John Eastman, a former lawyer for then-President Donald Trump, could lose his law license because of legal advice he gave during the fight over the 2020 presidential election results, after bar complaints by Democratic activists.
A judge in California recommended Wednesday that Eastman be disbarred, arguing that in giving advice on how to challenge the Electoral College vote, “his position would likely be unanimously rejected by the Supreme Court.”
That claim echoed arguments from the January 6 Committee hearings in 2022, when a former aide to Vice President Mike Pence testified that Eastman thought “maybe you’d only lose 7 to 2” but acknowledged that “we would lose 9-0.”
If it is wrong to try arguments that have little to no chance of success at the Supreme Court, then all of the Democrats who tried to throw Trump off the 2024 ballot, and the lawyers who represented them, must also be disbarred.
After all, the Supreme Court unanimously rejected the decision by Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold (D) to exclude Trump from the ballot because she determined, and state judges agreed, he had committed “insurrection.”
That was a direct attack on democracy — more direct than anything the Trump legal team sought to do simply by asking Congress, then the state legislatures, to ensure that the vote totals were correct (i.e. that democracy worked).
Just this week, the White House condemned Venezuela’s authoritarian regime for trying to exclude the leading opposition candidate from the ballot. Democrats know that doing so is a direct, immoral assault on democracy.
So if Eastman is to be punished, then every Democrat, every lawyer, and every judge who lent their legal credentials to the effort to kick Trump off the ballot should also be disbarred. Unless, of course, we have two tiers of justice.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, “The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency,” now available on Audible. He is also the author of the e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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