Carter, David O

Subterms

    Latest story

    163 Shares199 Views

    Judge Says Trump Signed Statement With Data His Lawyers Told Him Was False

    by

    The determination came in a decision by a federal judge that John Eastman, a lawyer for the former president, had to turn more of his emails over to the House Jan. 6 committee.Former President Donald J. Trump signed a document swearing under oath that information in a Georgia lawsuit he filed challenging the results of the 2020 election was true even though his own lawyers had told him it was false, a federal judge wrote on Wednesday.The accusation came in a ruling by the judge, David O. Carter, ordering John Eastman, the conservative lawyer who strategized with the former president about overturning the election, to hand over 33 more emails to the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. Judge Carter, who serves with the Federal District Court for the Central District of California, determined that the emails contained possible evidence of criminal behavior.“The emails show that President Trump knew that the specific numbers of voter fraud were wrong but continued to tout those numbers, both in court and to the public,” Judge Carter wrote. He added in a footnote that the suit contained language saying Mr. Trump was relying on information provided to him by others.The committee has fought for months to get access to hundreds of Mr. Eastman’s emails, viewing him as the intellectual architect of plans to subvert the 2020 election, including Mr. Trump’s effort to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to block or delay congressional certification of the Electoral College results on Jan. 6, 2021. Repeatedly, the panel has argued that a “crime-fraud exception” pierces the typical attorney-client privilege that often protects communications between lawyers and clients.The emails in question, which were dated between Nov. 3, 2020, and Jan. 20, 2021, came from Mr. Eastman’s account at Chapman University, where he once served as a law school dean.Judge Carter wrote on Wednesday that the crime-fraud exception applied to a number of the emails related to Mr. Trump and Mr. Eastman’s “efforts to delay or disrupt the Jan. 6 vote” and “their knowing misrepresentation of voter fraud numbers in Georgia when seeking to overturn the election results in federal court.”Judge Carter found four emails that “demonstrate an effort by President Trump and his attorneys to press false claims in federal court for the purpose of delaying the Jan. 6 vote.”In one of them, Mr. Trump’s lawyers advised him that simply having a challenge to the election pending in front of the Supreme Court could be enough to delay the final tally of Electoral College votes from Georgia.“This email,” Judge Carter wrote, “read in context with other documents in this review, make clear that President Trump filed certain lawsuits not to obtain legal relief, but to disrupt or delay the Jan. 6 congressional proceedings through the courts.”Another email was related to the lawsuit Mr. Trump and his lawyers filed in Fulton County, Ga., in December 2020, contending that thousands of votes had been improperly counted and citing specific numbers of dead people, felons and unregistered voters who had cast ballots.In one email ordered for release, Mr. Eastman made plain his view that Mr. Trump should not sign a document making specific claims about voter fraud in the county because his legal team had learned they were inaccurate.“Although the president signed a verification for [the state court filing] back on Dec. 1, he has since been made aware that some of the allegations (and evidence proffered by the experts) has been inaccurate,” Mr. Eastman wrote. “For him to sign a new verification with that knowledge (and incorporation by reference) would not be accurate.”But Mr. Trump did sign a new verification, on Dec. 31, 2020, after the suit was moved to federal court. The suit included a caveat that the voter fraud figures it used were to be relied upon “only to the extent” that “such information has been provided” to Mr. Trump’s legal team; the suit also stated that such data was subject to “amendment” or “adjustment.”The episode was the latest example of how Mr. Trump was repeatedly told that his claims of widespread voter fraud were false and often pressed forward with them anyway. His attorney general at the time, William P. Barr, informed him at least three times that his accusations about fraud were unfounded, as did other top officials at the Justice Department, the White House Counsel’s Office and the Trump campaign.Judge Carter’s ruling came as part of a federal lawsuit Mr. Eastman filed at the beginning of the year, seeking to bar the committee from obtaining his emails as part of its inquiry into Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the election.In a previous ruling, issued in March, Judge Carter offered a sweeping analysis of how Mr. Trump and Mr. Eastman most likely committed felonies, including obstructing the work of Congress on Jan. 6 and conspiring to defraud the United States.Mr. Eastman has also been a focus of the Justice Department’s investigation into Jan. 6 and the months leading up to it.In June, federal agents seized Mr. Eastman’s phone as part of what appears to be a broad grand jury inquiry into Mr. Trump’s role in intersecting schemes to stay in power, including a plan to create fake slates of pro-Trump electors in states that were won by Joseph R. Biden Jr. A flurry of subpoenas issued by the grand jury, sitting in Washington, named Mr. Eastman and several other lawyers close to Mr. Trump as subjects of interest. More

