Last week’s indictment of President Donald Trump for his efforts to stay in office after losing the 2020 election referenced six unindicted co-conspirators who played essential roles in either coming up with or implementing the plot. One of those co-conspirators also played a crucial role in keeping one of Alaska’s most conservative legislators in office.
That’d be John Eastman, an attorney who helped devise the plan around fake electors that would have relied on former Vice President Mike Pence interfering in the counting process, who appeared as the critical legal witness in the trial challenging Wasilla Republican Rep. David Eastman’s eligibility to serve in the Alaska Legislature.
The December 2022 trial centered on Rep. Eastman’s decade-old membership in the Oath Keepers, a militia group whose leadership played a crucial role in amplifying Trump’s baseless election fraud claims and organized one of the more serious threats of violence on Jan. 6.
Rep. Eastman traveled to Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6 and attended Trump’s rally, but there’s no evidence he entered the U.S. Capitol and has not been charged with any crimes. However, plaintiffs argued Eastman’s membership ought to disqualify him from holding public office under the Alaska Constitution’s Red Scare-era disloyalty clause.
No person who advocates, or who aids or belongs to any party or organization or association which advocates, the overthrow by force or violence of the government of the United States or of the State shall be qualified to hold any public office of trust or profit under this constitution.
Alaska Constitution Article XII, Sec. 4
The trial brought several right-wing figures to the witness stand, including Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, who testified from federal custody while awaiting what would be an 18-year sentence for seditious conspiracy. Much of the testimony carried little weight when determining the underlying questions of the trial: Are the Oath Keepers an anti-government group, and is Rep. Eastman a member?
While a straightforward reading of the law would have likely led to a disqualification of Rep. Eastman, John Eastman brought what proved to be a critical offramp to the law. Citing older legal precedent, John Eastman argued that Rep. Eastman would have had to have affirmatively known and supported the Oath Keeper’s anti-government mission when he joined the group in the early 2010s.
That was never proved at trial, with John Eastman telling the court that he saw no evidence of anti-government attitudes in the Oath Keepers’ bylaws (a point that extremism researchers said shouldn’t be surprising given how much of the far-right operates on coded language and hidden messages). When asked at trial, Rep. Eastman said he liked keeping oaths.
John Eastman also offered several other novel legal analyses, like how the Oath Keepers’ calls to violence didn’t rise to illegal calls for imminent violence because they included the qualifier “if.” Calls to get the torches and pitchforks if Pence didn’t “do the right thing” and disqualify electors were “vintage Brandenburg,” a favorite line of John Eastman referencing the free speech case Brandenburg v. Ohio. He even went on to opine that they were actually a call for lawfulness.
But the line of legal thinking about what Rep. Eastman knew when he joined the Oath Keepers proved pivotal in the case.
While the judge ruled that the Oath Keepers are, in fact, an anti-government group, he ultimately ruled in Rep. Eastman’s favor, finding that Rep. Eastman never explicitly supported the group’s anti-government mission. That Rep. Eastman has never disavowed the group or its leaders, only offering vague and qualified statements, didn’t matter. The ruling was not appealed to the Alaska Supreme Court.
“In this case, the court finds that the Oath Keepers are an organization that has, through words and conduct, taken concrete action to attempt to overthrow by violence the United States government. The court further finds that Rep. Eastman is a member of that organization, but that he does not and did not possess a specific intent to further the Oath Keeper’s words or actions aimed at overthrowing the United States government,” Judge Jack McKenna wrote in his order. “The court therefore finds that he is not disqualified from holding public office by Article XII, § 4.”
Rep. Eastman also got to stay in the race for his House seat, which he handily won, and continues to serve in the Alaska Legislature. While he’s not a part of the Republican-led majority in the House, he still has friends in the Legislature like Homer Republican Rep. Sarah Vance. Vance, the House Judiciary Committee chair, gifted Rep. Eastman a seat on the committee even though he wasn’t entitled to one as a caucus-less legislator. It’s in that seat Rep. Eastman would later muse whether dead abused children might be a “benefit to society” because they wouldn’t require as many social services as living abused children.
Rep. Eastman also finished second to last in The Midnight Sun’s crowd-sourced legislator rankings. He ranked dead last in the categories of ethics and effectiveness.
Things aren’t going quite as well for John Eastman, who currently faces disbarment proceedings in California for his role in advising Trump leading into Jan. 6. John Eastman recently asked to delay the proceedings because he believes he’s likely to be indicted soon along with Trump.
Matt Acuña Buxton is a long-time political reporter who has written for the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner and The Midnight Sun political blog. He also authors the daily politics newsletter, The Alaska Memo, and can frequently be found live-tweeting public meetings on Twitter.
