America is at an inflection point, and Eastman is the symbolic victim—the proverbial canary in the coal mine. If the left succeeds in destroying Eastman, we could all be next
While the NYC trial against Donald Trump has the attention right now, the Democrat party has been waging lawfare against other parts of both the Trump and Republican campaign – the advisors inside those campaigns and especially the lawyers. I mentioned this in a post a few months ago but want to focus on just the lawyers so this bears repeating:
[The Democrats] have tried to disbar more than 100 attorneys who agreed to work on election integrity cases following the 2020 presidential election. They’ve expanded that lawfare to attorneys across the nation who defend conservatives, including half of Republican attorneys general.
But not lawyers like the ones in the photo below; they’re Left-wing so had their crime of firebombing a police car downgraded so as not to threaten the burgeoning legal careers – and by the Biden Depatment of “Justice”, no less.
You can click on the link to see how the DOJ got ten year convictions in 2022 but then tossed the terrorism enhancement (an enhancement often applied to January 6 rioters), and then pled them down to 18-24 months due to their “history and personal characteristics”, which the article summarises thusly:
Because, you know, Mattis graduated from Princeton and New York University Law School and was an attorney at the white-shoe law firm Pryor Cashman, and Rahman was a public-interest lawyer whose “best friend,” Obama administration intelligence official Salmah Rizvi, guaranteed the $250,000 required to release her on bail.
Keep all that in mind as you read this about what they’re doing to John Eastman, a key Trump legal advisor:
He was forced to retire from the law school where he was a longtime constitutional law professor and even dean. He was let go by the University of Colorado’s Benson Center for Western Civilization, where he was a visiting scholar. Armed Stasi—sorry, FBI—agents accosted him in a parking lot and seized his phone without a warrant. He has been suspended from academic conferences and lost board seats. He and his wife have endured death threats, spikes in their driveway, and threatening graffiti in their neighborhood… And last week, State Bar Court of California Judge Yvette Roland devoted 128 pages to explaining why he should lose his law license.
That includes the process of “debanking”:
Now John Eastman, one of the attorneys who worked with former President Donald Trump, has been debanked by both Bank of America and USAA.
Debanking has become very popular across the Western world leftists, as I wrote about here in the case of Nigel Farage in Britain. But Eastman’s example is worse when you consider the background of the USAA:
USAA — now an insurance, financial services, and banking powerhouse headquartered in San Antonio, Texas — got its start in 1922 as a mutual self-insurance company for Army officers. Its clientele is mostly service members, veterans, and their families, with membership limited to those who can show a military tie.
Most of whom vote Republican. You might then wonder how such an organisation can pull such a stunt:
Of the 10 men and one woman listed on USAA’s executive council, none mentions military service on his or her LinkedIn profile…. USAA scored a 100 on the 2023 Corporate Equality Index (CEI) from the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), a political stakeholder group.
I’ve also written about the Corporate Equality Index before, here and here. Basically it’s the method by which Leftist activists have managed to insert their values into corporate boardrooms. In the case of USAA they cleverly split their donations to Republicans and Democrats about equally, since they’re based in Texas.
But back to Eastman. What was so terrible that he did?
John had the chutzpah to do what every law school student is taught to do in legal ethics class: defend and zealously advocate for one’s client, no matter how unpopular or even disreputable that client may be. In this case, John’s unpopular client was a high-profile one: former President Donald Trump.
And his advice was a legal argument around the 12th Amendment and the role of the VP, which advice has been dressed up by the Democrat-MSM complex as as encouraging the “overturning of an election” or “fomenting an insurrection,” and all the other hyperbole they’ve been using since January 6, 2021.
And he’s not the only lawyer to be targeted by the Democrat Party with lawfare:
Former U.S. Assistant Attorney General Jeffrey Clark is also being prosecuted in Georgia, and he was just found by the District of Columbia Bar to have violated an ethics rule, which might lead to his own disbarment there—all stemming from an internal Department of Justice memo that Clark never even sent.