    More stories

    • 150 Shares149 Views

      in Elections

      John Eastman Says He Dealt Directly With Trump Over Jan. 6 Plans

      by

      John Eastman said in a court filing that he had received handwritten notes from President Donald J. Trump as they strategized about how to keep him in power.WASHINGTON — The conservative lawyer John Eastman, the architect of a strategy to overturn the 2020 election, dealt directly with President Donald J. Trump and received handwritten notes from him as the men sought to keep Mr. Trump in power, according to a new court filing.The filing underscored how instrumental Mr. Eastman was in devising ways to fight Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory, and how personally involved Mr. Trump was in the attempt to keep the presidency in his hands. It also provided further documentation of how members of the Trump campaign and White House aides were involved in the plans.The filing came as the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol is preparing for public hearings in June about the attempt to overturn the election, and as more information has emerged about Mr. Eastman’s role in advising state officials in Pennsylvania to reject votes cast in favor of Mr. Biden.Mr. Eastman did not release the contents of his communications with Mr. Trump and others in the White House and the Trump campaign, but he described them in general terms in a filing in his federal lawsuit in California against the House committee. He is fighting the release of hundreds of documents that the panel has demanded via subpoena, including by arguing that some of them are protected by attorney-client privilege.In the filing on Thursday, Mr. Eastman argued that some of his emails with the White House and Trump campaign were covered by attorney-client privilege because, he said, the people he communicated with were functioning as “conduits” for or “agents” of Mr. Trump. He said he mostly communicated with Mr. Trump using six intermediaries, three of whom worked for the Trump campaign and three of whom worked directly for Mr. Trump while he was in office.But Mr. Eastman said he also spoke directly to Mr. Trump, and the filing stated that Mr. Eastman received two “handwritten notes from former President Trump about information that he thought might be useful for the anticipated litigation.”“While Dr. Eastman could (and did) communicate directly with former President Trump at times, many of his communications with the president were necessarily through these agents,” Mr. Eastman’s lawyers, Anthony T. Caso and Charles Burnham, wrote, referring to the six intermediaries.The documents Mr. Eastman is seeking to block from release include the two handwritten notes from Mr. Trump; communications with what he called “potential clients,” including seven state legislators, who were seeking advice about how to challenge their states’ election results; a document discussing “various scenarios for Jan. 6”; and another discussing the “need to pursue election integrity litigation even in the event of Trump loss for the good of the country.”In March, the federal judge in the case ruled that Mr. Eastman and Mr. Trump had most likely committed felonies as they pushed to overturn the election, including obstructing the work of Congress and conspiring to defraud the United States. The actions taken by Mr. Trump and Mr. Eastman, the judge found, amounted to “a coup in search of a legal theory.”At the time, the judge, David O. Carter of Federal District Court for the Central District of California, ordered the release of more than 100 of Mr. Eastman’s emails; Mr. Eastman turned them over to the House committee as he continued to fight the release of others.Among the documents that Mr. Eastman turned over was a draft memo written for Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, that recommended that Vice President Mike Pence reject electors from contested states in his role overseeing the certification by Congress of the Electoral College results on Jan. 6.In their filing, Mr. Eastman’s lawyers wrote that their client disagreed with Judge Carter’s conclusion that he had undermined democracy, arguing that Mr. Eastman truly believed the election was stolen. The filing cited the work of conservative media figures — including the new film “2000 Mules” by Dinesh D’Souza, which fact checkers have described as misleading — as evidence that widespread fraud occurred in the election.“If, as seemed clear to Dr. Eastman and his client at the time, there was illegality and fraud in the election of sufficient magnitude to have altered the outcome of the election, then far from ‘undermining’ democracy, Dr. Eastman’s actions and advice must be seen for what they were — a legitimate attempt to prevent a stolen election,” Mr. Eastman’s lawyers wrote. “Perhaps Dr. Eastman was wrong about that. But even if he was, being wrong about factual claims is not and never has been criminal.”They added, “Dr. Eastman’s position remains that his legal theories, controversial though they may have been, were not unlawful.”In the filing, Mr. Eastman said he began working for Mr. Trump two months before the 2020 election at the invitation of Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer who the Jan. 6 committee said “promoted false claims of election fraud to members of Congress” and participated in a call in which Mr. Trump tried to pressure Georgia’s secretary of state to “‘find’ enough votes to reverse his loss there.”Mr. Eastman, Ms. Mitchell and others began preparing to fight the election results well before Election Day, but the effort “kicked into high gear” on Nov. 7 — four days after the election — when Mr. Eastman met with Mr. Trump’s campaign team in Philadelphia to assist with the preparation of an election challenge, the filing said.In deciding in March that Mr. Trump and Mr. Eastman had “more likely than not” broken the law, Judge Carter noted that Mr. Trump had facilitated two meetings involving Mr. Eastman in the days before Jan. 6 that were “explicitly tied to persuading Vice President Pence to disrupt the joint session of Congress.”At the first meeting, on Jan. 4, Mr. Trump and Mr. Eastman invited Mr. Pence and two of his top aides, Greg Jacob and Marc Short, to the Oval Office. There, Judge Carter wrote, Mr. Eastman “presented his plan to Vice President Pence, focusing on either rejecting electors or delaying the count.”That meeting was followed by another, Judge Carter wrote, on Jan. 5, during which Mr. Eastman sought again to persuade Mr. Jacob to go along with the scheme. More

