came to the resolution, or the realization, excuse me, the realization that the law didn’t matter here. One of my colleagues said, it’s called Trump law. If it involves Trump, there ain’t no law. That these were not normal legal skirmishes where the normal rules most clients would be advised by their lawyer, if you’re charged with a criminal matter, be quiet. Don’t give them any fodder that they can turn against you. But because this was much more political, and whether these prosecutions were going to go forward or not or would get traction in the local jury pools was very political. 

And if I was staying silent and letting the other side define the narrative, the narrative that Eastman got fake electors to cast votes to undermine democracy and instill President Trump into office or keep him in office, even though he knew he lost the election. That was the narrative. And if I allowed that narrative to be told over and over and over again without being challenged, then it becomes as if it’s true, and it has an impact on the jury pool in those criminal matters. And they will come to that jury deliberation believing that narrative and then trying to figure out, should Eastman be sent away for the rest of his life because he engaged in that? 

And you can’t let that stand. You can’t let those false narratives take root, it seems to me. And so that’s why we spent a lot of time with my legal teams addressing just this very issue. And they finally came around to my view on this, that I think we need to be speaking out publicly, challenging the narrative, because nothing that we did was wrong. And yet the narrative is out there that we were trying to destroy our elections, our democracy. I mean, it’s just blatantly false. 

But if you let those false things go unanswered, then people start to believe them. It’s Goebbels, you know, the big lie. They say that Trump was engaged in the big lie, but the real big lie was that Trump was engaged in a big lie. It’s Goebbels. If you repeat the lie big enough and often enough, people will come to believe it. And that’s why I determined you have to speak up against it. 

Mr. Jekielek:

I keep thinking about this sort of the art of the smear, so to speak, right? Actually, Sharyl Attkisson famously wrote a book about this. But I’ve been thinking about this specifically in the context of something I’ve been covering for a while, which is this, the Shen Yun performing arts, this, you know, dance group, Chinese American dance group that travels the world, a million audience a year and so forth, that’s been recently attacked by the New York Times, you know, repeatedly, I think, more than 10 articles. I can’t remember right now exactly the number. 

But it feels to me like this carefully crafted narrative, basically ignoring a whole lot of information, which would be very positive towards the group and focusing on some very specific things that might be negative. But once that narrative is, I see it because I see people writing to us or asking me questions, is setting hold, even for people who are skeptical of the New York Times itself for a whole suite of reasons. For example, it’s reporting on a bunch of the things that we just talked about, right? And it’s just, it’s very powerful.

Mr. Eastman:

It’s one of the most extraordinary things when you talk to people that any story written about something they know a lot about is often false. But on stories that are written about things that they don’t know about, they treat it as gospel truth. It’s really an interesting dynamic. And that, you know, there are larger geopolitical forces at work in a lot of these things. 

Mr. Jekielek:

We know from whistleblowers to, you know, a very prominent, you know, former Chinese professor that there’s an active effort to just, well, not only Shen Yun performing arts, but also The Epoch Times, basically groups that the Chinese Communist Party hates. They’re putting a lot more resources into that. 

Mr. Eastman:

What the Chinese Communist Party is doing there is exactly what the deep state has done to the MAGA movement led by President Trump and for the same goals, which is to try and shut down and discredit any challenge to their monopoly of power. And you see this, you see this in the J6 committee and the false narratives that have been put out about that. Just recently, Bennie Thompson, who was the chairman or nominal chairman, I think Liz Cheney or Mary McCord was the real power behind that effort, put out a tweet talking about the L.A. riots, that President Trump refused to call up the National Guard on January 6th in Washington, D.C., but he has called up the National Guard to go in L.A. 

Now, that’s just false, right? We know from the record that President Trump authorized the calling up of 20,000 troops and National Guard in Washington, D.C., on January 6th, and that was refused. And so this false story, he puts into this story about the L.A. riots, that it just is another way to kind of repeat the false narrative. 

The other false narrative that came out of that January 6th stuff is that five police officers were killed that day. That’s just not true. It’s just not true. And yet they continue to repeat it. And a lot of people believe it because it’s been repeated so often. And so, and why are they doing that? 

