Right-wing attorney John Eastman appears to be aware his scheme to pressure Mike Pence to overturn Donald Trump's election loss was unlawful.
Email exchanges released last week by the House select committee show that Eastman was aware that interrupting the congressional certification of Joe Biden's election win, so that Trump's attorneys could argue the Electoral Count Act was not followed to the letter of the law, was, in fact, unlawful but pressed forward with the scheme, reported The Guardian.
“The Senate and House have both violated the Electoral Count Act this evening – they debated the Arizona objections for more than two hours. Violation of 3 USC 17,” Eastman wrote to Pence's counsel Greg Jacob at 9:44 p.m. on Jan. 6, 2021.
Eastman argued that since the statute had been violated in small ways, which amounted to a delay of several hours at most, Pence should be willing to commit “one more minor violation and adjourn for 10 days."
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That shows Eastman, who was advising Trump after his election loss, knew the scheme to delay Biden's certification violated the Electoral Count Act and showed he was involved in a conspiracy to defraud the United States and obstruct Congress, as the House counsel Douglas Letter argued Tuesday while appearing on behalf of the select committee in a federal court hearing.
“It was so minor it could have changed the entire course of our democracy," Letter told the court. "It could have meant the popularly elected president could have been thwarted from taking office. That was what Dr. Eastman was urging.”
The email also raises the possibility that Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani also was aware the scheme was illegal when he called Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) at about 7 p.m. that evening asking the newly elected GOP senator to object to 10 states Biden had won after Congress reconvened about an hour later, which would have dragged the joint session into the following day.
“The only strategy we can follow is to object to numerous states and raise issues so that we get ourselves into tomorrow – ideally until the end of tomorrow,” Giuliani said in a recording of the call.
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