A disgraced attorney who tried to overturn the 2020 election results has permanently lost his California law license over his efforts to help President Donald Trump illegally cling to power.
Former law school dean John Eastman was the one who proposed that former Vice President Mike Pence refuse to count some states’ electoral votes following President Joe Biden’s election victory.
When that idea failed, he appeared alongside former New York City mayor and Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani at the “Stop the Steal” rally that preceded the deadly Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021, and spread false claims about election fraud.
Eastman later filed lawsuits challenging the election results and made “patently false and misleading statements” about the outcome, according to a judge tasked with reviewing whether he should lose his law license.
On Wednesday, the California Supreme Court voted to uphold a lower court decision prohibiting him from practicing law.
The court ordered that his name be “stricken from the roll of attorneys,” and that he pay a $5,000 fine to the State Bar of California.
In a statement, State Bar Chief Trial Counsel George Cardona said the court’s ruling was justified by the “clear and convincing evidence that he advanced claims about the 2020 election to mislead courts, public officials, and the American public.”
Eastman’s attorney, Randall A. Miller, told the AP in a statement that the decision “departs from long-standing United States Supreme Court precedent protecting First Amendment rights, especially in the attorney discipline context.”
The Daily Beast has also reached out for comment.
Throughout his marathon trial, which lasted from June to November 2024, Eastman argued that he was acting in good faith as a vigorous champion of his client.
But in a 128-page ruling, State Bar Judge Yvette Roland found that Eastman’s false claims were “lies that cannot be justified as zealous advocacy.”
Special Prosecutor Jack Smith referred to Eastman as an unindicted co-conspirator when he charged Trump in May 2023 with four felony counts related to this attempt to subvert the 2020 election. The charges were dropped when Trump won re-election.
Later that year, Pence called Eastman a “crackpot” during an interview with Fox News.
Throughout his career, Eastman has also advanced other questionable legal theories.
Before the 2020 election, he pushed a false claim that Kamala Harris, who was born in California, was ineligible to serve as vice president and run for the presidency because her parents were not citizens at the time of her birth.
Newsweek had to apologize for publishing his arguments.
Conveniently, he nevertheless considered Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, who was born in Canada to a Cuban-born father and held Canadian citizenship until 2014, eligible to run for president.
He has also spent decades banging the drum to end birthright citizenship, despite the 14th Amendment’s explicit guarantees that virtually all people born in the U.S. are automatically conferred citizenship.
As the Supreme Court was preparing to hear oral arguments on the issue earlier this month, Politico revealed that Eastman was the secret driving force behind the Trump administration’s push to end the practice.
He has been lobbying Trump on the issue since the president’s first term in office, and the Justice Department’s briefs in the case adhered closely to the legal arguments Eastman has put forward in 100-plus op-eds, interviews, law review articles, debates, speeches, and legislative hearings, Politico reported.
Neither the White House nor the DOJ have commented on the connection, and Eastman has refused to say whether he helped Trump craft the executive order at the heart of the case.
Trump made history as the first president to attend Supreme Court oral arguments when he attended the April 1 hearing, where the justices appeared deeply skeptical of the government’s case.
