Attorney John Eastman, who worked with former President Donald Trump on his attempts to overturn the 2020 election, has to turn over more than 150 documents to the House January 6 Committee by Wednesday, a federal judge ruled late Tuesday—including an email that the judge said contains evidence of a possible crime.
U.S. District Court Judge David Carter ordered Eastman to turn over 159 documents to the committee by 2:00 p.m. Pacific time Wednesday, while another 440 are shielded under attorney-client privilege.
One of the emails Eastman has to disclose is because of the “crime-fraud exception,” which is when a document that would otherwise be covered under attorney-client privilege has to be turned over because the “communications are ‘sufficiently related to’ and were made ‘in furtherance of’” a crime.
The email in question shows Eastman advising Trump’s legal team not to file a lawsuit related to Congress counting the electoral votes on January 6, because a negative court ruling “would ‘tank the January 6 strategy,’” which could violate the law by showing Trump planned to “delay or stop the electoral count.”
The documents also show Trump and Eastman planned to disrupt Congress’ electoral vote counting as early as December 7, 2020, when Eastman forwarded Trump a memo “explaining why January 6 was the ‘Hard Deadline’ that was ‘critical to the result of this election.’”
Other documents being handed over to the committee include documents related to the Trump campaign’s “fake electors” scheme and emails related to multiple meetings Eastman had with an unnamed right-wing group with a “high-profile leader” about efforts to overturn the election.
The ruling pertained to one tranche of documents out of thousands Eastman had been trying to shield from the House committee and came after Carter had previously ordered Eastman to turn over other documents in earlier rulings, including one in March that found Eastman and Trump’s efforts to overturn the election “more likely than not” constituted illegal obstruction.
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