During a broadcast this week of his show on MSNBC, host Lawrence O’Donnell condemned defenses recently offered by John Eastman, a lawyer — for now — who is among the 19 defendants in a criminal case in Georgia alleging a conspiracy against the state’s election results from 2020.
Speaking with Laura Ingraham in a Fox interview, Eastman had claimed he had pushed Mike Pence, then the vice president, towards options on January 6 other than rejecting certain electoral votes that had been submitted from various states for certification by Congress. Eastman alleged he did so specifically on January 4. “He’s lying,” O’Donnell asserted.
The host subsequently cited a passage from the recent federal indictment of Donald Trump that alleges election interference. This filing from federal prosecutors describes a January 4 meeting that involved Trump, Eastman, and others, where participants argued “the Vice President should reject or send to the states Biden’s legitimate electoral votes, rather than count them.” The document describes Eastman as allegedly having proposed either rejecting the electoral votes or sending the matter for consideration by state legislators in contested jurisdictions — not just the latter. Prosecutors also alleged Eastman to have focused on the purported option of Pence just rejecting certain electoral votes in discussions the following day, on January 5.
Eastman, who was not identified by name in the federal indictment but is referred to as a numbered, un-indicted co-conspirator in the matter, kept pushing for a delay in the certification of the 2020 results late into the night on January 6. “He was advocating breaking the law — again, at 11:44 p.m. on the night of January 6,” O’Donnell contended. “And he was lying about illegal activity that occurred in the election. Of course, John Eastman wasn’t asked about that in the unsurprisingly incompetent line of questioning by one former Clarence Thomas law clerk to another.” O’Donnell is referring to Fox host Laura Ingraham, who like Eastman once clerked for the Supreme Court Justice.
