Former Trump legal adviser John Eastman, aka the attorney who tried to mastermind a coup to keep a president who definitively lost an election in power, is simply appalled by the House Jan. 6 select committee using its authority to get to the bottom of him trying to mastermind a coup.
Speaking to a sympathetic Tucker Carlson on Fox News Monday night, Eastman accused the committee of “shredding the entire Constitution” by sending subpoenas for his testimony and telecommunication records.
“This group that wants to advance a Soviet Communist-style agenda… we shouldn’t be surprised that they’re using Soviet Stalinist tactics to do it,” said Eastman, who wrote a blueprint on how Mike Pence could hijack the 2020 election certification process for Trump.
Playing along with Eastman’s performative outrage, Carlson asked the lawyer why he was complying with the “Soviet show trial.”
“Why would the rest of us have any kind of obligation to play along with it, honestly?” asked the Fox host, whose producers had put up a chyron declaring that “WHAT IS HAPPENING IS SICKENING AND SCARY” a few minutes before.
Eastman argued that he “shouldn’t” comply with the committee, but Congress has the authority to pursue criminal contempt charges like those against ex-White House senior strategist Steve Bannon.
The lawyer complained that the Jan. 6 committee has “forced” him to try and block “these unbelievably expansive and unconstitutional subpoenas of our private records and communications.”
Last week, Eastman informed the committee that he was pleading the Fifth instead of testifying.
