Former President Donald Trump was preparing for his campaign against the legitimate results of the 2020 election long before the first votes were ever cast, and contracted an attorney linked to his plan to overturn the election months before Election Day.
Politico first reported a court filing submitted on Tuesday that reveals lawyer John Eastman was working for Donald Trump as early as the summer of 2020, while polling indicated that Mr Trump was trailing his opponent but Mr Biden’s victory was far from certain.
In the filing, part of Mr Eastman’s bid to block the 6 January committee from obtaining documents and other information he controls, Mr Eastman explains that he was hired as part of a so-called “election integrity” unit in August of 2020.
“As a member of the Election Integrity Working Group and in furtherance of my representation of President Trump as candidate and his campaign committee, I began conducting legal research and collaborating with academic advisers and other supporters of the President about the myriad number of factual and legal issues we anticipated might arise following the election,” he explained in the filing.
The revelation is not particularly damaging for Mr Trump, but reveals that he was planning on potentially disputing the results of the 2020 election months ahead of time.
It also shows how long the legal team working for Mr Trump had to investigate the arguments of voter fraud and election shenanigans that the Trump campaign tried to make in the days following the election; given that Mr Eastman and his team were working as early as August, it is all the more significant that the Trump team was unable to come up with serious evidence of election fraud to present in their various court battles following 3 November.
Mr Eastman would go on to make a name for himself in the January 6 investigation by being the author of a memo which claimed that Vice President Mike Pence had the constitutional authority to reject Electoral College votes from states where the Trump campaign had alleged fraud. Mr Pence and most constitutional law experts disagreed with that assertion, and the House and Senate are currently considering legislation to clarify the vice president’s role in the process as a result.
The former Trump legal team member is now one of a handful of Trump allies resisting the efforts of the January 6 committee to investigate the attack on Congress and efforts to overturn the election.
