CNN on Thursday published an “explosive” email exchange between Greg Jacob, a top lawyer for then-Vice President Mike Pence, and John Eastman, a lawyer who was working with then-President Donald Trump’s legal team, that absolutely “nails the culpability of Eastman in the events of that terrible day.”
“The email exchange began on January 5,” CNN’s Chris Cillizza writes, “with Eastman attempting to push the idea that Pence had the constitutional authority to reject certain electors from swing states when the votes were counted in Congress the next day.”
By 12:14 pm ET on January 6, it became “increasingly clear” that there was a Trump-fueled riot brewing at the US Capitol, and Jacob was “unequivocal in his rejection of Eastman’s theories,” the report says.
“I have run down every legal trail placed before me to its conclusion, and I respectfully conclude that as a legal framework, it is a results-oriented position that you would never support if attempted by the opposition, and essentially entirely made up,” Jacob wrote Eastman. “And thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege.”
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To which Eastman responds: “The ‘siege’ is because YOU and your boss did not do what was necessary to allow this to be aired in a public way so the American people can see for themselves what happened.”
In his next response, Jacob drops the hammer: “The advice provided has, whether intended or not, functioned as a serpent in the ear of the President of the United States, the most powerful office in the entire world. And here we are.”
Jacob added: “Respectfully, it was gravely, gravely irresponsible for you to entice the President with an academic theory that had no legal viability, and that you well know we would lose before any judge who heard and decided the case. And if the courts declined to hear it, I suppose it could only be decided in the streets. The knowing amplification of that theory through numerous surrogates, whipping large numbers of people into a frenzy over something with no chance of ever attaining legal force through actual process of law, has led us to where we are.”
As noted by Cillizza, the Jacob-Eastman email exchange is “incredibly damning” and shows that Jacob is utterly convinced that the Eastman knows that what he is doing is wrong — and is doing it anyway, with disastrous consequences for the party and the country as a whole..
“The image of Eastman as Iago pouring his poison in the ear of Trump’s Othello is a powerful one,” Cillizza writes. “Especially when you consider that Jacob wasn’t some lawyer working for Democrats. He was the chief counsel to the Republican vice president of the United States.”
“That fact makes his accusations against Eastman all the more powerful,” the report concluded.
