I’ve heard from so many supporters across the country who are praying for me as I deal with the lawfare persecution that is being waged against me. Many have also contributed to my legal defense fund, for which I am extremely grateful.
Last month I was fortunate to give a speech to the American Freedom Alliance where I discussed at length what I have been dealing with concerning the weaponization of the justice system, including the California State Bar trial against me, the indictment in Georgia, being an unindicted co-conspirator in the federal trial against Donald Trump and other elements of the left’s attempts to destroy my reputation, bankrupt me and put me in prison for representing President Trump.
A common theme among many of the comments that people have sent is they wish that Americans could hear from me in my own words just how outrageous the effort is against me and how false the charges being made actually are.
As it happens, last month I was fortunate to give a speech to the American Freedom Alliance where I discussed at length what I have been dealing with concerning the weaponization of the justice system, including the California State Bar trial against me, the indictment in Georgia, being an unindicted co-conspirator in the federal trial against Donald Trump and other elements of the left’s attempts to destroy my reputation, bankrupt me and put me in prison for representing President Trump.
Below are comments in my own words that my team have excised from what was a 47-minute speech. I hope they give you a good idea of what I have been dealing with, the toll it has taken on me and my family, and the strength of my case in fighting back.
The ordeal that this persecution has taken on me is extraordinary, but as I said in the speech, my wife and I have come to the realization that my whole life – my education, my twenty years teaching constitutional law, my twenty years of running one of the leading public interest constitutional litigation centers in the country, the briefs I filed in 200 cases in the Supreme Court – has probably equipped me to be able to push back against this tyranny better than anybody else.
But I can’t do it alone. That is why I am asking Americans like you to help with a generous donation to the John Eastman Legal Defense Fund.
I hope that the excerpts below in my own words give you a fuller, better-informed understanding of the tyrannical nature of what the political left is doing and the strength of my effort to push back against this tyranny.
Sincerely,
John Eastman
Constitutional Scholar
Attorney for President Donald Trump
“In His Own Words”
Comments Excised from Dr. John Eastman’s Speech to the American Freedom Alliance
[Note: all time marks are approximate.]
01:22
“There is a level of seriousness here that we haven’t seen in our nation’s history. Banana Republic doesn’t even begin to cover it. This is Stalinist tactics on top of a Banana Republic. Criminalizing free speech, the right to petition the government for redress of grievances and going after the attorneys who were doing nothing but giving legal advice as part of a racketeering enterprise. We’ve never seen anything like it.
One hopes that the courts will eventually come to their senses and put a stop to it, but the amount of money and time that it is costing all of us that are in the line of fire right now is extraordinary. I’m entering week 8 of the trial to protect my bar license in California. This is going to cost me half a million dollars to protect a bar license.”
3:05
“Thirty-eight pages, single spaced, they sent me back in May of 2022, a demand letter for an investigation. It was the most extraordinary thing. Identify every bit of evidence you had to support every statement you made, everything you published, every brief you filed, every radio interview you did, for the last two years. Has any Bar ever done anything like that? We decided, you know what, we’re going to respond and I spent four months crossing the “T’s”. They said we had no evidence. I gave them 100,000 pages of documents.”
4:00
“They said no evidence and we provided evidence. One of the charges that was brought against me – this is my favorite one – ‘He claimed in his speech on January 6th on the mall (by the way to half a million people…) that dead people voted. That’s moral turpitude because it’s false and he knew it was false because as the Inspector General of Michigan has acknowledged only 1,500 dead people voted in Michigan.’ So in their own complaint and charges against me they admit what I said was true and they falsely say that it was false.
I can’t even begin to tell you how surreal the criminal charges are…I’m indicted co-conspirator number 3 in Georgia for, get this, for giving testimony to the Georgia Legislature. The testimony said there’s lots of evidence of illegality and fraud, I think you should investigate it. And if you agree, then you have some legal authority, constitutional authority, to do something about it. The charge is soliciting members of the Legislature to violate their oaths of office. There are six counts against me, all tied to the same thing regarding contingent electors.”
