Trump lawyer John Eastman, author of an infamous "coup memo," says he began advising the former president in September 2020 after being recruited to join an "election integrity working group."
Eastman says he was recruited to join the group by Trump ally and conservative attorney Cleta Mitchell, who had been deputized by the former president in late August to lead the working group.
“As a member of the Election Integrity Working Group and in furtherance of my representation of President Trump as candidate and his campaign committee, I began conducting legal research and collaborating with academic advisers and other supporters of the President about the myriad number of factual and legal issues we anticipated might arise following the election,” Eastman wrote in a court filing Tuesday.
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Eastman's filing came in response to a federal judge's order for him to produce thousands of pages of documents requested by the House Select Committee investigating the Captiol insurrection, according to a report from Politico.
"Tuesday’s filing provides the clearest insight yet into the relationship between Trump and the legal adviser who helped pressure then-Vice President Mike Pence to single-handedly attempt to overturn the election," Politico reports. "Eastman says he advised Trump on various lawsuits seeking to invalidate millions of votes and spoke to state legislators who he said had the authority to appoint their own set of pro-Trump electors."
