California Bar Disciplinary Judge Yvette Roland disbarred Donald Trump’s former attorney and constitutional legal scholar John Eastman.
She issued a 128-page opinion on March 27, almost four months after she’d received the parties’ closing written statements.
Eastman posted an article on his Substack about the ruling, stating that he would follow up with more articles analyzing the decision in depth. He said Roland, who donated to Democrats while serving on the bench, disbarred him since she claimed he “made misrepresentations of hotly disputed facts and unresolved questions of constitutional law in my representation of former President Trump and his challenges to the illegality of the 2020 election, and because I also made those claims in public speeches, writings, and media appearances in which I highlighted illegality in the election (all of which is constitutionally protected speech).”
A nationally renowned constitutional expert told The Arizona Sun Times that he or she believed Roland took so long because she was receiving assistance writing the opinion from progressive legal activists. The expert pointed out that Roland frequently appeared confused during the trial, sometimes not sure what part of the trial they were at and unaware of key facts such as that Congress amended the Electoral Count Act in 2022 to prohibit the vice president from having substantial authority to accept or reject electoral slates.
Roland found Eastman culpable of all counts except one, which was dismissed with prejudice. They were “one count of failing to support the Constitution and laws of the United States (Bus. & Prof. Code § 6068, subd. (a)); two counts of seeking to mislead a court (§ 6068, subd. (d)); six counts of moral turpitude by making various misrepresentations (§ 6106); and two additional counts of moral turpitude (§ 6106).”
The State Bar of California filed its complaint against Eastman over his actions representing Trump in dealing with the election illegalities in the 2020 election, including filing a Motion to Intervene on his behalf and providing him with a memo outlining options he could take. Those options included how Vice President Mike Pence could deal with accepting slates of electors from states suspected of election fraud. Relying on historical precedent, Eastman laid out multiple options, including how Pence could accept the slates, which would result in Joe Biden winning the election, reject the slates, or postpone acceptance of them for 10 days while the state legislatures determined what to do. Eastman preferred the last option over rejecting the slates.
Roland stated in her opinion that the “disciplinary proceeding boils down to an analysis of whether or not Eastman, in his role as the attorney for then-President Donald Trump … and his re-election campaign, acted dishonestly in his comments and advice given regarding the issue of whether then-Vice President Mike Pence … had authority to unilaterally reject certain states’ slate of electors and/or delay or recess the electoral count during the Joint Session of Congress on January 6, 2021, and the manner in which he pursued legal action aimed at obstructing the lawful electoral process.”
She declared, “Eastman was aware, or should have been aware, that the course of conduct he proposed in his memos was factually and legally unsupported. Eastman’s dubious strategy to influence Vice President Pence to take unilateral action to determine the validity of slate of electors in the contested states or delay the Joint Session of Congress constitutes moral turpitude in violation of section 6106, as charged in count ten.”
The California Bar claimed there wasn’t historical precedent for the vice president to have a substantive role in accepting disputed electoral slates. However, Roland admitted in footnotes that she disallowed testimony that got to the root of those accusations.
“Eastman was precluded from offering expert testimony from John Yoo regarding ‘whether it would be frivolous to assert that Vice President Pence had the authority to unilaterally adjourn the Joint Session of Congress’ and ‘that [Eastman]’s argument that Pence could refuse to count certain electoral votes was non-frivolous,’” she said in footnote 7.
While Roland allowed Yoo to testify about certain aspects, some witnesses who had considerable involvement in looking into 2020 election illegalities were prohibited from testifying completely: “William M. Briggs, Anthony Cox, Jr., Mark Finchem, Heather Honey, Sandy Juno, Jeffrey O’Donnell, and Wendy Rogers.”
Yoo, who is a constitutional law professor at the University of California at Berkeley, spoke considerably about it anyway, although Roland appears to have rejected accepting many of his statements into the record afterward. The law professor said the vice president does have substantive authority and backed it up with numerous historical examples.
In an article titled “What Happens if No One Wins,” which he co-authored with law professor Robert Delahunty, he said, “We suggest that the Vice President’s role is not the merely ministerial one of opening the ballots and then handing them over (to whom?) to be counted. Though the 12th Amendment describes the counting in the passive voice, the language seems to envisage a single, continuous process in which the Vice President both opens and counts the votes.”
They added, “[I]f ‘counting’ the electors’ votes is the Vice President’s responsibility, then the inextricably intertwined responsibility for judging the validity of those votes must also be his.”
Roland tried to keep a law review article Yoo co-authored with Delahunty for Case Western Reserve Law School titled “Who Counts: The 12th Amendment, the Vice President, and the Electoral Count” out of the trial. The summary of the article states in part, “This article argues that, while the constitutional text is ambiguous, its best reading makes the Vice President, as President of the Senate, the only federal institution to judge the legitimacy of electoral votes, subject in limited cases to judicial review.”
Another article Yoo wrote, “On the Unenforceability of the Electoral Count Act,” published in 2016, found that the vice president has substantive authority to decide whether or not to accept electoral slates.
The California Bar put a witness on the stand, Matthew Seligman, who asserted that the vice president doesn’t have substantive authority to reject electoral slates. Yoo said he’d never heard of Seligman and said he’d only heard of one legal scholar who did not agree that the vice president had substantive authority, University of Virginia law professor John Harrison.
Bar complaints were filed against Seligman, who appears to have spent much of his career as a law clerk for progressive law professor Lawrence Lessig, for the unauthorized practice of law when it was revealed that he had been advising the California Bar on drafting the complaint against Eastman without an active bar license in California.
