Guide to Day Three of the Select Committee Hearings

On June 16, the select committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol attack set out to tell the story of then-President Trump’s attempts to pressure Vice President Pence into a legally dubious scheme to overturn the 2020 election. Much of today’s hearing revolved around John Eastman, a Chapman University professor who advised Trump in the lead-up to the Jan. 6 attack.

All of the following and more can be found on Lawfare’s January 6 Project page, curated by associate editor Rohini Kurup.

Watch:

(Videos of previous hearings are also available on our site.)

Listen: 

Right after the hearing, Quinta Jurecic, Alan R. Rozenshtein, Natalie Orpett, and Benjamin Wittes appeared live on Twitter. Listen to the discussion below on the Lawfare Twitter account, or listen in podcast form on The Lawfare Podcast.

Team is concerned that the hearing might go long so we rearranged our childcare and now we will be broadcasting at 5!

Link is still the same, so please come and join us this evening: https://t.co/vg0c4FDT3S

— Lawfare (@lawfareblog) June 16, 2022

Read:

Text of Witness Testimony

• Greg Jacob, chief legal counsel to former Vice President Mike Pence
  • Written testimony
• Michael Luttig, former federal judge and informal adviser to former Vice President Pence
  • Written testimony

Selected Primary Sources

• The “Eastman Memo” detailing a plan to use Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the 2020 election (undated)
• Emails between John Eastman and Greg Jacob, chief counsel to Vice President Mike Pence (Jan. 6, 2021)
• Deposition of John Eastman before the Select Committee (Dec. 9, 2021)

Selected Documents Related to Eastman v. Thompson

• Committee brief in Eastman v. Thompson, alleging crimes committed by Donald Trump (March 2, 2022) 
• Judge David Carter’s opinion in Eastman v. Thompson (March 28, 2022).

Commentary on Lawfare

Donald Trump, John Eastman, and the Silence of the Justice Department by Benjamin Wittes

This piece from our editor in chief is a readable rundown of the Eastman v. Thompson ruling, in which a federal judge said Eastman and Trump’s actions were “a coup in search of a legal theory.”

Legal Ethics, Bar Discipline, and John Eastman by Paul Rozenzweig

Writing in October 2021, before the California bar confirmed the existence of an ethics investigation into Eastman, Rosenzweig sketched out the possible grounds for discipline and walked through what the process might look like.

Here’s What Electoral Count Act Reform Should Look Like by Thomas Berry and Genevieve Nadeau

One of the questions we got in our post-hearing Twitter Space was about the Electoral Count Act and how it could be amended to avoid trouble in the future. Here’s an article on just that topic!