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John C Eastman, a former Supreme Court clerk and law school dean, has been recommended for disbarment in California over what the author considers a politically motivated scheme to discredit conservative lawyers.

Lawfare is a Threat to Democracy

OPINION: Canceling conservative lawyers undermines elemental fairness

By David Wanetick, April 2, 2024 7:30 am

America witnessed the woke’s most recent lawfare attack on Republicans a few days ago. California State Bar Court Judge Yvette Roland formally recommended that attorney John Eastman lose his law license. His license has already been placed on involuntary active status. What was this constitutional scholar’s crime? Interpreting the constitution.

The 2020 elections experienced a bewildering array of election irregularities. These concerns caused state legislators from four of the seven contested states to send letters to Vice President Mike Pence asking him to return their electors back to the states for reconsideration. John Eastman advised Mike Pence that as president of the Senate, he had the constitutional authority to allow the four states to reconsider their electoral slates. In fact, many Democrat opinions from the early 2000s supported Dr. Eastman’s position.

Mike Pence trampled on the four states’ requests while rushing to certify Biden as president. Then, Pence lied about what he did when he insinuated that Dr. Eastman counseled Pence to swap out electors and award the election to Donald Trump. In fact, Dr. Eastman advised the Vice President against awarding electors to Donald Trump. Realizing that the Constitution reserves the power to select electors with the states, Dr. Eastman just wanted Pence to honor the states’ requests for reconsideration of their electors.

For his plea to ensure the will of the electorate was represented by the states’ electors, Judge Roland echoed Pence’s lie and scolded Dr. Eastman by stating, “Eastman’s wrongdoing constitutes exceptionally serious ethical violations warranting severe professional discipline.”

Dr. Eastman’s ordeal is just one example of how the Left is aggressively seeking to systematically strip Republicans of legal counsel. The threat of not being able to find counsel to represent them when subjected to lawfare results in the paralysis of Republican candidates. Thus, woke politicians, judges, liberal media networks, and lawyers are undermining democracy by removing Republican candidates from the landscape.

Conservative lawyers face fines and disbarment

Lawyers brave enough to defend Republican plaintiffs face sanctions (heavy financial fines), reputational damage and disbarment. Judges are targets of intimidation by woke rioters. To wit, the US Marshals Service data reveals that serious threats against federal judges, which trigger investigations, rose to 457 in fiscal year 2023 from 224 in fiscal 2021. Further:

For more than 120 days during the summer of 2020, ANTIFA and other woke warriors targeted the federal courthouse in Portland, Oregon, triggering the arrest of more than 900 progressive activists.

Nine lawyers, some of which may have had connections with Donald Trump, were ordered to pay Detroit and Michigan a total of $175,000 in sanctions for challenging the 2020 election results.

The Arizona Supreme Court imposed sanctions on lawyers representing Republican Kari Lake for challenging defeat in the governor’s race. Separately, Republican leaders in Arizona, including the state’s GOP chair Kristina Karamo, and their attorneys were ordered to pay nearly $60,000 in sanctions over an election lawsuit.

Left-wing ideologue David Brock launched a “dark money” effort called 65 Project to disbar, publicly shame, and impoverish more than 100 lawyers who participated in filing post-election legal challenges to the 2020 presidential election results. Brock told Axios that he intends to “not only bring the grievances in the bar complaints, but shame them and make them toxic in their communities and in their firms.” He said, “I think the littler fish are probably more vulnerable to what we’re doing … You’re threatening their livelihood. And, you know, they’ve got reputations in their local communities.”

The 65 Project sought to disbar sitting United States Senator Ted Cruz for his views on the 2020 elections.

Rudy Giuliani’s law license was suspended in New York and Washington DC. These suspensions were issued without hearings, based largely on First Amendment-protected statements he made outside of any court of law. Also, a U.S. Bankruptcy judge declared that Mr. Giuliani’s bankruptcy would not relieve him of paying an egregious $148 million verdict against him for defamation.

One of President Trump’s lawyers during his impeachment trials, Michael van der Veen, had his house attacked and received multiple death threats. Another one of Trump’s lawyers had to take his family into hiding because his home was vandalized. The windows were broken and he says that he received close to 100 death threats.

I think we can all agree that a one-sided justice system that has been weaponized against conservatives is not something our founding fathers would support.

I urge Arizonans to listen to Dr. Eastman discuss the politically motivated legal and judicial attacks against him on April 17 in Ahwatukee when he keynotes Davos in the Desert’s Lawfare event.

David Wanetick
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