It's now up to a judge whether Trump attorney John Eastman can keep his California law license – San Francisco Chronicle
Attorney John Eastman, the architect of a legal strategy intended to keep former President Donald Trump in power, talks to reporters after a hearing in Los Angeles on June 20.
The trial on whether to disbar Donald Trump’s attorney John Eastman as a lawyer in California has ended with accusations by a State Bar prosecutor that Eastman conspired with Trump “to illegally disrupt the peaceful transfer of power to President-elect Joseph Biden” in 2021. But Eastman’s lawyer argued that the only lawbreaking was by states’ election officials who ignored evidence that the 2020 election had been stolen.
Eastman “had a First Amendment right to speak out about election fraud,” and punishing him would have “a chilling effect on legal advocacy for decades to come,” attorney Randall A. Miller wrote in final arguments Friday to the State Bar Court’s judge, Yvette Roland, who presided over the 35-day trial.
Roland has already issued a tentative decision, however, that Eastman committed violations of legal ethics when he tried to help Trump overturn the election results. She is due to issue a final ruling within 90 days, which could be appealed to the state Supreme Court.
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Eastman, a former law professor and law school dean at Chapman University in Orange County, has also been charged in Georgia with forgery and racketeering for allegedly trying to help Trump overturn the election results in that state. Trump and other former aides also face criminal charges. Two former Trump attorneys, Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro, have pleaded guilty and agreed to testify against other defendants.
Eastman testified in the State Bar trial and said he had acted in good faith in preparing legal plans to challenge the election results. According to media reports of the proceedings, he testified that he does “not recall” saying that Vice President Mike Pence, who presented the final electoral vote count to Congress, had the authority to withhold a state’s electoral votes if Pence was unsure of their validity.
But video footage of the Jan. 6, 2021, rally before Trump supporters stormed the Capitol shows Eastman telling the crowd, “We know there was fraud. We know that dead people voted,” and he was “demanding that Pence do something about it.” Eastman was standing alongside Rudy Giuliani, another Trump legal adviser who is also charged in the Georgia case and faces possible disbarment in Washington, D.C.
Eastman’s “misconduct strikes at the very heart of what it means to be a lawyer,” State Bar attorney Duncan Carling wrote in final arguments in the California case. “He misused his license in a grave and injurious manner designed to undermine our democracy, subvert the peaceful transfer of presidential power and thwart the will of the people in a free and fair election.”
The evidence shows, Carling said, that Eastman “held — and still holds — truth and democracy in contempt, deliberately disregarding facts that demonstrate the validity of Biden’s victory to further a false narrative that would ignore the Constitution, disenfranchise millions of voters and undermine a democratic election.”
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Miller, Eastman’s attorney, countered that Eastman had merely been “fulfilling his ethical duty to zealously represent the interests of his client.”
“The only violations of clearly-established constitutional law that occurred in the 2020 election were the numerous and acknowledged violations by state election officials of Article II of the Constitution, which assigns plenary authority to the state legislatures for directing the manner of choosing presidential electors,” Miller wrote.
According to the bar’s case against Eastman, Miller said, “the government has spoken, and if you disagree, then you must be lying.”
Reach Bob Egelko: begelko@sfchronicle.com; Twitter: @BobEgelko
Bob Egelko has been a reporter since June 1970. He spent 30 years with the Associated Press, covering news, politics and occasionally sports in Los Angeles, San Diego and Sacramento, and legal affairs in San Francisco from 1984 onward. He worked for the San Francisco Examiner for five months in 2000, then joined The Chronicle in November 2000.
His beat includes state and federal courts in California, the Supreme Court and the State Bar. He has a law degree from McGeorge School of Law in Sacramento and is a member of the bar. Coverage has included the passage of Proposition 13 in 1978, the appointment of Rose Bird to the state Supreme Court and her removal by the voters, the death penalty in California and the battles over gay rights and same-sex marriage.
He can be reached at begelko@sfchronicle.com.
Our politics team covers California government from Sacramento and national politics from the Bay Area and Washington, D.C. The guiding principle in choosing which stories to cover is: How does political and government news affect the Bay Area and California?
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