Newly revealed emails indicate that former Trump lawyer John Eastman has already laid out a scheme for stealing the 2024 election, according to a political columnist, and the former president's loyalists are already jockeying for position to help carry it out.
The House select committee has obtained new emails that show Eastman pressing Pennsylvania GOP legislators to cast doubt over their state's vote totals and then certify a slate of Trump electors, and the Washington Post reported that the communications reveal the plot to steal the last election was even more nefarious than previously understood.
"This is extraordinary stuff," wrote Post columnist Greg Sargent. "Eastman advised that a state legislature should concoct a fig leaf justification for declaring the correct Biden electors certified by the governor invalid and certifying Trump electors instead."
It's been known that Eastman cooked up a scheme for Vice President Mike Pence to subvert the Electoral Count Act, but the new emails show him concocting a pretext for GOP-led state legislatures to invalidate Joe Biden's election win based on a complex -- but legally bogus -- formula to invalidate mail-in ballots.
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“Eastman’s view is that the legislature has absolute power in terms of picking presidential electors,” elections expert Richard L. Hasen told the Post.
That would give political bad actors "a path to steal an election" by “ignoring the will of the voters” or their own prior rules for picking electors, Hasen said, and Trump loyalists are already running for positions of authority over state elections, and that could put them in place to enact Eastman's scheme.
“This shows the country one more strategic booby trap that was improvised by Trump’s team that can sit there for use by bad-faith actors in future elections,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), a member of the select committee.
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