Because what Trump and his movement represented was a serious threat to the ongoing power structures in Washington, D.C., which we are learning increasingly as a result of Elon Musk’s work and DOGE increasingly part of a global hegemony, a global government effort to stop the consent of the governed, to stop populist uprisings, to stop the people actually having a say on the direction of their government. And so they create these false narratives as an excuse to silence or to discredit the movement that would try and recapture control of their own governments. 

We saw it happen in Poland recently, where you and I were both there at CPAC Poland with the presidential election there and the extraordinary efforts, the press and the EU and all these people to discredit the candidate of the populist uprising against mass illegal immigration and everything else going on in Europe. And so this is a power play. 

And this is philosophically, this is a predictable outgrowth of a movement that started in this country more than 100 years ago, the progressive movement. Remember, the progressive movement was, well, the American people really aren’t that smart. mAnd if we get the experts into government that will, you know, manage the technicalities, it’s kind of got very complicated to run the government. And so we need experts. 

Felix Frankfurter’s best and brightest from Harvard was the idea in the New Deal under Franklin Roosevelt. And we bring these experts in. And, of course, if you’ve got experts telling you how you ought to live your lives and you say otherwise, well, you ought to be shut down. Because the experts know better for you than you do what’s good for you. And that movement has now metastasized. And anybody that says, no, you’re telling me I have to put masks on my two-year-olds who are not susceptible to this COVID disease. That’s insane. And you’re going to destroy them, and we’re not going to comply. 

And then the experts with the law enforcement efforts will come down hard on you if you haven’t gotten in line and bent the knee. And that’s the movement that these false narratives are trying to shut down. And we see it even after Trump got elected, the lawfare, the lawsuits, everything, every time he’s tried to do something, it generates lawsuits by activist judges trying to shut it down. And what they’re really trying to shut down is the movement by the American people to reclaim authority over their own government.

Mr. Jekielek:

With the COVID years, right, I think at this point it’s pretty easy to argue that the experts got most things wrong in pretty serious ways that impacted—or at least were able to be leveraged by other specific interests that wanted particular outcomes and so forth. So it’s sort of, I think maybe that we’ve kind of learned that we can’t put our trust in the experts. We have to figure out another way. We still need experts. This is a bit of a conundrum because it is a complicated world and we need experts to interpret things, but at the same time, we also know that the experts can be catastrophically wrong.

Mr. Eastman:

Yes. To Anthony Fauci’s credit for a moment, when he spoke out of both sides of his mouth, wear masks or don’t wear masks, then forevermore, he could either be described as right or described as wrong. And he said both things. No, look, the most pernicious part of all that is not that experts were involved. It’s that certain experts had determined that they knew the absolute truth of this, and any other expert, as well as ordinary people that said that just doesn’t make any sense, were shut down. Their medical licenses were revoked; they were cancelled off of X and Twitter at the time and Facebook because they were speaking out against, you know, the Fauci standard narrative line, which was just blatantly false. And so if you’re going to have a rule of experts, it’s got to be scientific. 

The scientific method means that it has to be challenged. When you shut that down, it’s the same thing we were talking about in the legal adversarial system. When you shut it down in the scientific adversarial system, we don’t call it an adversarial system; we just call it the scientific method. Challenging the claims of science with the tools of science is science. That’s how we define science. 

If you shut that down, you end up with Soviet-style science, Soviet-style agriculture. Scientism. The government has said, this is what the science is, and you’re not allowed to challenge it. Two plus two is five. It was 76 years ago now that George Orwell wrote the book, 1984. 

In 2024, I was talking about this. He had it exactly right. He was just 40 years off. Two plus two is five. That’s what the experts told you. If you said, no, no, that’s not right, then they sent a torturer out from the Ministry of Truth to beat it into you until you not only repeated that two plus two is five, but actually came to believe that two plus two was five. That’s tyranny. It’s authoritarianism. The government has spoken, and you better bend the knee because we know what’s good for you. 

