No surprise here. One of the most degenerate Trumpian fanatics, up there with Lara Trump, Eastman will soon lose the law license he used in order to devise the vile and traitorous Jan. 6 plot. The judge who presided over his disbarment trial said Eastman’s “lack of remorse and accountability presents a significant risk that Eastman may engage in further unethical conduct, compounding the threat to the public.” UD thinks he can still lead a meaningful life hawking sixty dollar a pop Trump bibles.

Andrew Sullivan’s final, parenthetical, mention of John Eastman is the most interesting part of this paragraph. (No link.)

Giuliani’s nothing. A sloppy drunk. Powell is something, but only one thing: The reincarnated Jean Harris, described by Diana Trilling at her murder trial as having the fixed expression “of the classic belle indifference of morbid hysteria, the corners of the mouth turned up in the fixed beginning of a smile.” 

Sullivan’s right that of the weird sisters only Eastman deserves a treason trial – one, because he is neither insane nor strung out; and, two, because he and he alone both conceived and plotted the treachery.

It’s the rare academic who sees his research implemented on a grand scale right in front of his eyes; and on Jan. 6 John Eastman’s mind must have been racing – as a mob enabled by his, er, bullshit attacked the Capitol – at the thought of the massive raise his university would be giving him to reward his remarkable research productivity. He imagined the school’s admiring pr write-up: “The John Eastman Theory of Vice-Presidential Powers is now routinely taught in jurisprudence classes across the nation, and indeed across the world.” Jacob could call it bullshit all he liked, but the shattered windows and bloodied police just down the street signaled a hugely important turn in human history, and he, John Eastman, had single-handedly made it happen. Forget his dinky academic gig – we’re looking at Attorney General… Supreme Court Justice…

When seeking to excise a varmint

The answer at hand is disbarment

For the absolute vile

You must put them on trial

And then cast them off like an old garment

As the mad Constitution-bomber’s disbarment proceeding gets underway today, let us recall exactly what he said about overthrowing the Republic.

One charge alleges Eastman violated California Business and Professions Code Section 6068(a), failure to support the US Constitution and laws. 

I assume the proceeding is private; here’s hoping we have access one way or another to testimony.

If [John] Eastman is ultimately disbarred, it would be a sudden end to an ignominious legal career. He is not very good at reading the Constitution or the law. In 2020, well before he began plotting to overturn that year’s election, he published a widely derided op-ed in Newsweek suggesting that vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris might be ineligible for that office because she was supposedly not a U.S. citizen at birth. You do not need to be a former Clarence Thomas clerk or a former Chapman University law professor, as Eastman is, to Google “Kamala Harris birthplace” and read “Oakland, California,” thus making her a natural-born citizen.

Eastman then suggested, however, that birthright citizenship itself might not be constitutional, a theory that characterizes much of his approach to the law during the 2020 election. The answer to any legal question is whatever John Eastman wants it to be, and if someone as misinformed as, say, the Supreme Court of the United States disagrees, they are also wrong and should correct themselves accordingly. This approach led him to conclude in an infamous set of memos after Election Day in 2020 that the Twelfth Amendment allows the vice president to throw out individual states’ electoral votes at his discretion and personally declare a winner. The point here is not to be right or correct—fortunately for Eastman, because he was neither—but to give a legalistic guise to a coup attempt.

The New Republic

Bowing to pressure from the student and faculty community, NYU has decided to replace the controversial conspiracy theorist with the high-profile lawyer whose radical ideas about the American electoral process have shaken up the world of legal theory.

Insiders have suggested that the real reason Bartiromo has been removed involves enormous financial penalties she is expected to incur when she loses various multibillion dollar defamation lawsuits filed against her by voting machine companies. NYU trustees are appointed largely on the basis of their ability to give hundreds of millions of dollars to the school.

Feds take Eastman’s phone.

This blog has long argued the importance of rescinding honorary degrees from, er, some of their recipients. Examples:

Bernard Madoff

Theodore McCarrick

Bill Cosby

Lance Armstrong

Sepp Blatter

Donald Trump

Sheldon Silver

James Levine

Almost all of these sex and/or money scumsters eventually lost the honor aura conferred upon them by America’s debauched universities (debauched because, in almost every case, a touch of due diligence would have uncovered enough rumors to stay their hand, but these schools apparently didn’t care).

But what about, say, a law degree? An actual degree you work for and pay for? Is there behavior dishonorable enough to justify rescinding a BA or a JD?

What about an MD? UD has argued that Jumana Nagarwala, who put her Hopkins MD to use allegedly slicing off the genitals of little girls all over the midwest, should have that degree rescinded under… call it the Mengele Rule. It’s pretty easy to argue that people who got BAs under false pretenses (as in the Varsity Blues case, where rejects took the place of qualified applicants because their parents faked their applications and paid various well-connected criminals enormous sums of money to help them) should have their degrees revoked. The principle here is that a legitimate university has a reputation to defend, and when it harbors filthy crooks it should formally, publicly, expel them.

And a lawyer? A student who attends your school in order to learn the laws of our land in order to use those same laws to destroy it? This is much like the 9/11 pilots who attended flight school here solely in order to crash their planes into buildings. It would seem to be rather at odds with the purpose of a legal education, a serious education in the rule of law in our democracy. If I were Chicago I’d be pretty fucking embarrassed to be the school that taught John Eastman the law solely in order for him to twist it to destroy the country. I mean, is my face red!

