In previously unreported comments from a radio interview, John Eastman said that the Jan. 6 investigators were egregiously “shredding four of ten of the Bill of Rights” in a “classic fishing expedition” in their quest to investigate causes and culpability for the Jan. 6 riots.
Yet, in a status update filed last week with a federal district court regarding compliance with a subpoena for documents issued by the U.S. House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection at the nation’s Capitol in 2021, Eastman’s attorneys have disclosed that 6,059 documents — comprising 25,500 pages of material — have been submitted for investigators.
The subpoena, issued in late January, demanded more than 24,000 archived emails and documents from Eastman’s former account at Chapman University in California, where Eastman was employed until shortly after the Jan. 6 event in Washington D.C.
Eastman was also relieved from some of his duties as a visiting conservative scholar at the University of Colorado (CU) following the Jan. 6 event and his classes were canceled due to under-enrollment. Eastman is suing CU for allegedly violating his First Amendment rights.
Eastman was on the legal team advising the Trump administration on potential challenges to the legitimacy of the 2020 election of Joe Biden as the president of the United States, and he addressed the crowd at a “Stop the Steal” rally shortly before many attendees marched on and invaded the Capitol.
Two months ago, Eastman railed against the U.S. House subpoena in an interview with Colorado conservative talk radio host Kim Monson on KLZ 560-AM.
“So, you know, they’ve subpoenaed everybody that had anything to do with raising questions about the election, as if somehow that provoked what happened at the Capitol on January 6th,” Eastman explained to Monson. “And so they couldn’t get the information for me because I’ve got attorney-client and other constitutional right privileges that I asserted before the J6 committee. So they subpoenaed my phone company. We filed a court action to block my phone company from turning over not just all of my emails, my — [correcting himself] excuse me, not e-mails — my texts and my phone communications — but those of anybody else on my account — so, my wife, my son, my daughter. …You know, this is what you call classic fishing expedition, to try and find something. We have a Fourth Amendment designed for — this is like the old British king that [says], ‘I don’t know if there’s any been crime committed, but I know you people well enough to know that you must have been committing crimes. So, I’m going to issue a general warrant to allow my officers just to look at whatever they want, to see what they find. And then if they find any evidence of illegality, or anything that can be portrayed as evidence of illegality, we’ll then bring charges.‘
“This is what the Fourth Amendment was designed to prohibit. And yet the J6 committee subpoenas are doing exactly that. They’re massive fishing expeditions. When they couldn’t get it from my phone company because of the lawsuit we filed, they discovered that my emails on my old employer at Chapman University had been archived, unbeknownst to me. When I removed them, when I left that university, they were supposed to be gone. But they had — and they were going to turn over 94,000 pages of documents of my emails that were in the archive system, without my ability to even review them for privilege.
I ran a legal clinic at Chapman University. I had dozens of clients whose attorney-client privilege materials were going to be in that cache of documents, and this was not anything specific to Jan. 6: ‘Did Eastman have any communications with the Proud Boys or anybody that’s been indicted or any or arrested?’ We wanted everything from November through January in any way related to the election. This goes after core political speech in a very substantial way. So, they are First Amendment rights. It’s like I said, an unreasonable dragnet looking — a general warrant — it’s Fourth Amendment. It’s protected material that I’ve asserted Fifth Amendment privilege over. It’s attorney-client material, so my clients are being deprived of their Sixth Amendment rights, to have counsel in confidential conversations.
“I mean, they are shredding four of the ten Bill of Rights in their unfettered effort to try and build a narrative that will salvage the hemorrhaging on their political aspirations. This is egregious!
And by the way, if anybody wants to help, I’ve got lawyers in D.C.. I’ve got lawyers in California. I’ve got lawyers elsewhere in the country, helping. We set up a legal defense fund. And I didn’t do GoFundMe because I didn’t want them to fund unfund me!“
In the status update filed with the California Central District Court, Southern Division, Eastman claims privileged protection in refusing to release nearly 4,000 of the documents subpoenaed by the select committee. About 640 of those documents were granted privileged protection with agreement from the Select Committee attorney.
Approximately 3,200 documents that Eastman claims to be protected are still under consideration by the court.
Listen to Eastman’s Feb. 2022 interview with Kim Monson using the media player below:
