President Trump and John Eastman (Credit: White House)
The Biden administration not only used the Justice Department to target President Trump and other prominent Republicans or outspoken conservatives but also went after the attorneys who represented them.
“If we don’t put an end to this pernicious lawfare, we will destroy the rule of law and the adversarial system of justice—and that, of course, is their intent,” said John Eastman, an attorney and academic who serves as a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, a conservative think tank.
Eastman’s career was derailed, and his life turned upside down, as a result of his efforts to persuade Mike Pence to refuse to certify the 2020 election results in January 2021.
The United States Democracy Center reported that John Eastman was disbarred following a bipartisan bar complaint signed by 25 prominent figures, including former federal and California state supreme court judges, Republican officials, leading law professors, and ethics advisors from the George W. Bush and Obama administrations.
The complaint accused Eastman of violating his professional responsibilities as an attorney by filing baseless claims, making false statements, and engaging in deceptive practices in his efforts to keep Donald Trump in power after the 2020 election.
This included his involvement in the Texas v. Pennsylvania lawsuit, his role in inciting the crowd at Trump’s “Stop the Steal” rally, and his legally unfounded plan to pressure then-Vice President Mike Pence to reject valid electoral votes, effectively disenfranchising millions of voters.
It seems unusual for an attorney to be vilified simply for participating in a lawsuit. Eastman believes the Justice Department’s harsh stance toward conservatives and their attorneys is a deliberate attempt to deter future legal challenges.
“They’ve explicitly said they want to make these lawyers so toxic that no one will take on these kinds of cases again,” Eastman remarked.
“You cannot have an adversarial system of justice when one side can’t find lawyers to represent them.”
Attorney Robert Previto, who has been practicing law in New York for nearly 30 years, echoed concerns about the politicization of government agencies and the courts under the Biden administration.
“Eastman and Giuliani are both correct in many of their observations about the weaponization of government agencies and the courts,” he stated.
Previto warned of the grave consequences of such actions, emphasizing, “We cannot survive as a republic, individual liberty cannot survive, if our courts and our government abandon their historical neutrality toward those not in power and instead set their dangerous sights on prosecuting political opponents.”
Mr. Eastman criticized what he described as a striking example of projection in politics, claiming that Democrats in 2024 accused Donald Trump of planning to weaponize the Department of Justice if re-elected, while they had done so themselves during the past four years.
“One of the greatest examples of what psychologists call projection,” he argued, “is the Democrats accusing Trump of wanting to weaponize the Department of Justice. And I’m sorry, that’s what’s been going on the last four years.”
He added that he had been “one of the prime victims of it, second only to President Trump.”
Eastman accused prosecutors of creatively misusing criminal statutes to target conduct that traditionally falls outside their scope.
He pointed to the Supreme Court’s decision in Fischer v. United States, which ruled that prosecutors had overreached in applying an obstruction statute—originally designed for addressing document tampering—to individuals involved in the January 6 Capitol riots.
In that case, the Court determined the law’s intended application was too narrow to encompass the broad use it had been given.
Eastman also criticized state-level prosecutors like Fani Willis in Georgia and Attorney General Kris Mayes in Arizona for allegedly stretching the boundaries of conspiracy and forgery statutes to criminalize conduct he believes does not warrant such charges.
“They’re creatively using criminal statutes to cover conduct that’s never been treated as covered by those statutes,” he contended, drawing parallels to the overreach struck down in the Fischer case.
The Fischer case serves as a key example in John Eastman’s argument about prosecutorial overreach in lawfare.
The Supreme Court ruled that obstruction statutes, initially intended for document tampering, could not be broadly applied to January 6 rioters without clear evidence of their actions affecting official records or proceedings.
Eastman points to this decision to illustrate his claim that prosecutors are stretching the boundaries of criminal laws to target conduct that does not traditionally fall under these statutes.
Attorney Robert Previto highlighted the dangers of what he described as “lawfare” by a sitting administration, warning of its potential to erode democratic principles.
He explained that totalitarianism, which he defined as “one-party rule or simply repression,” often begins by manipulating the scope of criminal statutes to target political opponents.
“This is done to stop them from speaking and acting—actions they are wholly entitled to—and to simultaneously chill the speech and actions of others who oppose the policies or even the party in power,” Previto said.
He cited the cases of Eastman, Giuliani, and Trump as examples of this tactic, stating that it starts “under the color of existing law” but ultimately stretches the application of criminal statutes to a breaking point.
“When this happens,” Previto warned, “the law loses its meaning—and its purpose—and becomes nothing less than a fulcrum for those in power to disempower the people.”
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