It’s not too early for UD‘s beloved U of C to start considering a process by which they can cleanly disassociate themselves from this piece of shit.

His take on his famous memo keeps changing. Where is his sedition today?

Makes UD think of the classic song, featured in The Big Lebowski.

For UD, this is the most important exchange, so far, reported to the January 6 committee.

From Lara Trump’s giggling dismissal of a reporter’s question, long ago, about violent chants at Trump rallies (People are just “having fun.”) to Eric Greitens’ RINO butchery (Like Lara Trump, he says the ad was all in fun.), violence – and now escalating violence – has run through Trumpworld. I think we owe a debt of gratitude to John Eastman for cutting out the all in fun bullshit and simply stating the obvious. Far from disavowing violence, Eastman here schools Herschmann on the excellent history of violence in America. Indeed you can sort of see Eastman shrug and then smile patiently at Herschmann as he explains, in the way of Robespierre explaining things to less bloodthirsty comrades, that you’ve got to break some eggs to make an omelette.

Nice work if you can get it.

***************

Eastman is, somehow, both a lawyer and a senior fellow at a research institute. He’s also a disgrace to the profession. His memo [arguing that Pence should simply declare Trump re-elected] is at once rife with falsehoods, childlike in its reasoning and deadly dangerous in its proposed application. Eastman needs to face consequences. State licensing authorities should review his fitness to practice law. Congress needs to demand answers, issuing a subpoena to compel Eastman to testify if necessary. And the Justice Department must, at a minimum, open a criminal investigation to determine whether Eastman’s proposed actions constituted conspiracy to violate federal election laws. If nobody takes action, then Eastman will fade into memory as just another unhinged conspiracy theorist who proposed dangerous abuses of power to serve Trump’s whims, and then walked away unscathed.

(People [as the old joke goes] tend to avoid me, since I have schizophrenia…

But at least I have each other.)

*********************************

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.”

Disreputable people damage organizations. John One-Man-Rule-Whisperer Eastman, the dapper daffy Harold Bloom lookalike we’ve all seen in the now-classic photograph, not only “conspired … to overthrow an election by offering a twisted argument that was beyond the pale of serious legal scholarship,” says Jeffrey Isaac, author of a great book about totalitarianism. He represents, Isaac continues, a “21st century American fascism beyond the pale” of an organization like the American Political Science Association.

He and others are pleased that at its last national meeting the APSA made January 6 rally speaker Eastman and his merry band, the Claremont Institute, eat at the children’s table (ie, all their panels had to be online), but they want more.

[It is indeed] within the power and authority of APSA leadership to censure Eastman and the Claremont Institute, by making a very public statement that they are among [quoting here from one of the APSA’s own statements about January 6] ‘those who have continuously endorsed and disseminated falsehoods and misinformation, and who have worked to overturn the results of a free and fair Presidential Election,’ and they thus deserve to be condemned.

******************

Oooh, you want me to wrestle with the whole free speech/cancel culture thing, do you? You don’t want me to do a hit and run and move on to my next post… You want me to tell you why I don’t think your kid should stop reading anti-semite Roald Dahl but it’s perfectly okay for the APSA to boot the Eastman Gang clear out of stadium. Okay.

If you stopped consorting with great but antisemitic artists you’d miss out on a lot of great artists.

The conductor Daniel Barenboim, a Jew, is a champion of Wagner’s music, …and has made a point of playing it in Israel, where it is hardly welcome. His defense is that while Wagner may have been reprehensible, his music is not. Barenboim likes to say that Wagner did not compose a single note that is anti-Semitic. And the disconnect between art and morality goes further than that: not only can a “bad” person write a good novel or paint a good picture, but a good picture or a good novel can depict a very bad thing. Think of Picasso’s Guernica or Nabokov’s Lolita , an exceptionally good novel about the sexual abuse of a minor, described in a way that makes the protagonist seem almost sympathetic.

21st century American fascism is apparently what Eastman does (“Simply put, Eastman did everything he could to help stage a coup. He was not just expressing a controversial view; he was trying to nullify an election in a way that never had occurred in the United States… Never before have we had someone so actively try to overthrow our government… Had Pence followed the Eastman prescription, American democracy would have ended.”); good and great art is what exceptional people – some of them holding disgusting views — do. If Dahl’s stories were child-centered variations on Der Stürmer articles, that would be one thing. Eastman’s work (and political activism) on the other hand seems pretty straightforwardly committed to dismantling democracy; his once-respectable organization has become a hotbed of anti-democratic conspiracy theorists.

That organization, by the way, seems to be thriving; it has its own extensive publications, fellowships, public events, etc. No outside organization is compelled to grant it membership; and indeed from its own point of view Claremont might well ask whether expulsion from a seriously left-leaning whatever isn’t actually a blessing. Certainly they can do a lot of fund raising off of all of this.

… Lecher.

******************

“I feel his frozen fingers trail up my thigh. He tilts his chin up. The whites of his eyes look jaundiced. My eyes dart to [Trump adviser] John Eastman, who flashes a leering grin.”

Eastman’s a “devout Catholic,” see.