Plus more than 100 other lawyers, as noted in that first quote.
As with the rest of the Trump cases and the hundreds of January 6 indictments and convictions, plus the legal actions against other members of his staff since 2021, the intention here is not necessarily to win but to intimidate people from helping the Trump campaign now in any way whatsoever; the process is the punishment.
All of this is a long way from the American foundational story of how John Adams – Boston Lawyer, one of the leaders of the American Revolution and the development of the Constitution, and the Second President of the United States – acted as the defense lawyer of one British Army Captain Thomas Preston and eight of his soldiers who were charged with murdering civilians in the infamous Boston Massacre of 1770. The soldiers were justifiability hated by the Boston population and no other lawyers were willing to act for them. The whole thing threatened to become nothing more than a mob action and a lynching. Adams risked his personal fortune, his family and his own life in acting for them and had charges dismissed against Preston and six soldiers with two found guilty of manslaughter (you can read some of the details at the link).**
And that trial has echoed down through American history:
Ruth Bader Ginsburg led the ACLU’s litigation program to achieve equal rights for women. Likewise, Thurgood Marshall was a civil rights pioneer for the NAACP, litigating Brown v. Board of Education and other cases, before joining the high Court. The history books are full of crusading legal mavericks who were controversial in their time: Clarence Darrow, William Kunstler, Louis Brandeis, Ralph Nader, Jack Greenberg, and many others.
None other than the American Bar Association demanding that, “A lawyer must…act with commitment and dedication to the interests of the client and with zeal in advocacy upon the client’s behalf.”
Which is exactly what Eastman did. Both of those excerpts are from an article whose title puts the issue in stark terms, The Rule of Law Depends on John Eastman:
Had Eastman been representing a different presidential candidate, such as David Boies did in smash-mouth fashion when challenging George W. Bush’s victory over Al Gore in 2000, he may have been feted as a celebrity—as Boies was. The more aggressive and ethically dubious Boies’s tactics, the louder the acclaim, even in defeat. Such it is with team sports. Alas, the left-leaning legal culture roots for Democratic candidates (and their lawyers), and it is glaringly apparent that the rules are not the same for Republicans.
See the two Manhattan “fuckin’ take it all down” lawyers at the start of this post as just another example. By contrast to the concerns of the DOJ prosecutors about their future in the law industry, Eastman, not a rich man and already deprived of work by this campaign has already incurred $1.5 million in legal costs and could be looking at more than $3 million by the time this is finished.
[T]he motives of Eastman’s critics are not driven by the merits. His only “crime” was representing a client the left despises. The California Bar complaint was initiated by hard-left activists (The 65 Project) led in orchestrated fashion by the execrable partisan hack David Brock, who professed that their goal is to “not only bring the grievances in the bar complaints, but shame them and make them toxic in their communities and in their firms.” Brock added, tellingly, that “the littler fish are probably more vulnerable to what we’re doing.”
Naked, brutal, political warfare waged not just within the system of justice, such things have been, but upon the system of justice. No Soviet communist could do more damage to American institutions.
America is at an inflection point, and Eastman is the symbolic victim—the proverbial canary in the coal mine. If the left succeeds in destroying Eastman, we could all be next…His fight is your fight. His plight could be your fate. At the signing of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, Benjamin Franklin reportedly quipped “We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.”
While I appreciate the good faith and hope in the system expressed in that argument and also hope Eastman and others can defeat this, I really don’t think it is enough any more in the face of such Democrat party tactics. Things will only change when the GOP and right-wing wage wage the same war on Brock, the 65 Project and other such groups and people, hurting them and even destroying them (including their careers and wealth).
** Of course it must also be remembered that when he became President twenty years later John Adams used the Alien and Sedition Act to arrest and suppress newspaper publishers for criticising his Administration.
No Minister 