Jan. 6 committee seeks new trove of John Eastman emails

The Jan. 6 select committee is seeking another batch of emails sent by attorney John Eastman — an architect of Donald Trump’s last-ditch bid to subvert the 2020 election — as part of a bid to round out its sprawling investigation.

In a late Wednesday court filing, House counsel Douglas Letter urged a federal judge in California to review the remaining emails to determine whether Eastman’s efforts to shield them — by the claiming of attorney-client privilege — were legitimate.

“As the Select Committee reaches the final months of its tenure under its current authorizing resolution, it now respectfully seeks such in camera review so that it may complete its efforts, including preparation of the final report,” Letter wrote in a three-page filing to U.S. District Court Judge David Carter.

The California-based jurist has already helped arm the committee with an enormous trove of Eastman’s emails, delivering a string of rulings in the spring that rejected Eastman’s privilege claims and, in one notable case, overruled it by citing evidence of a “likely” conspiracy with Trump.

The emails all came from files held by Chapman University, Eastman’s former employer. The committee subpoenaed Chapman for records in January, but Eastman — who had pleaded the Fifth during an appearance before the committee in December — sued to block Chapman from delivering the files to lawmakers.

The litigation landed before Carter, who forced Eastman to detail his attorney-client relationship with Trump and then conducted a document-by-document review to determine whether Eastman’s privilege claims could be sustained. In most cases, he rejected them.

Those emails became a significant source of evidence the committee cited during its public hearings in June and July. And perhaps more notably, the panel repeatedly quoted Carter’s sweeping March ruling in which he described Trump and Eastman’s partnership as “a coup in search of a legal theory.”

But even as it won repeated victories in Carter’s court, the committee opted to defer determinations on 576 documents totaling 3,236 pages. At the time, Letter indicated the panel might revisit those emails at a letter date.

That date has apparently arrived. Letter said in Tuesday’s filing that he reached out to Eastman’s attorneys on Aug. 4 about accessing the deferred emails, and Eastman’s team indicated the next day that they would review the deferred emails. But Letter says he heard nothing by Aug. 26 and said he intended to ask the court to get involved.

That warning prompted Eastman’s attorneys to deliver four new documents and a log of another 212 that Eastman continued to assert privileges over. But Letter said Eastman’s lawyers didn’t address the remaining 360 documents the committee is seeking to obtain.

“In light of this exchange over the past month or so,” Letter wrote, “it seems clear that further consultation with Plaintiff’s counsel will not result in the Select Committee receiving the material that it seeks in a timely manner.”