Roalnd ignored Yoo’s testimony about the vice president having substantive authority.
“[T]here was no solid legal authority regarding this issue and the only legal authority upon which he relied in drafting the memo consisted of four law review articles,” she said. Eastman’s team produced far more than four articles on the topic.
She admitted that there were competing slates of electors in Hawaii’s 1960 election.
“Eastman ignored the fact that the 1960 Hawaii presidential election involved competing slates of electors, two certified by the Governor of Hawaii and one non-certified, which resulted in the counting of the more recent certified slate of electors, which was certified by the Governor of Hawaii due to a recount,” she claimed.
Roland’s opinion repeated much of what Seligman said. It repeated facts about the disputed 2020 election and Eastman’s role, focusing on statements by election fraud-denying officials and judges declaring there were no problems.
Another significant component of her opinion was repeating common criticisms found in the mainstream media about the top election integrity investigators’ work. She left out much of the responses to the criticisms or downplayed them. A couple of the election integrity investigators made mistakes, such as transposing a column in a spreadsheet, so occasionally, one of their numbers regarding illegal votes was incorrect, but the mistakes in proportion to their numbers that weren’t disputed were relatively small. Roland spent a large portion of her opinion focusing on this limited number of mistakes, using it to discredit the rest of their research. Much of her opinion focused on making the case that there was no election wrongdoing.
The opinion was full of statements ignoring evidence provided to the contrary by Eastman’s team.
“Without explanation or support for any partisan malfeasance regarding the Georgia absentee ballots, Eastman argued that an ‘unconstitutional change in Georgia law appeared to materially benefit Vice President Biden.’” Roland said.
She cited a statement issued by CISA declaring that the election was the most secure ever but failed to include testimony from Eastman’s team to the contrary.
“Significantly, about two months before Eastman made the damning Dominion voting machine vulnerabilities remarks on the Ellipse, Eastman had become aware that the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) stated on November 12, 2020, ‘[t]he November 3rd election was the most secure in American history,” notwithstanding the “many unfounded claims and opportunities for misinformation about the process of our elections.’”
Roland cherry-picked parts of statements, omitting key details. “Trump encouraged his supporters to march down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol and concluded by urging them to ‘fight like hell’ to save the country,” she said, failing to mention that Trump also told them to protest and march “peacefully.”
She reviewed Eastman’s communications with Pence and his attorney but selectively left out facts related to those communications that favored Eastman.
She admitted Eastman did not claim there was fraud, but that didn’t change her opinion.
“Although Eastman did not explicitly label any of these actions as fraud,” she said, “he argued that these (and other) actions invited fraud or were ‘drastic and fraud-inducing.’”
Despite admitting that, the judge said, “[T]here was no massive evidence of outcome-determinative fraud related to these alleged ‘illegalities’ or any absentee voter fraud in connection with the Pennsylvania 2020 presidential election.” This ignored the fact that when judges overturned elections prior to 2020, they did not require “massive evidence of outcome-determinative fraud.”
In 2013, in Pembroke, North Carolina, a new election was ordered for town council after it came out that at least two candidates helped bring people to the town’s early voting location who were ineligible to vote. In 2018, in Sharpsburg, North Carolina, a judge merely cited “an irregularity” as enough to order a new election. There, only 20-25 voters were alleged to have been disenfranchised.
In 2019, a judge ordered a new election for a Georgia House seat based on merely finding that four voters were ineligible. Also that year, in North Carolina, a judge ordered a new election where a contractor was accused of illegally collecting hundreds of ballots for the winning Republican candidate. He wasn’t even convicted yet, merely accused.
In 2020, after hundreds of mail-in ballots were discovered in a mailbox in Paterson, New Jersey, a judge ordered a new election in the affected city council race. In Surry County, North Carolina, a judge ordered a new election in the commissioners’ race in 2021 over the mere action of a poll worker informing voters that one of the candidates was deceased.
Roland said the First Amendment does not protect “false statements made knowingly or with reckless disregard of the truth.”
She admitted that the standard is “false statements,” a fairly high standard, and assumed Eastman’s statements were false. She ignored vast amounts of testimony from Eastman’s witnesses, who verified that his statements about election illegalities were accurate.
She said he committed a crime of moral turpitude when he said that seven states had transmitted alternate slates of electors to the President of the Senate, refusing to admit that the slates were valid. She said he misled the court when he said in his Motion to Intervene that election officials in Pennsylvania violated the law by adopting different standards for voters to favor Biden. She ignored all of Eastman’s witnesses’ testimony to the contrary.
Roland found aggravating circumstances of “multiple acts of wrongdoing, lack of candor and indifference.” Eastman refused to act remorseful for his conduct.
She claimed his conduct “far surpasses the misconduct at issue” by former President Richard Nixon’s attorney, Donald Segretti, who served four and a half months in prison for his role in the Watergate scandal spying on Democratic headquarters.
Roland awarded more than the maximum amount of sanctions for disbarment against Eastman. The bar disciplinary rules authorize a maximum of $5,000, but she issued sanctions for $10,000, citing a rule that allows a disciplinary judge to deviate in their discretion.
Eastman intends to appeal. His GiveSendGo legal defense fund has raised $740,401.
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Rachel Alexander is a reporter at The Arizona Sun Times and The Star News Network. Follow Rachel on Twitter / X. Email tips to rachel.r.alexander@gmail.com.
Photo “John Eastman” by John Eastman Defense Fund.
