A federal judge on Wednesday ordered the release of emails from John Eastman, a former lawyer for Donald Trump, to House investigators, saying the communications were made in furtherance of a crime related to Trump’s efforts to sway the 2020 election.
“The emails show that President Trump knew the specific voter fraud numbers were false, but continued to tout those numbers, both in court and to the public,” Judge David O. Carter wrote.
“The Court finds that these emails are sufficiently related to a conspiracy to defraud the United States,” he added.
Carter, who sits on the federal district court in central California, had already released many of Eastman’s emails from January 2021 to the House select committee investigating the attack on the US Capitol, but the two sides remained at odds over 562 additional documents from Eastman Chapman University email. account.
For eight of the more than 500 Eastman documents the judge was reviewing, the judge said the materials could be released because they fit the so-called criminal fraud exception, which allows disclosure of otherwise privileged material if the communications relate to or for promoting illegal or fraudulent conduct.
Four of the documents came from emails discussing possible election disputes. In them, Carter wrote: “Dr. Eastman and other attorneys suggest that — regardless of the merits — the primary goal of the filing is to delay or otherwise disrupt the Jan. 6 vote.”
Carter’s new executive order cited an email where Trump’s lawyers say “having this case pending before the Supreme Court, and not pending, may be enough to delay Georgia’s consideration.”
“This email, read in conjunction with other documents in this review, makes clear that President Trump filed certain lawsuits not to obtain legal relief, but to stop or delay the January 6th congressional proceedings through the courts “, said the decision.
“The Court finds that these four documents are sufficiently related to the crime of obstruction and further the crime,” he adds.
CNN has reached out to representatives for Trump and Eastman for comment.
Four other emails the judge ordered released “demonstrate an effort by President Trump and his lawyers to make false allegations in federal court to delay the January 6 vote.” Carter pointed to the lawsuit Trump filed challenging the election results in Georgia. The judge went on to cite a December 2020 email in which Eastman said Trump had been informed that some of the claims made in early December about the state court election were inaccurate.
According to Carter, Eastman wrote in the December 30, 2020 email: “Although the President signed a verification for [the state court filing] on December 1, has since been informed that some of the claims (and the evidence provided by the experts) were inaccurate. For him to sign a new verification with this knowledge (and incorporation by reference) would not be accurate.”
But Trump and his lawyers continued to file a federal lawsuit citing the same inaccurate numbers, Carter said. The federal lawsuit filed by Trump’s lawyers did not include the numbers in the body of the complaint, but rather, the lawsuit included as an attachment a challenge to the state court election. Trump filed it, Carter noted, without “correcting, clarifying or otherwise changing” the bogus fraud numbers.
The federal lawsuit filed by Trump also included a footnote that Carter called “Trump’s attempt to disclaim responsibility for the misleading claims.” Trump said in the footnote that he was only relying on the evidence presented to him. “But, according to his lawyers’ admissions, the information he was given was that the alleged voter fraud numbers were inaccurate,” Carter said Wednesday.
Carter’s findings that Trump and Eastman “knowingly” misrepresented voter fraud numbers in federal court will bolster the committee’s investigation into the former president’s election reversals.
The committee has repeatedly argued that a key tenet of Trump’s plan to overturn the results of the 2020 election was to file frivolous lawsuits designed to delay the certification of results in key states. The judge’s decision echoes that sentiment. The disclosure of the emails also comes as the Justice Department as well as the local district attorney in Atlanta have launched their own criminal investigations looking into 2020 election programs.
Eastman must also turn over portions of material related to his proposal to then-Vice President Mike Pence to stop certifying the 2020 election on Jan. 6, 2021, the judge ordered Wednesday. Thirty-three documents were ordered to be disclosed in total under the new order, which set an October 28 deadline to do so.
Earlier this month, the commission argued that Eastman had been “consistently unreliable” as he sought to shield his communications from the ongoing investigation, and that investigators should now have access to more emails from one of his work email accounts.
This story has been updated with additional details.