Mr. Jekielek:

You know, it’s very interesting that you mentioned this because there are, I guess, similar trends in these areas. And our reporting, both on election issues and on COVID issues, you know, we were in some ways a little bit slower because we like to really understand an issue before reporting on it. The really difficult thing was in both these cases, whereas anything related to COVID or anything related to the 2020 election was to sift through a whole bunch of really crazy stuff, right? It almost seems like when there is this kind of, no, there’s only one way to think about this, that also breeds an unusually large amount of completely unsubstantiated stuff. 

I also understand that some of this type of stuff is actually fed intentionally to confuse things as well, like people who are actually trying to report on things truthfully. But I don’t know if you’ve thought about that because there’s just such an astonishing amount of information, which turns out to be false, that you have to sift through and really focus on not making a mistake because if you do, you’re going to get hammered. I think our record is pretty fantastic, quite honestly, on all these things, but it’s very difficult.

Mr. Eastman:

And nobody’s going to be perfect on it. I’ll give you a couple of examples from my own experience. So they identified thousands of people in Georgia who were voting from P.O. boxes. Thousands, thousands of people. You know, you have to have a residence, right? If your residence is over in Alabama, but you’ve got a P.O. box in Atlanta, that doesn’t mean you get to vote in Atlanta. And so they generated a report that the Trump statistical guys generated, a report talking about all these thousands of people that were voting from P.O. boxes. 

Well, a couple of them were in an apartment building where on the first floor of the apartment building was a Kinkos or FedEx place. And so the apartment building’s own mailboxes were P.O. boxes in the FedEx. And so those couple of people were then identified in the Senate hearing by a Democrat, who said, you know, I know these people, that’s their residence; your whole study is discredited. No, it meant that a couple of the thousand were not illegal votes, but all the other 998 were. But they never addressed the other 998. They said, you’ve been discredited, so we don’t have to even look at that evidence. 

The other thing, when I filed the brief on behalf of President Trump in the original action in the Supreme Court that Texas had brought against Pennsylvania and three other states, Supreme Court rules require you to put on the cover of your brief the lawyer, the law firm, your address, and your email address. So all of a sudden, everybody in the world had an email address for Trump’s attorney. Now, I wasn’t by far the only attorney or, you know, the most involved with all the election challenges, but they had my email address. 

And so I got stuff from all over the world of people that knew things. Whether they knew them or not, it was like drinking from a fire hose. And I had to try and become a triage nurse, sorting out what were just crazy things that people believed but had no basis in fact, what were red flag operations that if you bought into would discredit all of the true stuff you actually had. And that red flag operation is very sophisticated. 

And if you nibble at it, then it discredits everything else that you’ve done without them ever having to confront the actual evidence of everything else you’ve done. It’s very difficult to get that right and get it right 100% of the time because if you miss it once, it’ll discredit everything else. At least that’s what the narrative then will do. Eastman, who once befriended a guy who talked about Pizzagate, as if that discredits everything else I’ve ever done, but this is the way they play the game. 

Red flag operations are a serious threat to the ability to challenge and sometimes get it wrong. The Supreme Court’s been very clear. If we’re going to have a full throw to the First Amendment, sometimes people are going to get it wrong. But the only way we get to the point of the truth is when you have that flexibility to maybe get it wrong. If once you get something wrong, you’re not allowed to ever advance anything true ever again because it’s now discredited. There’s no First Amendment. 

Mr. Jekielek:

And there’s this, I think this huge irony that when there is this, you know, what I call a megaphone around what you’re supposed to believe, what you’re supposed to repeat, that just, I think, naturally fosters a lot of crazy speculation, right, so it just kind of creates the situation where there’s just a lot more to sift through. I don’t know if that’s entirely true, but that’s my theory. 

Mr. Eastman:

Yes, it does, and I get it. I won’t get into details, and some of it may have been true, but I couldn’t confirm it. The Chinese were intercepting the transmittal of ballot data from county clerks to the Secretary of State and altering the data. I had the IP address from Beijing, and I had the receiving IP address in a spreadsheet and then a column that said, and this increased Biden’s votes by 28, and it decreased Trump’s vote. 

I said, well, that column is obviously not the raw data. I need the raw data. Well, it turns out the raw data doesn’t exist, that this was all made up, or at least it looks like it was made up because I was never able to confirm it. And I was working with former NSA [National Security Agency] experts on this stuff. They said, Eastman, the IP addresses are not valid; they’re made up. 

