Newly revealed emails show that former Donald Trump attorney John Eastman urged Republican officials in Pennsylvania to throw out thousands of absentee ballots and recount the commonwealth’s popular vote to show Mr Trump leading there in an effort to ultimatley overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election.
According to Politico, Mr Eastman wrote that Republican legislators could cite concerns with the absentee ballot process to remove mail-in votes and show Mr Trump leading in the vote count, a move that he wrote would “provide some cover” to replace the commonwealth’s electors with pro-Trump partisans.
“You’d be left with a significant Trump lead that would bolster the argument for the Legislature adopting a slate of Trump electors — perfectly within your authority to do anyway, but now bolstered by the untainted popular vote,” Mr Eastman wrote in an email to Pennsylvania Rep Russ Diamond on 4 December 2020. “That would help provide some cover.”
President Joe Biden beat Mr Trump in Pennsylvania by more than 80,000 votes. The race there was decided by more than a percentage point in Mr Biden’s favour, and the races in Georgia, Arizona, and Wisconsin were decided by slimmer margins. But Pennsylvania, with its 20 electoral votes, was the biggest prize of the bunch.
The emails, obtained from the University of Colorado via a public records request from the Colorado Ethics Institute, show a granular level of plotting from Mr Eastman as to how Mr Trump’s camp could subvert democracy and ensure that the Republican incumbent remain president despite losing the election to Mr Biden.
Mr Eastman was working as a visiting professor at the University of Colorado during the post-election period. There are similar attempts underway from the Jan 6 committee investigating the Capitol riot in Congress to access Mr Eastman’s emails in California from a period when he was working as a professor at Chapman University.
Mr Eastman eventually outlined his belief that Vice President Mike Pence refuse to count Mr Biden’s electors, a strategy for overturning the result that Mr Pence ultimately spurned.
These emails, however, suggest that Mr Eastman pursued other strategies for overturning the result before settling on the last-ditch effort centred on Mr Pence.
Mr Diamond, a Republican from Lebanon County, Pennsylvania, who has served in the commonwealth’s House of Representatives since 2015, called for the certification of Pennsylvania’s electors to be withdrawn and joined a lawsuit asking a Pennsylvania court to invalidate the commonwealth’s popular vote count.
These attempts, like the vast majority of legal attempts to overturn the election result, were not successful.
Mr Eastman was called before the Jan 6 committee in January and took the Fifth Amendment more than 100 times. He is currently raising money for his legal defence fund.
