Nearly 1,000 attorneys—including Berkeley Law’s Erwin Chemerinsky and Harvard Law’s Laurence Tribe—are asking California bar authorities to investigate conservative attorney John Eastman for allegedly working in concert with other lawyers to try and install former President Donald Trump in a second term, despite having lost reelection.
The complaint, filed Thursday by the group Lawyers Defending American Democracy, spotlights Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani and former Trump DOJ official Jeffrey Clark as having worked congruently with Eastman. “We believe that concerted unethical action by lawyers aggravates the circumstances of their violation,” the complaint reads. More than 1,200 people signed the complaint, including more than 200 nonlawyers.
Eastman represented Trump in court in seeking to challenge the election results. He also spoke alongside Giuliani at a rally on Jan. 6, ahead of the attack on the U.S. Capitol building and drafted memos that purported to lay out how then-Vice President Mike Pence could prevent the congressional certification of the Electoral College results.
The complaint cites a California rule of professional conduct against attorneys who “engage in conduct involving dishonesty, fraud, deceit, or reckless or intentional misrepresentation.” And it argues that Eastman’s conduct may qualify as an “aggravating circumstance” under the state bar’s rules of procedure. “On balance, a greater sanction is appropriate in cases where there is serious harm to the client, the public, the legal system, or the profession and where the record demonstrates that the lawyer is unwilling or unable to conform to ethical responsibilities,” the rules read.
Eastman is already the subject of a separate bar complaint filed in October by the nonpartisan the States United Democracy Center, which Tribe and Chemerinsky also signed. “The available evidence supports a strong case that the state bar should investigate whether, in the course of representing Mr. Trump, Mr. Eastman violated his ethical obligations as an attorney by filing frivolous claims, making false statements, and engaging in deceptive conduct,” the complaint reads. “There is also a strong basis to investigate whether Mr. Eastman assisted in unlawful actions by his client, Mr. Trump.”
The new bar complaint filed Thursday adopts the arguments made by the States United Democracy Center but states that it differs in arguing Eastman “was not acting independently to provide legal advice to President Trump.”
“Instead, he was participating with Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Clark in a carefully orchestrated collective plan to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election even though all of the available evidence clearly showed that Joseph R. Biden had won,” the complaint reads. “Their concerted action proceeded on several fronts simultaneously, thereby increasing the danger of its success.”
The complaint details Clark’s own efforts to try and undermine the election results through his role at the Justice Department, as well as actions taken by both Giuliani and Eastman.
Those incidents include remarks that Eastman and Giuliani made at the Jan. 6 rally, when both attorneys made unsubstantiated claims about voter fraud in the 2020 election. The complaint states that everything the two lawyers said at the rally “was nonsense.”
“Theirs was no casual dishonesty,” the complaint says of the three attorneys. “It appears, instead, to have been a carefully considered decision to work together to inflict on the nation a grave constitutional trauma.”
“Lawyers are licensed to practice in California and elsewhere in this country only after they have demonstrated their knowledge of and respect for the rule of law, the essential but fragile ingredient of a healthy democracy,” the complaint continues. “That Mr. Eastman and other lawyers, including Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Clark, joined together not to nurture that ingredient but use its fragility to alter the results of a free election is among the most serious violations of the rules of professional responsibility one can imagine. Activity of that kind simply cannot be tolerated.”
In addition to Chemerinsky and Tribe, the complaints’ signatories include two former presidents of the American Bar Association, Robert Hirshorn and Martha Barnett. A number of retired judges, law professors and former leaders of other bar associates also signed the complaint.
A New York state court has interimly suspended Giuliani’s law license over false statements he made about fraud in the 2020 election. Reuters reported that Clark is under investigation by D.C. disciplinary counsel, where LDAD has also filed a complaint.
Read the complaint:
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