Had I bought into that and gone public with it, then all the other stuff that I was talking about, the nursing home stuff, everything that’s verifiable would have been completely discredited. I don’t know whether that was just somebody that believed it and was trying to get me to run with it or was deliberately trying to get me to run with something that was false in order to discredit it. 

Mr. Jekielek:

It’s amazing the parallels of what you’re describing with what we experienced on the reporting side over the last however many years, really trying to figure out who the, well who, I guess, you know, who the real truth tellers are and which information is highly verifiable. It just takes a while. 

Mr. Eastman:

And I think there’s a reason it so closely parallels, because the efforts are being aimed to silence people who are challenging the status quo just in different ways, right? It’s the same monopoly of power, globalist monopoly of power play, trying to stop anybody from challenging it. And you guys do it through the pages of your newspaper. I do it through the briefs I filed in the Supreme Court or the public comments I make.

But trying to silence that is a way to hold on to power and make sure that they never have to confront the actual evidence, right? Because if they have to confront the actual evidence, they lose. And so they want to demonize those that have the actual evidence so they don’t have to confront it. 

Mr. Jekielek:

I can’t help but think that the issue of birthright citizenship fits into this category almost because the narrative would have you believe this is an inviolable issue. And I have to say, I think I may have believed that. What is the reality from a constitutional law expert who’s actually focused on looking at this issue for years?

Mr. Eastman:

So I first came to this issue in one of the cases in the wake of 9/11. American troops had captured a guy named Yaser Esam Hamdi on the battlefield of Afghanistan fighting for the Taliban against American forces. He was captured and he was sent to Guantanamo Bay. And when they realized he’d been born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, they started treating him as a citizen and transferred him from Guantanamo Bay up to the Navy Brig at Norfolk, Virginia. 

Former Attorney General Ed Meese and I weighed in with a brief when his case got to the Supreme Court saying, look, the fact that he was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana is not the end of the story about whether he’s a citizen. You also have to look at his parents’ status when he was born. And his parents’ status were Saudi citizens. His dad was here on a temporary work visa working on one of the oil rigs off the coast of Louisiana. And as a temporary sojourner, temporary visitor, he did not fall subject to the automatic citizenship of the 14th Amendment. Most people didn’t realize that there were two requirements of citizenship under the 14th Amendment. 

I’ll give you one recent example of somebody who’s just ignorant about this: Senator Hirono from Hawaii, after Trump issued his executive order, writes on her X account, the Constitution is clear. Anybody born in the United States, dot, dot, dot, is a citizen. That’s what she puts up there. And the dot, dot, dot, of course, is the other key language. It’s all persons born in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens. And the question is, what does that phrase mean? There were two understandings of it at the time the 14th Amendment was ratified.

Does it mean partial or territorial jurisdiction, such as if you’re within our borders, you have to comply with our laws, not the laws of Mexico or France or wherever? Or did it mean something more complete? Were you subject to the allegiance of the country? The drafters of that language were asked point-blank in the debates what they meant. They said it means complete jurisdiction, not owing allegiance to any foreign power, such as exists if you’re here temporarily visiting, such as on business or for health reasons, or just passing through. And so they were very clear. The Supreme Court, the first couple of times out of the box after that, interpreted that clause just the way they intended it. 

Fast forward to a case in 1898 called Wong Kim Ark, where Chinese parents were here lawfully and permanently domiciled in this country, but they weren’t citizens because we wouldn’t let them become citizens. We had a treaty with the emperor of China that wouldn’t let them renounce their allegiance. The court held that the child born here to them, permanently domiciled, was a citizen, and therefore when he left the country to visit his grandparents in China and came back, they couldn’t prevent him from returning. 

For decades and decades, for a century, most scholars realized that Wong Kim Ark didn’t address the question of temporary visitors or illegal immigrants. But when Trump in 2016 says he’s going to address this problem, all of those scholars all of a sudden say this has been settled law for 100 years, and it hadn’t been. Now they’re acting as if it’s settled law, and the fact is the 14th Amendment is originally understood, and by the people who drafted it, but also those who ratified it, has two requirements; born here, and subject to the complete jurisdiction, not owing allegiance to anybody else. 

