John Eastman claimed that he had no time for his disbarment hearing. Yet somehow he found the time to file another lawsuit to disenfranchise voters.
Eastman pursued Colorado voting case even after nine-count felony indictment.
Attorney John Eastman, who was recently indicted by a state grand jury in Georgia on nine felony counts related to his role as an architect of Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, is a busy man.
But while he has repeatedly asked a California state court to delay disbarment proceedings—citing Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigation of him, and the Georgia grand jury’s indictment of him—Eastman has been able to find time to file yet another lawsuit to disenfranchise potentially hundreds of thousands of voters in Colorado.
On August 4, a week after a federal grand jury empaneled by the special counsel brought criminal charges against Trump for his role in attempting to overturn the 2020 election, Eastman’s attorneys filed papers in California seeking a stay of disbarment proceedings against him. The filing relates that Eastman and his attorneys feared that the special counsel might charge Eastman sometime soon:
“The indictment heightens the potential for [Eastman] to be charged as a criminal. When there are parallel criminal and civil proceedings, the defendant faces the difficult choice of asserting his Fifth Amendment right at the risk of losing a non-criminal trial (here, a disciplinary proceeding), or waiving his constitutional right against self-incrimination. Courts have recognized the need to stay civil proceedings to avoid prejudicing the defendant’s rights.”
On August 14, a state grand jury in Fulton County, Georgia brought felony racketeering charges against Trump and 18 other individuals—among them former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, former presidential chief of staff Mark Meadows—and Eastman as part of wide sweeping “criminal enterprise” to deny Joe Biden to be sworn in as president. the presidency even if it meant using legal stratagems/shenanigans to electorally defeating him after the fact.
On the very next day, California bar counsel responded to Eastman’s attempt to delay the proceeding saying: “The State Bar has presented extensive evidence to support … charges that [Eastman] engaged in acts of dishonesty and moral turpitude in matters concerning the peaceful transition of power in 2020.” [Eastman] disputes these charges and continues to claim, both in court and in public statements, that the 2020 election was stolen through fraud and that his actions to support efforts to reject the 2020 election results were justified and valid.”
“The public interest,” he continued, “weighs strongly in [the] interest of resolving these competing positions as quickly as possible.
While too busy to appear at his disbarment hearing, however, Eastman was still able to find time to turn himself in to authorities in Georgia for booking as his criminal case proceeds, and to file a lawsuit that critics say will have the effect of dramatically suppressing voting in Colorado.
On July 31, Eastman became the lead attorney in a lawsuit by Colorado’s Republican party, that if successful, would disenfranchise as many as a million – more than a fifth – of that state’s total registered voters
Since 2016, Colorado’s unaffiliated voters have been allowed by law to vote in either the state’s Democratic or Republican primaries even if they choose to remain unaffiliated with either party. Eastman and the Colorado Republicans claim in the lawsuit that those voting rights are unconstitutional.
Unaffiliated voters in Colorado are currently the state’s largest voting bloc— a sizable plurality of about 46%—and their numbers are growing. In his lawsuit, Eastman claimed to know of a scheme by Colorado Democrats to prevent Rep. Lauren Boebert from becoming her party’s nominee and effectively deny her a second term in Congress.
Eastman cited news articles as support for the idea that there was at least somewhat of an organized effort to get Democrats to switch their voter affiliation to unaffiliated in order to stop Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Co.) from winning a second term, although the evidence that that is true is tenuous.
Colorado’s Republican state chairman, Dave Williams, (the politics website, Colorado Politics has reported), has said in a fundraising solicitation that the litigation was necessary because, "the current unconstitutional open primary scheme allows for Democrats, and other left-wing groups, to interfere in our primary nomination outcomes so they can weaken our general election prospects.”.
Meanwhile, Colorado Secretary of State, Jane Griswold, a Democrat, has vowed that she will defend voters against the lawsuit, noting in a statement that a previous, similar lawsuit, failed: “The court dismissed the prior lawsuit and we continue to believe the new lawsuit has no merit. As Secretary of State, I will always stand up for voters to ensure that their constitutional right to cast a ballot is protected.”
And California’s Bar Counsel has insisted that it is imperative that Eastman’s disbarment trial continue.
Bar counsel won that argument.: On Tuesday, Eastman surrendered to authorities in Fulton County, Georgia. On Thursday, he was back in California at his trial for disbarment. This morning the trial resumed.