A federal judge on Wednesday ordered lawyer John Eastman, a key figure in former President Donald Trump’s challenges to the 2020 election results, to turn over 33 new documents to the House Jan. 6 committee, including a number that the judge found are exempt from attorney-client privilege because they relate to a crime or an attempted crime.
In his orderUS District Judge David Carter of Central California found Eastman should hand over eight documents under the “crime-fraud exception” to attorney-client and attorney work privileges.
According to the judge, Eastman said in one of the email exchanges that Trump was aware that the number of voter fraud cases his team was alleging in a federal lawsuit challenging the election results in Georgia was “inaccurate.” But, the judge said, Trump signed off on the suit, “swearing under oath” that the numbers were correct, anyway.
The email exchange centered on Trump’s legal team’s plan to use the same highly inflated fraud numbers it had used in a state court suit in early December 2020, alleging that Fulton County, Georgia, “improperly counted a number of votes including 10,315 deceased people, 2,560 felons, and 2,423 unregistered voters,” the ruling said.
But on Dec. 30, 2020 — before the federal filing — “Eastman relayed ‘concerns’ from President Trump’s team ‘about including specific numbers in the paragraph dealing with felons, deceased, moved, etc.,'” Carter said.
Eastman said in an email the next day that “although the President signed a verification for [the state court filing] back on Dec. 1, he has since been made aware that some of the allegations (and evidence proffered by the experts) has been inaccurate.”
“For him to sign a new verification with that knowledge (and incorporation by reference) would not be accurate,” Eastman wrote.
Nevertheless, Carter noted, “Trump and