Former President Donald Trump’s federal indictment makes clear that unnamed “Co-Conspirator 2” is former Chapman Law dean John Eastman.
“Co-Conspirator 2 told the crowd, ‘(A)ll we are demanding of Vice President Pence is this afternoon at one o’clock he let the legislatures of the state look into this so we get to the bottom of it and the American people know whether we have control of the direction of our government or not. We no longer live in a self-governing republic if we can’t get the answer to this question,’” the indictment that was unveiled Tuesday, Aug. 1 read.
Eastman uttered those words to a riled-up crowd on Jan. 6, 2021, standing beside Rudy Giuliani (who is clearly identifiable as Co-Conspirator 1).
The co-conspirators listed in the indictment are unindicted and unidentified, but the document described Co-Conspirator 2 with a level of specificity that it has to be Eastman.
Eastman’s attorney did not respond to a request for comment about Trump’s indictment.
Trump’s indictment cited, chapter and verse, from Eastman’s memos and emails that “functioned as a serpent in the ear of the President of the United States, the most powerful office in the entire world,” as Vice President Mike Pence’s attorney put it.
The indictment zeroes in on Eastman’s theory that the vice president had the power to accept, reject or send back for further investigation electoral votes from the states for the November 2020 presidential election, even though they were already certified by state legislators. Pence could kick back, or simply refuse to count, “contested” electoral votes for Joe Biden, and even declare Trump the winner, the infamous Eastman memos argue.
Eastman’s rationale was that courts made changes to how elections were conducted because of the pandemic, but that only state legislatures have that power (the Supreme Court recently said that’s wrong). He argued that states could send Trump electors in place of Biden…
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