Legal expert: Eastman’s push to throw out Pennsylvania votes was conspiracy to defraud the US

The efforts by Trump lawyer John Eastman to attempt to overturn the 2020 election in Pennsylvania was a conspiracy to defraud the US government, a former federal prosecutor explained on Wednesday.

"Even by the standards of other ideas promoted by the conservative lawyer John Eastman to keep President Donald J. Trump in the White House after his election loss in 2020, a newly revealed strategy he proposed to take votes from Joseph R. Biden Jr. in Pennsylvania stands out as especially brazen," The New York Timesreported Wednesday. "Mr. Eastman pressed a Pennsylvania state lawmaker in December 2020 to carry out a plan to strip Mr. Biden of his win in that state by applying a mathematical equation to accepting the validity of mail ballots, which were most heavily used by Democrats during the pandemic, according to emails from Mr. Eastman released under a public records request by the University of Colorado Boulder, which employed him at the time."

The emails were sent to Republican state Rep. Russell Diamond.

"The emails were the latest evidence of just how far Mr. Trump and his allies were willing to go in the weeks after Election Day to keep him in power — complete with anti-democratic plans to install fake pro-Trump electors and reject the votes of Biden supporters. Mr. Eastman would go on to champion the idea that Vice President Mike Pence could unilaterally block congressional certification of Mr. Biden’s Electoral College victory, an idea Mr. Pence rejected even as Mr. Trump was promoting the protests that turned into the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol," the newspaper reported.

On "MSNBC Prime," anchor Ali Velshi asked former U.S. Attorney Barbara McQuade about the new Eastman emails.

"Ali, I think this is just more evidence that is taking what was once a fuzzy picture and bringing it into focus," McQuade said. "What was this plot? I think we are now seeing what it was, it was an effort to reach out to some of these swing states -- if you can knock off a couple of them, you can change the outcome of the election and flip the outcome."

"One thing that is challenging to prove in any public corruption case, isn't so much the what happened part of it, that part can be relatively easy. It is the intent, was there criminal intent to commit a crime here? And I think one of these text messages is so powerful on this, the idea of needing cover, using it as cover. That, to me, is a really important piece of evidence to show that they knew what they were doing was fraudulent -- and that's the key to a case like this."

She also explained how this could be prosecuted.

"This is, again, as that fuzzy picture is coming into focus -- it seems to me the low most logical charge here is a charge called 'conspiracy to defraud the United States.' It makes it a crime for two or more people to agree to try to interfere with the proper functioning of any agency of the government," she explained. "And so, if it is interfering with the election, we have a number of different people, working on different fronts, to try to knock off a state here and a state there. And with the swing states, if you can flip just a couple of them, to go from the Biden column to the Trump column, that could be the difference on Election Day."

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