Trump’s executive order basically says we’re reasserting the original meaning of the 14th Amendment. If Congress wants to offer citizenship to people born of illegal immigrants or who are temporary visitors, it can do that under its naturalization power. But that’s a policy judgment our Constitution assigns to Congress. It’s not mandated by the 14th Amendment. 

It’s interesting because I’m aware there were a whole kind of operations, businesses that basically facilitated people coming on U.S. soil, in effect, having a kid and then leaving so that that kid would have, notably China, as we were aware of, but so that kid would have American citizenship and creating potentially all sorts of problems, especially with China, our major geopolitical enemy on the world stage today, but also with Russia. 

You have China birth tourism in Los Angeles, but you have massive Russian birth tourism in Miami. These are people that then their children are treated as citizens who may well be agents of those foreign powers aiming to destroy us. We can’t stop them from coming into the country because they’re citizens. 

Mr. Jekielek:

Exactly. And this is an obvious loophole, right? But again, it’s sort of one of these things where, you know, it’s funny when I was thinking about this years ago, right, I was thinking, am I allowed to talk about this? Right? Like it’s again, it’s sort of these kinds of taboo areas.

Mr. Eastman:

If you look at the news accounts of the fact that I filed a brief in the Supreme Court on this issue just a month or two ago and attended the oral argument. The fact that I even attended the oral argument was newsworthy somehow. But all of those news stories say, you know, this is a view being pushed by Eastman, who, you know, illegally has been disbarred and has been criminally indicted for trying to keep Trump illegally in power, right? That narrative is designed to discredit the argument without ever having to confront the argument. And that’s part of the reason they put these demonizing narratives out. That’s people raising questions that they don’t want raised. 

Mr. Jekielek:

As we finish up, let’s talk about these riots in LA and the National Guard being deployed.

Mr. Eastman:

The Constitution’s provision allows Congress to establish rules for the federal government to call on the executive to call up the National Guard. Those rules currently allow him to call it up in case of invasion or rebellion or the inability to enforce federal law. Whether the illegal immigration problem is an invasion, as one prominent judge down in Texas has said or not, what’s going on may not be a rebellion in the way that that word is, although that word’s a bit flexible, but it is clearly an effort to obstruct the enforcement of federal law. 

So it’s authorized by this statute that says how you can call up the National Guard, which is really the inheritor of the state militias. Governor Newsom sued President Trump, saying another part of that same statute says the orders to call up the National Guard shall be issued through the governor, and since Trump didn’t go through Newsom to issue the orders, they’re claiming it’s illegal. 

But we’ve got a couple of examples, not in our immediate recent history, but in relatively recent history, of the President of the United States calling up a state guard, National Guard, without going through the governor. John Kennedy did it in 1962 when the governor of Mississippi led the obstruction of enforcement of the court order to let James Meredith register at the University of Mississippi. So it was nonsensical for John Kennedy to run that order through the governor when the governor was in fact leading the charge that he was calling up the National Guard to prevent. 

I think something quite similar is with Governor Newsom. He is, if not inciting, certainly encouraging or lending his voice to the obstruction of the federal enforcement of immigration laws efforts. The notion that he could therefore block the order to call up the National Guard seems rather silly. 

Mr. Jekielek:

Thinking about the reporting on these riots, again, I’ve kind of been looking at how it’s being done by different media. And again, it’s very clear to me, even through our own reporting, that there’s been a lot of violence, yet the media, certain media seem to be pursuing a completely different picture. And I guess it just reminds me of, again, what we’ve been discussing. 

Mr. Eastman:

Yes. So if it was only a riot, it would be relatively minor, as well as the police response to put down a riot. Riot suggests that there’s a protest that gets out of hand because people’s emotions run high and it leads to something that wasn’t intended. This is much worse. And you see the well-orchestrated and pre-planning that’s going into it. The confrontations and the violence are all part of the effort. This is not some protest that got out of control. This is all orchestrated. 

And so I think what’s going to be important to assess here at the end of the day, and I think people like Kash Patel understand this and will get to the bottom of it, is who is orchestrating it, who’s financing it, and what is their purpose. It’s clearly something much beyond the immigration issue, but it’s a destabilizing effort of our regime. And so then you have to ask who has a vested interest in doing that. 

