John Eastman’s Fox News Interview Probably Didn’t Help John Eastman

If you’re under indictment, the last thing you would want to do is provide the prosecution more evidence, but that’s seems to be what John Eastman just did. Eastman appeared on the Fox News program “The Ingraham Angle,” and during the interview, Eastman made a number of troubling statements.

First, in response to Laura Ingraham’s question about the violence on January 6th, Eastman said it was contrary to what they wanted to do.  

As Kyle Cheney points out, Eastman tried to use the impact of the riot to pressure Pence to violate the Electoral Count Act.

Second, Eastman was asked by Ingraham what he was hoping to accomplish. Eastman said, “that some people had suggested that Mike Pence simply had the power to reject electors whose certification was still pending,” but claimed that he explicitly told Pence that even though he thought it was an “open issue,” he thought it is the weaker argument and it would be “foolish” even if he had it.

Lawrence O’Donnell pointed out on his show that Eastman is believed to be co-conspirator two in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s indictment of Donald Trump for an attempt to overturn the 2020 election.

O’Donnell: Page 32 of that indictment says John Eastman circulated a two-page memorandum outlining a plan for the Vice President to unlawfully declare the defendant Donald Trump the certified winner of the presidential election… the Vice President's chief of staff, the Vice President's counsel met again with coconspirator 2, John Eastman, who now advocated that the Vice President do what the defendant had said he preferred the day before, unilaterally reject electors from the targeted states.

Pence said in a previous interview that a "gaggle of crackpot lawyers" tried to pressure him to reject electors.

Lastly, Eastman said that what he recommended was that Pence follow the requests of more than a hundred state legislators in the swing states, giving them a week to sort out the impact of “what everyone acknowledged” was illegality. It’s probably not great to volunteer that you “recommended” that Pence violate the Electoral Count Act.