While the details of and procedural developments surrounding the Big Indictment against the former president have consumed the news cycle since it came out last week, there’s still (at least) one more indictment heading toward Donald Trump that may come, if it comes, before we close out the summer.

I’ve been returning to this John Eastman interview again and again. In a way it doesn’t deserve so much attention. This is a shallow-thinking, casually self-justifying, fundamentally dishonest man. But his central role in America’s profound political crisis — one that is ongoing — makes him and his arguments important. What interests me are the sophisms he uses to justify his own criminality, attacks on the democratic process and more by projecting his own bad acts on to his foes.

The structure is consistently the same. Assert enemies were about to do X in the cause of the Deep State, wokeness and anti-Americanism so Eastman had to do X to preserve America. In a way he takes to the nation-state level the argument of every guy who blows someone’s head off and justifies it by saying he was afraid they were about to hurt him. Beyond these “I had to do it first” claims there’s another theme: a lot of railing against coastal intellectuals from the Eastman crew’s headquarters in Southern California while using layer upon layer of high-falutin’ fancy talk that falls apart when you kick any tire.

I want to return to this revelatory interview with co-conspirator John Eastman, the last portion of which was published Thursday by Tom Klingenstein, the Chairman of the Trumpite Claremont Institute and then highlighted by our Josh Kovensky. There’s a lot of atmospherics in this interview, a lot of bookshelf-lined tweedy gentility mixed with complaints about OSHA regulations and Drag Queen story hours. But the central bit comes just over half way through the interview when Eastman gets into the core justification and purpose for trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election and overthrow the constitutional order itself. He invokes the Declaration of Independence and says quite clearly that yes, we were trying to overthrow the government and argues that they were justified because of the sheer existential threat America was under because of the election of Joe Biden.

January 6th conspirators have spent more than two years claiming either that nothing really happened at all in the weeks leading up to January 6th or that it was just a peaceful protest that got a bit out of hand or that they were just making a good faith effort to follow the legal process. Eastman cuts through all of this and makes clear they were trying to overthrow (“abolish”) the government; they were justified in doing so; and the warrant for their actions is none other than the Declaration of Independence itself.