A federal judge on Wednesday ordered the release of emails from John Eastman, a former Donald Trump attorney, to House investigators, saying the communications were made in furtherance of a crime related to Trump’s efforts to subvert the 2020 election.
“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,” Judge David O. Carter wrote.
“The Court finds that these emails are sufficiently related to and in furtherance of a conspiracy to defraud the United States,” he added.
Carter, who sits on the federal district court in central California, already released many of Eastman’s emails from around January 2021 to the House select committee investigating the US Capitol attack, but the two sides were still arguing over 562 additional documents from Eastman’s Chapman University email account.
For eight of the 500-plus Eastman documents the judge was examining, the judge said that the materials could be released because they fit in the so-called crime-fraud exception, which allows disclosure of otherwise privileged materials if the communications were related to or in furtherance of illegal or fraudulent conduct.
Four of the documents were from email threads discussing prospective election litigation. In them, Carter wrote, “Dr. Eastman and other attorneys suggest that – irrespective of the merits – the primary goal of filing is to delay or otherwise disrupt the January 6 vote.”
Carter’s new order cited one email where Trump’s attorneys state that “merely having this case pending in the Supreme Court, and not ruled on, may be enough to delay consideration of Georgia.”
“This email, read in context with other documents in this review, make clear that President Trump filed certain lawsuits not to obtain legal relief, but to disrupt or delay the January 6 congressional proceedings through the courts,” the ruling states.
“The Court finds that these four documents are sufficiently related to and in furtherance of the obstruction crime,” it adds.
Four other emails that the judge is ordering disclosed “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 judge went on to cite a December 2020 email where Eastman said that Trump had been made aware that some of the allegations made in a state court election challenge were inaccurate.
Yet Trump and his attorneys went on to file a federal lawsuit referencing the same inaccurate numbers, Carter said.
Carter’s findings will bolster the committee’s investigation into the former President’s election reversal gambits.
The committee has repeatedly argued that a core tenet of Trump’s plan to overturn the 2020 election results was to file frivolous lawsuits intended to delay certification of the results in key swing states. The judge’s ruling echoes that sentiment. The revelation of the emails also comes as the Justice Department as well as the local prosecutor in Atlanta have launched their own criminal probes looking at the 2020 election schemes.
Eastman must also hand over portions of materials related to his proposal for then-Vice President Mike Pence to disrupt certification of the 2020 election on January 6, 2021, the judge ordered Wednesday.
Earlier this month, the committee argued that Eastman has been “consistently unreliable” as he’s tried to protect his communications from the ongoing probe and that the investigators should now get access to more emails from one of his work email accounts.
This story has been updated with additional details.
Source: www.cnn.com