    • 175 Shares109 Views

      in Elections

      Jan. 6 Panel Has Evidence for Criminal Referral of Trump, but Splits on Sending

      by

      Despite concluding that it has enough evidence, the committee is concerned that making a referral to the Justice Department would backfire by politicizing the investigation into the Capitol riot.WASHINGTON — The leaders of the House committee investigating the Capitol attack have grown divided over whether to make a criminal referral to the Justice Department of former President Donald J. Trump, even though they have concluded that they have enough evidence to do so, people involved in the discussions said.The debate centers on whether making a referral — a largely symbolic act — would backfire by politically tainting the Justice Department’s expanding investigation into the Jan. 6 assault and what led up to it.Since last summer, a team of former federal prosecutors working for the committee has focused on documenting the attack and the preceding efforts by Mr. Trump and his allies to reverse his defeat in the 2020 election. The panel plans to issue a detailed report on its findings, but in recent months it has regularly signaled that it was also weighing a criminal referral that would pressure Attorney General Merrick B. Garland to open a criminal investigation into Mr. Trump.But now, with the Justice Department appearing to ramp up a wide-ranging investigation, some Democrats are questioning whether there is any need to make a referral — and whether doing so would saddle a criminal case with further partisan baggage at a time when Mr. Trump is openly flirting with running again in 2024.A federal judge found that it was “more likely than not” that President Donald J. Trump had committed crimes in his efforts to derail the certification of the 2020 election.Brittany Greeson for The New York TimesThe shift in the committee’s perspective on making a referral was prompted in part by a ruling two weeks ago by Judge David O. Carter of the Federal District Court for Central California. Deciding a civil case in which the committee had sought access to more than 100 emails written by John C. Eastman, a lawyer who advised Mr. Trump on efforts to derail certification of the Electoral College outcome, Judge Carter found that it was “more likely than not” that Mr. Trump and Mr. Eastman had committed federal crimes.The ruling led some committee and staff members to argue that even though they felt they had amassed enough evidence to justify calling for a prosecution for obstructing a congressional proceeding and conspiring to defraud the American people, the judge’s decision would carry far greater weight with Mr. Garland than any referral letter they could write, according to people with knowledge of the conversations.The members and aides who were reluctant to support a referral contended that making one would create the appearance that Mr. Garland was investigating Mr. Trump at the behest of a Democratic Congress and that if the committee could avoid that perception it should, the people said.Even if the final report does not include a specific referral letter to Mr. Garland, the findings would still provide federal prosecutors with the evidence the committee uncovered — including some that has not yet become public — that could be used as a road map for any prosecution, the people said.Attorney General Merrick B. Garland has given no public indication of the Justice Department’s intentions other than to say that it will follow the facts and the law. Yuri Gripas for The New York Times“If you read his decision, I think it’s quite telling,” Representative Zoe Lofgren, Democrat of California and a member of the committee said of Judge Carter’s ruling. “He and we have reviewed a huge amount of documents, and he reached a conclusion that he outlined in very stark terms.”Ms. Lofgren is among those who believe a referral letter to the Justice Department is superfluous, since it would carry no legal weight.