The House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol dedicated a crucial portion of its third hearing Thursday to demonstrating that former President Donald Trump’s plan to overturn the 2020 election was not only legally unsound, but that even the lawyer pushing it the hardest knew it.
In one of the most explosive findings of the hearings thus far, the committee heard testimony that law professor John Eastman told Trump two days before the insurrection that his scheme to keep the president in power was illegal.
Greg Jacob, Vice President Mike Pence’s counsel, recounted a White House meeting on Jan. 4, 2020, in which Eastman said in front of the president that his plan to thwart the counting of the Electoral College violated the law.
“I believe he did on the 4th,” Jacob said in response to a question from the panel.
Such an admission was consistent with the testimony of other witnesses present at Thursday’s hearing, the committee’s third this month. Multiple former White House aides testified, either in person or in taped deposition, that the plan proposed by Eastman, the chief architect of the effort to block Biden’s election victory, was either illicit or certain to be struck down in the courts.
In another bombshell from the hearing, the committee showed an email from Eastman requesting a pardon from Trump for his role in the attempts to stop the transfer of power to Biden.
“I’ve decided that I should be on the pardon list, if that is still in the works,” Eastman wrote to Trump’s personal attorney and confidant Rudy Guiliani, according to an email obtained by the Jan. 6 committee. Rep. Pete Aguilar, a Democrat of California who led questioning Thursday, said Eastman did not get one. Trump publicly announced 143…
Source : time
