A disciplinary hearing for John Eastman, the attorney who devised ways to keep Donald Trump in office after he lost the 2020 election against Joe Biden, will begin Tuesday in Los Angeles.
The California State Bar filed eleven charges in January against Eastman, who was until recently dean of Chapman University’s School of Law in Orange County. He stands accused of making false and misleading statements regarding election fraud, “including statements on January 6, 2021, at a rally in Washington, D.C., that contributed to provoking a crowd to assault and breach the Capitol to intimidate then-Vice President Pence and prevent the electoral count from proceeding.”
Eastman will spend the day testifying in his defense in the hope his law license will not be suspended. The disbarment hearing is expected to last eight days, the Associated Press reported. The final decision is left to the California Supreme Court.
The dean was a former law clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas and ran for California Attorney General in 2010.
Witnesses for the prosecution include Greg Jacobs, a former attorney for Pence, who pushed back against Eastman’s plan to stop the decertification of the vote.
According to George Cardona, who filed the charges against Eastman, the false and misleading statements Eastman made are acts of “moral turpitude, dishonesty, and corruption” in violation of Business and Professions Code section 6106. “There is nothing more sacrosanct to our American democracy than free and fair elections and the peaceful transfer of power,” Cardona said.
Eastman strongly disputes the allegations, saying the California State Bar is going after him on conduct protected by the First Amendment.
His attorney Randall A. Miller said the hearing against the former dean “is part of a nationwide effort to use the bar discipline process to penalize attorneys who opposed the current administration in the last presidential election. Americans of both political parties should be troubled by this politicization of our nation’s state bars.”
Eastman’s hearing comes after special counsel Jack Smith indicted Trump in a classified-documents probe. Smith is also investigating Trump’s behavior in connection with the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021. The former dean has been a subject of that investigation, with his cellphone having been seized last summer.