“Maybe we will, maybe we won’t,” she said of a referral. “It doesn’t have a legal impact.”But the question about whether to send the referral has, for one of the first times since the committee was formed in July, exposed differences among members about the panel’s mission.Representative Elaine Luria, Democrat of Virginia and a member of the panel, said that the committee should still send a referral for any crimes it uncovers.Representatives Jamie Raskin of Maryland and Elaine Luria of Virginia, Democratic members of the Jan. 6 committee, at the Capitol last month. Ms. Luria said that the committee should send a referral for any crimes it uncovers.J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press“I would say that I don’t agree with what some of my colleagues have said about this,” Ms. Luria said on MSNBC this month. “I think it’s a lot more important to do what’s right than it is to worry about the political ramifications. This committee, our purpose is legislative and oversight, but if in the course of our investigation we find that criminal activity has occurred, I think it’s our responsibility to refer that to the Department of Justice.”Although staff members have been in discussions about a referral, and some have debated the matter publicly, the committee members have not sat down together to discuss whether to proceed with a referral, several lawmakers said.Representative Pete Aguilar, Democrat of California, said the committee was likely to hold off on making a final determination until investigators finished their work. He said the panel was “finishing up” its investigative phase and shifting to a more “public-facing” one in which the panel will present its findings.“The members haven’t had those conversations,” Mr. Aguilar said of a meeting to discuss a potential referral. “Right now, we’re gathering the material that we need. As the investigative phase winds down, we’ll have more conversations about what the report looks like. But we’re not presupposing where that’s going to go before we get a little further with the interviews.”Although the committee has the ability to subpoena testimony and documents and make referrals to the Justice Department for prosecutions, it has no criminal prosecution powers.The committee’s vice chairwoman, Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming, singled out Mr. Trump’s conduct at a public hearing in December, reading from the criminal code and laying out how she believed he had obstructed Congress. In early March, the committee in effect road-tested whether the evidence it had gathered could support a prosecution, laying out in a filing in the civil case before Judge Carter its position that Mr. Trump and Mr. Eastman had obstructed Congress and defrauded the American public.In validating the committee’s position, legal experts said, the judge made it difficult for the Justice Department to avoid an investigation. Mr. Garland has given no public indication of the department’s intentions other than to say that it will follow the facts and the law. But subpoenas issued by a federal grand jury indicate that prosecutors are gathering information about a wide array of issues, including about efforts to obstruct the election certification by people in the Trump White House and in Congress.Investigators from the House committee and the Justice Department have not been sharing information, except to avoid conflicts around the scheduling of certain witnesses.Representative Pete Aguilar, Democrat of California, has said that the committee is “finishing up” its investigative phase.Oliver Contreras for The New York Times“We want them to move faster, but we respect their work,” Mr. Aguilar said, adding that the committee has a different goal the Justice Department’s inquiry: to fully investigate what led to the riot, which injured more than 150 police officers, and take legislative steps to prevent a repeat. “It’s an insult to the lives of the Capitol Police officers if we don’t pursue what happened and take meaningful and concrete steps to ensure that it doesn’t happen again.”Capitol Riot’s Aftermath: New DevelopmentsCard 1 of 6A Trump ally agrees to cooperate. More