7:55
[Talking about the RICO charge:] “If you look at the 141 predicate acts in that complaint it’s things like Trump asked his chief of staff to get him the phone numbers of legislators in Pennsylvania. This is a predicate act for the RICO charges. How many of you talked to friends to try to say we think there’s something wrong with the election? Oh my God, you’re all a part of the predicate acts. [If] they want to broaden this, you’re part of the RICO enterprise. It’s minimum five years, maximum 20 years, and a $100,000 fine for being part of the enterprise even if you didn’t commit a criminal act. If you committed any act, criminal or not, that was in furtherance of the conspiracy as they’ve defined it you can be charged for the criminal conduct of everybody else.”
9:00
So December 4th, one of the most comprehensive lawsuits filed in all of this was by the team down in Georgia. About a thousand pages of affidavits. Expert reports. A hundred page complaint. Very well documented. There wasn’t anything in that complaint that they hadn’t vetted three ways to Sunday. There wasn’t any of the speculation about the machines or any of that because they hadn’t been able to confirm it. So none of that is in there. It’s they unilaterally changed the signature verification process without legislative authority. That means it was unconstitutional. They ran portable polls all over Atlanta which is illegal under Georgia law because you got to have observers, you’ve got to have fixed polling places, they have to be notified 72 hours ahead of time or whatever. So illegal. How many votes were harvested through that scheme? All of these things are in there. Very sophisticated analysis of the voter rolls. People who had long since moved who were voting. People who were felons that were voting. People who were on the Social Security death index were voting. All of those things are in there.”
10:50
“That litigation, that lawsuit never got a judge appointed. December 4th the case was filed. We’re up at the end of December and no judge has been appointed who is eligible to sit on that case. This is now a federal due process violation as well as the election challenge violation. So we file a federal lawsuit raising due process. Due process. Exhibit “A” is the complaint that was filed that never got a judge appointed. We have to attach Exhibit A to our complaint. One of the other lawyers in the White House says Trump can’t sign the verification of that complaint because we’ve subsequently learned that some of the numbers may be inaccurate. Like 10,500 dead people voting. Of course, the expert report said “as many as.” The complaint said “as many as.” And it offered the caveats that were perfectly acceptable. So we had a whole team…I can’t tell you what the exchanges of the emails were because that’s still attorney client privilege….so the lawyers come to the point that we can have him sign the verification because every statement in the original complaint we’re attaching was true.”
12:05
“Count number nine against me is that I made a false statement in a pleading to the federal court in Georgia. Now the federal court in Georgia has never invited me to offer or show cause why I shouldn’t be sanctioned because it’s not sanctionable conduct because everything we said was true. Yet Fani Willis has decided that is another criminal charge against me and one of the predicate RICO acts. These are the kinds of things we’re dealing with.”
16:00
“In Pennsylvania, one of my favorite cases, the California Bar is going after me because they claim I have no evidence there was some collusion here. So the League of Women Voters – a completely nonpartisan organization [laughter] – sued the Secretary of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. This was in August of 2020. The premise of the lawsuit was the signature verification process that’s been in place in Pennsylvania for a hundred years violates federal due process because when you disqualify a signature you don’t give the voter notice that you’re doing that and an opportunity to cure. So the basis of their lawsuit is to get notice and an opportunity to cure as an add on to the signature verification process. The Secretary of the Commonwealth, the defendant in this certainly “adversarial” suit says let me tell you something, I don’t think we have a signature verification process at all in our law. We’ve been doing it a hundred years but we don’t have it. Unilaterally she gets rid of the signature verification process. Now the suit goes away because we don’t need notice and an opportunity to cure because we’re not going to do any signature verification. She realizes she’s out on a limb a little bit so she decides to file a motion in the Pennsylvania Supreme Court which is hyper partisan. It’s elected partisan, 7-2 Democrat I think is the number, she files a “writ for Kings Bench warrant”.”
