John Eastman, the former Trump legal counsel who played a central role in the eligibility trial against Wasilla Republican Rep. David Eastman (no relation) late last year, has been indicted on nine charges in the latest indictment to land against former President Donald Trump.
The indictment comes from Fulton County, Ga., and is the second indictment that specifically focuses on the former president’s attempts to stay in office after his 2020 defeat. Unlike the narrow federal indictment filed at the beginning of the month that only charged Trump, this indictment brings 41 criminal counts against 19 defendants, including John Eastman.
John Eastman has been identified as one of the president’s co-conspirators in the federal case but has yet to be indicted. Still, given the likelihood that federal charges would soon be landing, John Eastman has requested a delay in his current disbarment proceedings.
The charges against John Eastman include racketeering, attempting to get a public officer to violate their oath of office, conspiracy to impersonate a public officer, two counts of conspiracy to commit forgery, two counts of conspiracy to commit false statements and writings, conspiracy to file false documents and filing false documents.
John Eastman was the key legal architect behind the president’s false elector plot, which recruited slates of fraudulent electoral college electors in the hope of disrupting the Jan. 6 electoral vote count. The plot relied on Vice Presiden Mike Pence recognizing the fake electors and halting the vote-counting process, which he refused to do.
According to one of the emails included in the Georgia indictment, John Eastman asked a Pence attorney following the attack on the U.S. Capitol to halt the congressional proceedings for 10 days, a move that even he conceded in writing was a “relatively minor violation.”
“I implore you to consider one more relatively minor violation and adjourn for 10 days to allow the legislature to finish their investigations, as we ll as to allow a full forensic audit of the massive amount of illegal activity that has occurred here,” John Eastman wrote. “If none of that moves the needle, at least a good portion of the 75 million people who supported President Trump will have seen a process that allowed illegality to be aired.”
John Eastman in Alaska
John Eastman later played a key role in the trial seeking to disqualify Rep. Eastman from holding office under the Alaska Constitution’s disloyalty clause that bars anyone who belongs to any anti-government group from holding office. Plaintiffs in the December 2022 trial argued that Rep. Eastman’s decade-old membership in the Oath Keepers—an anti-government militia group that played a key role in fanning the flames of Jan 6.—ought to disqualify him.
Rep. Eastman is one of the Legislature’s most conservative members and has amplified conspiracy theories around the 2020 election, including suggestions that Antifa was behind the Jan. 6 riots. He attended the president’s rally on Jan. 6 in Washington, D.C., but he has not been charged with any crimes, and there’s no evidence he entered the U.S. Capitol building.
Still, a strict reading of the Alaska Constitution’s disloyalty clause—essentially asking whether the Oath Keepers are anti-government and whether Rep. Eastman is a member—would have disqualified him if not for the legal argument that John Eastman outlined as Rep. Eastman’s trial. Essentially, John Eastman argued that legal precedent required Rep. Eastman to have had knowledge of the Oath Keepers’ anti-government mission when he joined the group. That was never proven at trial.
The judge ultimately agreed, ruling that Rep. Eastman couldn’t be disqualified even though the plaintiffs had proved that the Oath Keepers were, in fact, an anti-government group.
Since 2020, Rep. Eastman has continued to boost fringe conspiracy theories about elections.
As a legislator, Rep. Eastman has pushed to end funding for the state’s participation in a national voter fraud detection network that has become the target of far-right conspiracy theories. In 2021, he reportedly used his legislative office account to travel to Arizona for the notorious audit of the 2020 presidential election that was conducted by a group called Cyber Ninjas (which ultimately found more votes for Biden and no evidence of fraud, ultimately shutting down when it was facing massive fines for continuing to espouse right-wing lies). He’s also successfully pushed the Mat-Su Borough to abolish the use of vote-counting machines altogether, despite concerns that doing so would increase the chance of fraud.
On Tuesday, Rep. Eastman announced his latest foray into the election conspiracy world with a tweet announcing he’s traveling to Mike “Pillow Guy” Lindell’s Election Crime Bureau.
“Stay tuned,” Rep. Eastman wrote.
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.