    • 150 Shares129 Views

      in Elections

      Ruling Declaring Trump ‘Likely’ Broke Laws May Not Mean He’ll Be Prosecuted

      by

      A high-profile ruling about a subpoena from the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack turned on a lower standard of proof than a criminal trial.WASHINGTON — A federal judge’s conclusion this week that former President Donald J. Trump likely committed felonies related to his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election intensified scrutiny on the question of whether the Justice Department can, should or will try to charge him with the same crimes.But the fact that a judge reached that conclusion does not necessarily mean that a prosecution would arrive at the same outcome. Here is an explanation.What is the case?It is a dispute over a subpoena issued by the House committee that is investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol by Trump supporters who were seeking to stop Congress and the vice president at the time, Mike Pence, from certifying Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s Electoral College victory.The subpoena instructs Chapman University to turn over emails from a former professor, John Eastman, who supplied legal arguments to Mr. Trump supporting his attempts to overturn the election. Mr. Eastman filed a lawsuit to block the subpoena, arguing that his messages were covered by attorney-client and attorney work-product privilege.What did the judge say?In his ruling, Judge David O. Carter of the Federal District Court for the Central District of California said the Jan. 6 committee could get certain emails under an exception to attorney-client privilege for communications that sought to further a crime or fraud because it was “more likely than not” that Mr. Trump unlawfully sought to obstruct a government proceeding.What is the theory that Mr. Trump committed crimes?Mr. Trump, in public and in private, pressured Mr. Pence to reject or delay counting the Electoral College votes of states where Mr. Trump baselessly claimed that his loss to Mr. Biden had been fraudulent. The idea is that there was no legitimate basis for Mr. Pence to do so, so Mr. Trump’s pressure on him amounted to an attempt to unlawfully obstruct a government proceeding and defraud the government.The evidence that Mr. Trump pressured Mr. Pence has been well established. The judge issued his ruling interpreting that evidence as likely amounting to a crime at this moment not because of a breakthrough in the investigation that uncovered new, conclusive evidence, but because of the timing of the subpoena lawsuit: The Jan. 6 committee needed to publicly argue that the crime-fraud exception applied so it could obtain Mr. Eastman’s emails, and the judge agreed.Is the ruling a road map for an indictment?Not necessarily, because the context is very different. As Judge Carter noted: “The court is tasked only with deciding a dispute over a handful of emails. This is not a criminal prosecution; this is not even a civil liability suit.”What is a big challenge to prosecuting Mr. Trump?Proving Mr. Trump’s state of mind — specifically, that he had the requisite criminal intent.The obstruction statute, for example, says that for the defendant’s action impeding an official proceeding to be a crime, he had to act “corruptly.” But what that means is not detailed in the statute, and the Supreme Court has not definitively offered an answer, raising risks and complications for prosecutors evaluating a potential case.One possibility, said Laurie L. Levenson, a criminal law professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, is that prosecutors would have to prove that Mr. Trump knew for sure that Mr. Pence had no lawful basis to do what he was asking. Another possibility is that prosecutors would need to prove only that Mr. Trump had at least some reason to believe that his conduct might be unlawful and proceeded anyway, she said.Why is proving Mr. Trump’s mind-set tricky?Because even though senior government officials were telling him there was no factual or legal basis for Mr. Pence to unilaterally reject some states’ electoral votes or otherwise slow down the certification, Mr. Eastman told Mr. Trump that he interpreted the law as giving Mr. Pence legitimate authority to take such a step.Julie O’Sullivan, a Georgetown University criminal law professor, said in any criminal trial, it would ultimately be up to the jury to decide what Mr. Trump truly believed. Unless evidence emerges that he told someone at the time that he knew what he was saying was false, she said, that will be a challenge.“The problem with Trump is defining his state of mind when it is so changeable,” she said. “He believes whatever he wants to think and it doesn’t necessarily have to be grounded in reality. That’s a tough argument to a jury, to say he knew any particular thing.”Capitol Riot’s Aftermath: Key DevelopmentsCard 1 of 4Trump’s tweet. More