19:20
“One might say that that kind of illegality is not proof of fraud and therefor we should just ignore the illegality. Well, it opened the door for fraud. How do I know that? Let me give a couple of examples.… Philadelpha and Alleghany county uploaded their ballot data by February 2021 and guess what?…a hundred ten thousand more ballots than people who had voted. Now I don’t want to speculate about whether that truck driver that brought in a couple of hundred thousand ballots from Long Island had anything to do with this but the Inspector General has recently issued a report saying they don’t know where those ballots came from, they don’t know where they went, what they do know is there are 650,000 ballots printed in Rochester New York that they don’t have any record of how they got into Pennsylvania. So the illegality maybe, maybe, opened the door for fraud.”
23:00
“[Wisconsin Special Counsel Michael Gabelman] said here’s what we learned in our report. One of the illegalities committed by the Secretary of State of Wisconsin was to issue a directive barring the bipartisan teams that state law requires to go into nursing homes before any ballots can be obtained from nursing home residents. Why does that make sense? Because people in nursing homes are particularly susceptible to undue coercion or fraud so they want bipartisan teams to make sure that’s not happening. She under the pretext of COVID – although the plant watering guy and the meal teams were still going into nursing homes but the bipartisan teams mandated by state law and continue to be mandated by state law…– the Secretary of State unilaterally abrogated that statute. In nursing homes the vote turnout rate went from historical averages of twenty to thirty percent to 95 percent including in memory care wings of the nursing homes. And, many of the ballots are in the same handwriting. So when people say what evidence do you have that illegality led to fraud, I say well the illegality clearly opened the door for fraud and we now have physical evidence that in fact people went through that door and committed fraud.”
24:35
“Justice Gabelman estimates that 150,000 to 200,000 ballots may have been affected statewide by this illegality and fraud. Now maybe you say, OK, that’s not big enough to affect the outcome of the election. Bill Barr says there’s no evidence of fraud that’s big enough to affect the outcome of the election. But the margin in Wisconsin was a little over 20,000 votes. So this is ten times bigger than the margin.”
“And that’s just one of the frauds.”
25:37
“They had a thing called Democracy in the Park in Madison the home of the University of Wisconsin…so they do Democracy in the Park which is illegal because if you’re going to return an absentee ballot, Wisconsin law only allows you to return it to the clerk’s office in person or mail it personally. Alright. So Democracy in the Park they’re sending out Biden campaign volunteers to be “human drop boxes” to receive all these ballots. Now there is a provision in Wisconsin law that lets you create an alternative site for the return of ballots but if you do that it’s only because the existing clerk’s office is not big enough to handle it and you have to NOT accept ballots at the original clerk’s office and you have to provide notice of where the additional site is. The “human drop boxes” flowing through the parks in Madison Wisconsin did not meet either of those requirements and so the courts finally held two years after the fact that this was illegal under their state law.”
26:55
“Article II of the federal constitution makes absolutely clear that the power to direct the manner of choosing presidential electors is vested in the Legislature of the state. Not the county clerk in Madison. Or the Secretary of State. Or a court. Or the private Democrat activist from New Yerk who was hired with Zuckerberg money to take over the Green Bay elections office. None of those people have the constitutional authority to alter the manner for choosing presidential electors. And yet in every one of these states – Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, Nevada – that kind of illegality, unconstitutionality, occurred at the heart of the election. That alone, in my view, authorizes the Legislature to reclaim its authority to direct the manner of choosing presidential electors. Legally. Constitutionally.”
27:56
“Prudently, I thought you want more evidence that that illegality had an impact on the outcome before you should take such a step. So my advice all along to the legislators was to conduct a further investigation. The illegality is clear. What was the impact of the illegality? That’s going to be much harder to prove. You have to be able to extrapolate from the best evidence you have to determine whether what occurred affected the outcome. But if you decide that it did, you have the legal authority, the constitutional authority to do something about it.”
