The MAGA New Right

John Eastman

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John Eastman

Constitutional law professor; Chapman University (resigned post-January 6); Claremont Institute founding director of Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence; clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas and Judge J. Michael Luttig; author of the “Coup Memos”; spoke at January 6 “Save America” rally beside Rudy Giuliani; indicted Fulton County 2023; recommended for disbarment California March 2024

Who He Is

John Eastman is the legal face of the Claremonter movement’s most extreme turn. A constitutional law scholar who clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas and Judge J. Michael Luttig, and who attended the University of Chicago Law School, he spent decades at the respectable end of conservative jurisprudence. He was a senior Federalist Society member, founding director of the Claremont Institute’s Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence, a law professor at Chapman University, and chairman of the board of the National Organization of Marriage (NOM, fighting same-sex marriage; chaired for a time by Princeton’s Robert P. George). He ran as a tough-on-crime candidate in the Republican primary for California’s attorney general in 2010 — Steve Cooley won the GOP primary; Kamala Harris got the job.

His career ended in disgrace. Field opens Chapter 7 with Tocqueville’s praise for America’s lawyerly class — men who developed “a certain taste for forms… which naturally render them strongly opposed to the revolutionary spirit and unreflective passions of democracy.” And then: “Tocqueville would have been awfully disappointed in John C. Eastman.”

January 6 — The Rally

Just before 11am on January 6, 2021 — an hour before Trump would speak in front of the White House, and two and a half hours before the Capitol would be overrun — Rudy Giuliani spoke to the “Save America” rallygoers. John Eastman stood by his side.

Eastman’s job that day was to explain how Democrats had perpetuated voter fraud in Georgia’s January 5 runoff and on November 3, 2020. He asserted dead people had voted, election officials had violated state law, and that the “old way” of fraud was “a bunch of ballots sittin’ in a box under the floor,” but now “they put those ballots in a secret folder in the machines.” When 99 percent of the vote was in, Democrats “paused the counting, took out their stash of electronic ballots, matched each of ‘those unvoted ballots with an unvoted voter,’ and ‘put them together in the machine’ marked as Democratic votes. ‘Voila!’” — “We saw it happen in real time last night, and it happened on November 3rd as well!” He added: “You don’t see this on Fox or any of the other stations” but you can see it in “the data.”

The 79 Days Report (October 2020)

Before the election, Eastman helped organize the “79 Days Report,” a joint project of the Claremont Institute and the Texas Public Policy Foundation (whose director at the time, Kevin Roberts, would later become Heritage Foundation president). Published October 20, 2020, it was presented as a counter to the bipartisan Transition Integrity Project (TIP). Other participants: Ryan Williams (Claremont president), Charles Haywood (far-right Christian conspiracist blogger), K.T. McFarland (former deputy national security advisor under Michael Flynn), Jeff Giesea (tech entrepreneur, friend of Peter Thiel; Richard Spencer claimed Giesea donated $5,000 to his National Policy Institute in 2016), and Gladden Pappin.

Critic Christian Vanderbrouk: the authors “repeatedly imagined that the left would engage in violence after the election—all the better for the state to respond with impunity. ‘A barely concealed bloodlust runs through the report.’” He called it “not a serious wargame or a policy study so much as a bowdlerized retelling of The Turner Diaries.”

The Coup Memos

December 24, 2020: A Trump aide asked Eastman to provide a memo on the Electoral College certification process for January 6. He produced two versions:

  • Long version: “War Gaming the Alternatives”
  • Short version: “a preliminary, incomplete draft” — a more particularized plan

Eastman was involved in Trump’s post-election efforts as of early December 2020. He also helped concoct alternative slates of electors in Georgia and Pennsylvania in December 2020, and filed a brief on behalf of Trump in Texas to invalidate the elections in several swing states (the court quickly tossed it).

The plan: Eastman argued that:

  1. States had broken laws in conducting the election; therefore
  2. Legitimate alternative slates of electors had been formed; therefore
  3. Pence could agree that official slates were invalidated; therefore
  4. Pence could either refuse to count Biden’s electors or delay certification

Constitutional scholars across the spectrum condemned this as legally groundless. Pence wrote: “Vesting the Vice President with unilateral authority to decide presidential contests would be entirely antithetical to that design.” Both memos took widespread fraud and illegality as premises — claims that had no merit. Both supposed the existence of alternative slates that had no legitimacy (Republicans who got together in mock ceremonies had “no more legitimacy than if a group of strangers had met in a bar”).

Eastman spent January 4 and 5 in the Oval Office making the case to Pence. His name would appear over 500 times in the January 6th Committee’s Final Report.

The Greg Jacob Exchange

On January 6, Pence’s top lawyer Greg Jacob wrote to Eastman:

“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. 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.”

  • A White House lawyer told Eastman on January 7: “I’m going to give you the best free legal advice you’re ever getting in your life: Get a great f-ing criminal defense lawyer. You’re going to need it.”
  • January 11, 2021: Eastman requested a pardon from Trump
  • Resigned from Chapman University under pressure
  • Indicted by a Fulton County, Georgia grand jury (summer 2023) for participating in efforts to overturn the election; thought to be one of the six coconspirators in the August 1, 2023 DC indictment of Trump
  • Recommended for disbarment in California, March 2024

Post-January 6 persistence: Continued peddling election lies in glossy interviews produced by Claremont’s main donor and board chairman, Thomas Klingenstein, in 2023 — which Field notes were also fundraising mechanisms for his legal fees.

Legal judgments from the judiciary:

  • One judge: “a coup in search of a legal theory… the illegality of the plan was obvious”
  • Judge Luttig: “the product of the most reckless, insidious, and calamitous failures in both legal and political judgment in American history”
  • AG Bill Barr to the January 6th Committee: Trump’s claims about widespread voter fraud were “bullshit”

Field’s Central Argument

The Eastman memos provided Trump with “a veneer of legal legitimacy with which to cover up a plan that was flagrantly unconstitutional and antidemocratic.” The memos represent what West Coast Straussianism looks like when its crisis mentality (“existential emergency”) meets its willingness to read constitutional text in service of founding principles — even when those readings are fabricated.

Christopher Flannery, one of the original Claremont Institute founders, wrote in August 2022 in American Greatness: “John Eastman Is an American Hero: He Put His Life on the Line to Stop an Unconstitutional Election.” The Claremont Institute was there the whole time.

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