    • 138 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      Pressing for Evidence, Jan. 6 Panel Argues That Trump Committed Fraud

      by

      The argument was a response to a lawsuit filed by John Eastman, who is seeking to shield his communications with former President Donald J. Trump.WASHINGTON — The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol on Tuesday laid out its theory for potential criminal charges against former President Donald J. Trump, arguing before a federal judge that he and the conservative lawyer John C. Eastman were involved in a conspiracy to perpetrate a fraud on the American public as part of a plan to overturn the 2020 election.The allegations, which the committee first leveled against the men last week in response to a lawsuit filed by Mr. Eastman, could determine just how deeply the panel can dig into emails, correspondence and other documents of lawyers close to Mr. Trump who have argued that such material should be shielded from scrutiny because of attorney-client privilege.They also form the core of the panel’s strategy for potentially holding Mr. Trump and his allies criminally liable for what happened on Jan. 6, 2021, one that turns on the notion that they knowingly sought to invalidate legitimate election results.“We’re talking about an insurrection that sadly came very close to succeeding to overturn a presidential election,” Douglas N. Letter, the general counsel of the House, told Judge David O. Carter of the United States District Court for the Central District of California, during arguments in Mr. Eastman’s case.The House committee’s argument is a risky one. If Judge Carter were to reject its claims, the inquiry’s legal team would be less likely to win support for a criminal prosecution unless investigators unearthed new evidence.In court on Tuesday, Mr. Letter repeatedly chastised Mr. Eastman for writing a memo that some in both parties have likened to a blueprint for a coup. The document encouraged Vice President Mike Pence to reject electoral votes from swing states won by President Biden, even as Mr. Eastman conceded that the maneuver was likely illegal.“Violate the law — and let them sue,” Mr. Letter said, characterizing Mr. Eastman’s counsel. “Boy, that’s not legal advice that I’ve ever given.”The committee in recent weeks has issued subpoenas to lawyers, including Rudolph W. Giuliani and Sidney Powell, who worked closely with Mr. Trump as they pursued various efforts to keep the former president in power despite losing the election. They offered up false slates of electors claiming Mr. Trump had won politically competitive states that he had lost, and explored the seizure of voting machines.Among them was Mr. Eastman, whom the committee says could potentially be charged with criminal violations including obstructing an official proceeding of Congress and conspiracy to defraud the American people.Charles Burnham, Mr. Eastman’s lawyer, said the committee’s accusations against the former president are “groundbreaking criminal allegations,” but he argued that both Mr. Eastman and Mr. Trump genuinely believed the claims of a stolen election — despite being told repeatedly that such statements were false.“Dr. Eastman and others absolutely believed that what they were doing was well-grounded in law and fact, and was necessary for what they believed was the best interest of the country,” Mr. Burnham said.In a filing in Mr. Eastman’s case last week, the committee first revealed the basis of what its investigators believe could be a criminal referral to the Justice Department against Mr. Trump. Central to the case is the argument that, in repeatedly rejecting the truth that he had lost the 2020 election — including the assertions of his own campaign aides, White House lawyers, two successive attorneys general and federal investigators — Mr. Trump was not just being stubborn or ignorant, he was knowingly perpetrating a fraud on the United States.The panel turned over to the court hundreds of pages of arguments, exhibits and court transcripts from Trump advisers telling him there was no widespread fraud in the 2020 election. But Mr. Burnham also said that Mr. Trump was given conflicting legal advice.“Multiple presidential advisers were counseling the president that there were issues with the 2020 election — fraud, illegality, and so forth,” he said.Mr. Burnham cited a book recently published by former Attorney General William P. Barr, who recounted how he tried to break through to Mr. Trump to tell him his wild fantasies about election fraud weren’t true, even as others informed the president he was right.“After the election,” Mr. Barr wrote, “he was beyond restraint. He would only listen to a few sycophants who told him what he wanted to hear. Reasoning with him was hopeless.”The arguments in court were prompted by Mr. Eastman’s attempt to shield from release documents he said were covered by attorney-client privilege. The committee responded that under the legal theory known as the crime-fraud exception, the privilege does not cover information conveyed from a client to a lawyer if it was part of furthering or concealing a crime.Capitol Riot’s Aftermath: Key DevelopmentsCard 1 of 3The first trial. More