33:45
[On the Project 65] “They’ve filed over 100 Bar complaints against any lawyer they could find that had any involvement in any of the election challenges on behalf of Trump…The head of the organization said our goal is not just to get them disbarred but to make them so toxic in their firms and their communities that right wing legal talent will never take on these kind of elections challenges again.”
34:10
“This is what I want to focus on for a minute. The fight I’m in is much bigger than me. It’s not just election challenges. It’s you have a problem with mask mandates or vaccine mandates and you want to speak out against it and the government comes down on you with all its might, which lawyers are going to come to your defense? You want you object to some transgendered 50-year-old man walking in naked to your 12-year-old daughter’s locker room or shower at the public pool, which lawyer is going to come to your defense? Their goal here is to destroy our adversarial system of justice. When I talked about they’ve crossed the Rubicon with the bringing of the criminal charges, their ultimate goal is to destroy our adversarial system of justice.”
35:05
“This totalitarian aspect of it; one of the charges against me in California is that I knew there was no evidence of illegality or fraud because Bill Barr said so. And I’m just supposed to bend my knee because Bill Barr said without any basis that there was no evidence that he’d seen of election fraud. But Bill come give me a call. I’ve got it all right here. You’re more than welcome to it. It’s backfired on him because I’m putting on the evidence that we never got to put on before.”
42:13
“When people say there’s no evidence I say well you don’t know what you’re talking about.
But why they are going after me so hard is because I have decided to stand up to shine a light on this to the extent I can and I’ve got the credibility I think to do it.”
43:10
“I have learned the lesson of Tom Paine in a way I never thought I would. Remember Tom Paine, “these are the times that try men’s souls.” And I never quite fully understood the depth of the importance of that message because the next line is “we cannot have summer soldiers and sunshine patriots.” We need people willing to stand up even when times are tough.”
43:35
“My wife and I, one of the darkest moments, was the day the Bar charges were filed against me. I spent four months responding comprehensively to all the nonsense. Thinking, “OK, you guys are getting fed this crap by these advocacy organizations then when you see the actual evidence I have you’ll drop it.” And they filed the Bar charges anyway. It was such a down moment that I had a spasm in my leg overnight, tension, and trying to deal with it I fell out of bed on our tile floor and split my head open. And we had a press conference for the next day, 9am – Ed Meese, Janet Rogers Brown and a whole bunch of people joining in talking about what nonsense this was – and so four in the morning I’m dealing with gushing blood…it knocked me out. [My wife] thought I was dead. She woke up and shaking me for five minutes and I finally wake up.”
45:02“The [press conference] went on for an hour. Every major newspaper and television outlet in the country and many in the world that were attending. Hardly any of them ever covered the fact that we had the news conference. Because it was so compelling.”
45:30
“About a week later, my wife and I come to the realization, independently but we share it… independently come to it… that my whole life, my whole education, my twenty years teaching constitutional law, my twenty years of running one of the leading public interest constitutional litigation centers in the country, 200 cases in the Supreme Court, has probably equipped me to be able to push back against this stuff better than anybody else.”
45:55
“So instead of spending time with my granddaughter this week I’ve been in the California Bar. Instead of golfing this summer I was dealing with the California Bar. We’re now entering week 8 of this Bar trial. I won’t have any comment about how the trial is going or how the judge is conducting it because that would not be proper. There are other people writing commentary about it that I would encourage you to find and read about.
46:21
“But if we don’t stand up and fight this tyranny, we will have given up on being citizens in a free republic and we will become sheep and subjects and wonder what happened and wonder what we’ve given to our grandchildren. So I, ladies and gentlemen, am willing to fight and I hope you are willing to join me in the effort.”
Click here to view the entire speech