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Despite being under congressional investigation for drafting the fateful plan that former President Trump drew on as he pressured Mike Pence to subvert the 2020 election results, conservative lawyer John Eastman is still keeping busy with Big Lie activities — even now, more than a year after Trump left office.
ABC reported one such example yesterday: Last month, Eastman and a few other Trump allies met in private with Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R), part of an effort to persuade him to “decertify” Biden’s victory in the state, though doing so is legally impossible.
But there are a host of other examples from the last few months of Eastman popping up, offering his opinion to Big Lie influencers and others in the election truther community. Before appearing in Wisconsin last month, Eastman sent a memo to State Rep. Timothy Ramthun (R), who pushed for the state legislature decertify the 2020 election results. He also appeared at a Colorado event alongside Tina Peters, the now-indicted clerk of Mesa County, Colorado who has become a MAGA cause célèbre.
A ‘Do Over’ In Wisconsin?
Eastman made his recent visit to Wisconsin to lend his advice to a smoldering movement on the right there to “decertify” the 2020 election. Jefferson Davis, a leader in the decertification push who was at the meeting, told ABC News that Eastman tried to pressure Vos to start “reclaiming the electors.” If not, according to Davis, Eastman urged Vos to either hold a “do over” or have “a new slate of electors seated that would declare someone else the winner.”
A video seeming to show the event was later posted by progressive activist Lauren Windsor.
But Eastman’s March jaunt to Wisconsin wasn’t the first time he had gotten involved with the state’s ongoing effort to revisit the 2020 election, now a months-long slog that’s taken on a life of its own.
In December 2021, Eastman sent an eight-page memo to Ramthun, which was first reported in Rolling Stone. Ramthun is a prominent figure in the Wisconsin state legislature who has continued to push efforts to decertify the 2020 election results. In his memo to Ramthun, Eastman argued that if there was “acknowledged illegality” in an election, then the result of that election could be rendered null and the state Legislature had the power to pick the electors “as it sees fit.”
An Event With Eastman And Tina Peters Gets Ugly
It’s not just Wisconsin. In February, Eastman joined leaders of Colorado’s election truther community as they held an “emergency town hall meeting” that served as a sounding board for baseless conspiracy theories.
The meeting was organized by FEC United founder Joe Oltmann, according to local reports. Oltmann was a key, early proponent of the bogus claim that “Eric from Dominion” — the voting machine company — was spearheading a plot to steal the election. (Eric Coomer, the Eric in question, has filed a defamation lawsuit.)
At the event, Oltman rallied the crowd against Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold, whom he baselessly accused of being a key player in an election fraud conspiracy. Tina Peters, the Republican clerk of Mesa County, Colorado, who was later indicted for allegedly conspiring to bypass election security procedures in her own clerk’s office, was there too, as was Shawn Smith, who works with an election truther group that calls itself the “U.S. Election Integrity Plan” and is an ally of MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell.
Speaking to the crowd, Eastman reportedly touted his involvement in Big Lie lawsuits in Texas, Pennsylvania, Georgia and Wisconsin. Eastman, according to Colorado Newsline, claimed that he and other Big Lie figures were experiencing “attacks” from the forces of “pure evil.”
He also reportedly touted another effort that kept him busy in Colorado: a lawsuit to stop allowing unaffiliated voters from participating in the major parties’ primary elections. Eastman was among the lawyers who represented a group of state Republicans in their lawsuit over Colorado’s open primary law. A judge dismissed it earlier this month.
Some of those with whom Eastman shared the stage took things in a more fiery direction. “I think if you are involved in election fraud then you deserve to hang. Sometimes the old ways are the best ways,” Smith reportedly told the crowd. The church hosting the event swiftly distanced itself from the remarks.