Well, the immediate suspects that come to mind are the Communist Party in China and other enemies of ours on the world stage, as well as the Communist Party within the United States that wants to destabilize the United States for their own purposes, even if they’re not connected with other foreign communist parties. And I suspect that that’s what’s going on. That’s a very dangerous game they’re playing, but it’s not a game at all. They’re trying to destroy the United States because of what it stands for, whether to then achieve their own global power or pave the way for somebody else to do so. 

And I think President Trump’s response now recognizes that in a way that he didn’t in his first term. Therefore, he’s taking the kind of actions that are playing out on that much larger battlefield than the particular battlefield of the streets of Los Angeles. This is something we want to carefully explore and get to the bottom of as well.

Mr. Jekielek:

John, this has been an absolutely fascinating conversation. A final thought as we finish? 

Mr. Eastman:

People often ask me why I persist in fighting against the lawfare against me. Why don’t I just throw in the towel and cut deals and be done? And my answer to them has been, I think our country was on the precipice and may still be on the precipice of losing freedoms that we inherited, that our grandfathers and even further back, our founders pledged their lives and their fortunes and their sacred honor to achieve. And I’m not willing to let those things be lost for my kids and grandkids without putting up a fight. 

When the Georgia indictment was handed down against me, I was teaching a seminar of young, recent law school grads called the John Marshall Fellowship that we run at the Claremont Institute. And everybody’s phone starts buzzing. And I look down at my phone. I’m teaching a seminar on the religion clauses. And I look down at my phone and I pull it out and it says, you’ve just been indicted in Georgia. And I put it aside.

But everybody else’s phones are buzzing as well. So I know everybody in the room knows it. But I continue to teach about the religion clauses. And at the end of the week, we have a nice fancy dinner and some good wine. And they roast each other. And they’ll occasionally toast the professors and thank us. But this was such a monumentally significant thing that happened in the middle of the week. They decided to roast me. 

And one of the participants gets up and says he was teaching us the religion clauses. All of a sudden, a bunch of jackbooted thugs start rappelling down from the rooftop and barge in and come arrest him and carry him off sideways in leg shackles. Now, that didn’t happen, of course, but it was funny and drew a laugh.

And then he turned very seriously and he said, what we witnessed there with his commitment to continue to teach what was the subject matter that we were there for demonstrated to us a level of courage that was contagious. And then he closed with this. He said, if you think about the last line in our national anthem, the question is not so much whether the flag still waves or flies. The question is what kind of land it flies over. Is it still the land of the free and the home of the brave? Or is it the land of the coward and the home of the slave? And that was just profound. 

And I’m not willing to hand off a land of the coward and the home of the slave to my kids and now increasingly my grandkids. So we fight for something that I think is the fight for our time. And that is for freedom and liberty, whether pursuing economic interests or noble aspirations of how you conduct your lives in a political community. But it’s a fight worth fighting for. It may be the most important fight worth fighting for. And so that’s why I do it. 

Mr. Jekielek:

Surely you’ve imagined yourself behind bars along this process. 

Mr. Eastman:

The unindicted co-conspirator listing in the indictment against President Trump that was brought by Special Prosecutor Jack Smith in Washington, D.C., that one kept me up at night because, you know, as the old line goes, any prosecutor could get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich.So he could have indicted me. And then you’re before a D.C. jury pool that has demonstrated and before D.C. judges that have demonstrated that on hyper-partisan cases like these, they’re unwilling to faithfully follow the law and instead reach a political outcome. So that did make me very nervous. 

Less so in Georgia and Arizona because I think the juries in both of those places, if these cases even ever get to a jury trial, there will be some number of the jurors that I think won’t go along with the lawfare nonsense. But it’s still what they say, the process is itself the punishment. And if they get additional punishment, that would be icing on the cake for them. But the process that I’ve been going through the last four years is itself punishment. And I’m not willing to back down to it because I think the fight is too important. 

Mr. Jekielek:

John Eastman, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show. 

Mr. Eastman:

Thank you, Jan. It’s a pleasure to have this conversation with you.