The California State Bar, which controls licensing for attorneys in the Golden State, has charged John Eastman with ethics violations relating to his advice to President Donald Trump on challenging the 2020 election results.
Eastman is the former dean of Chapman Law School and has worked for a variety of conservative legal causes.
The complaint casts Eastman’s advice on a legal strategy that relied on Congress to send disputed results back to state legislatures as an attempt to overturn democracy and an act of “moral turpitude” akin to serious crime.
The Los Angeles Times notes:
The 11 disciplinary charges against Eastman include failure to support the Constitution and laws of the United States, misrepresentation, seeking to mislead a court, and making false and misleading statements that constitute acts of “moral turpitude, dishonesty and corruption.”
State Bar officials said they intend to seek Eastman’s disbarment before the State Bar Court.
However, the complaint, filed by an ostensibly “nonpartisan” group called the States United Democracy Center that is stacked with anti-Trump zealots, is also the latest attempt to punish lawyers for working for Trump.
The founder and executive chair of the group, Norm Eisen, acted as counsel for the Democrats in 2019 when they impeached then-President Donald Trump. As Breitbart News reported at the time, Eisen used deceptively edited video to make false claims about Trump’s past statements — but he faced no ethical sanctions.
Eisen and his team filed their complaint in October 2021, one of several such actions taken by anti-Trump groups to punish or intimidate Trump’s attorneys, often merely for the fact that they represented him.
In November 2020, long before the Capitol riot and while election challenges were still pending before the courts in several states, Democrats, left-wing political action committees, and their supporters in the media began calling on the public to harass law firms representing Trump, as well as individual attorneys, urging them not to work for him. Trump lost one set of attorneys in Pennsylvania as a result of the intense public pressure.
Then-candidate Joe Biden had boasted that he had 600 lawyers ready at his disposal to dispute election results; none of them was subject to intimidation, even when Hillary Clinton urged Biden never to concede a loss.
None of the lawyers who participated in the “Russia collusion” hoax, such as Marc E. Elias, in an effort to undermine the 2016 election has been subjected to disciplinary action by the Bar, though he has faced unrelated sanctions elsewhere. Nor have the lawyers who advised the 2019 impeachment investigation or the January 6 Committee been disciplined, though those inquiries violated common standards of due process.
In an essay at Substack responding to the charges against him, Eastman argued that the State Bar’s action was based on “distortions, half truths, and outright falsehoods” and “poses a threat to the ability of controversial clients or causes to have the kind of zealous legal representation that our adversarial system of justice requires.”
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 new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent 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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