(CN) — Former Donald Trump attorney John Eastman retook the stand on Friday, the fourth day of his disbarment hearing in downtown Los Angeles.
Eastman, an Orange County lawyer and former dean of the Chapman University law school, was one of the chief architects of a legal strategy to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Among other things, he authored two memos urging Vice President Mike Pence to either delay a vote to certify the election, or reverse the results in favor of Trump. Eastman now faces 11 disciplinary charges from the State Bar of California. Earlier in the week State Bar attorney Duncan Carling called Eastman's conduct "fundamentally dishonest," and his legal theories "baseless, completely unsupported by historical precedent or law, and contrary to our values as a nation."
Eastman's lawyer, Randy Miller, has defended his client's ideas as "tenable," and not so kooky as to be beyond "scholarly debate."
Much of Eastman's arguments were based on the claim that there had been enormous amounts of election fraud that swung the election toward Joe Biden — that is, based largely on misinformation. On Friday morning, Carling questioned Eastman about the evidence Eastman had relied on to form his legal conclusions, some of which made their way into a brief filed on behalf of the Trump campaign, in a lawsuit filed at the U.S. Supreme Court by the state of Texas, which challenged the election results in four states: Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Carling attempted — slowly and methodically — to show that the brief was based on work that was far outside the mainstream.
The brief cited an analysis by economist Charles Cicchetti which went viral on Facebook after the election. In the brief, it was summarized thusly: "The probability of former Vice President Biden winning the popular vote in the four Defendant States — Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — independently given President Trump’s early lead in those States as of 3 a.m. on November 4, 2020, is less than one in a quadrillion, or 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000."
That math relied on an assumption that Biden would get the same proportion of votes as Hillary Clinton had gotten in 2016 – an assumption that was, needless to say, rather presumptuous. (It's unclear whether or not Cicchetti's conclusions were wildly off-base, or misinterpreted by the Trump campaign's legal team, or both.)
When asked about the accuracy of Cicchetti's work, Eastman replied, "I'm not an expert in statistical analysis." He added that he thought it was "credible."
Carling also asked Eastman about Jesse Morgan, a truck driver who, in a sworn affidavit, said he delivered 24 bins of vote-by-mail ballots from New York to Pennsylvania. The account is hard to follow, but it was alleged that these were fraudulent, filled-out ballots intended to sway the Pennsylvania vote toward Biden. After Morgan's story became public, the Pennsylvania-based York Daily Record reported that Morgan was an "amateur ghost hunter" with "a lengthy history of drug abuse, mental health issues and allegations of domestic violence."
In a filing in his disbarment case, Eastman cited Morgan's ballot-delivery story as evidence that there was "fraud and illegality" in the 2020 election. Carling asked Eastman if Eastman knew about Morgan's research into "paranormal activity." Eastman said, "No."
"So you haven't heard him described in press accounts as a ghost hunter?" asked Carling.
"I have not," Eastman replied.
In the afternoon, Nevada's Deputy Secretary of State for Elections Mark Wlaschin appeared via Zoom. Much of his testimony was about voter fraud in the 2020 election — or rather the lack thereof. He said there were around 200 attempts to vote fraudulently in that election, calling them "individuals that demonstrated poor judgment and lack of integrity." Most of those were people who attempted to vote twice, but those attempts were all prevented. Less than 50 people tried to vote under names of people that had died.
"Would you consider that 'widespread fraud' in Nevada?" state bar attorney Sam Beckerman asked.
"I would not," Wlaschin replied.
Wlaschin also testified about a wave of disinformation and half-baked conspiracy theories about Dominion voting machines, which were used in the state.
"Everything from they were owned by a Venezuelan dictator," he said, "to they had modems in their machines, to the Italian military satellites — I apologize, but I'm being genuinely serious." Many of the theories held that the machines "somehow switched" people's votes.
Eastman's testimony will continue next week. The court has yet to rule on to what extent Eastman can claim attorney-client privilege to avoid talking about what he says are his 65 other clients — some of whom may or may not have been involved in organizing alternate slates of electors.
The disbarment hearing, which was initially supposed to last eight days, is proceeding at a glacial pace. It will restart Tuesday and continue until the end of the week before taking a three-week hiatus. It will restart again on the last week of August.
Follow @hillelaron
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