(People [as the old joke goes] tend to avoid me, since I have schizophrenia…
But at least I have each other.)
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And stop trying to confuse… uh… me?? —
Eastman claimed in our first interview that he had “never had any dealings” with Utah senator Mike Lee about matters related to the memo, but [the book] Peril reports that Lee and Eastman did speak in December, and during the conversation Eastman told Lee the memo was forthcoming.
Costa and Woodward report that Lee, after receiving the two-page memo from the White House, told Trump’s lawyers: “You might as well make your case to Queen Elizabeth II. Congress can’t do this. You’re wasting your time.” During our first interview, I asked Eastman if Lee had made such a comment to him, and Eastman replied: “I’ve never had any dealings with Mike Lee about this at all. I don’t know who gave him a copy of the internal memo. To this day, I have not had any conversation with him about in fact whether that was true or not [that Lee received the memo].”
During our second interview, I noted that Costa and Woodward write that in December 2020, “Lee was directed to John Eastman, another Trump lawyer. The two spoke with each other. ‘There’s a memo about to be developed,’ Eastman said. ‘I’ll get it to you as soon as I can.’”
After I read that passage to him, Eastman said: “I did have a conversation with Senator Lee. But I have no record of having given him either of the two memos. We were working on broader things. If I did give him one, it would have been the fuller memo, but I don’t have any record of having done that.”
How does Eastman account for his initial statement to me that he had “never had any dealings with Mike Lee about this at all”?
“I want to be very precise here: I said at the time I did not recall having any conversations with Mike Lee, and I certainly don’t have any record of having given him the memo,” Eastman says. “But now that I’ve seen that quote from — I do recall that Mike Lee called me at one point. I don’t remember the subject of the conversation.”