John Eastman, then chairman of the National Organization for Marriage, testifies during a hearing before the House Ways and Means Committee in 2013 in Washington, DC. The committee heard from six representatives of groups that were targeted by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) for special scrutiny. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

John Eastman’s Constitutional Law class at Chapman University once was a tour-de-force on the far fringes of legal thought.

“I distinctly remember him lecturing for close to an entire class on his belief of why the Establishment Clause shouldn’t ban state and local governments from actually, literally establishing official state religions,” said George Brietigam, who took the class in 2017.

Under Eastman’s interpretation, California could make Christianity, Judaism, Islam or any other religion the official state religion because the Establishment Clause only bans the national government from establishing churches.

“Professor Eastman often professed some very fringe beliefs on constitutional issues. However, to his credit, he would openly admit to them as being fringe and make it a point to clarify what the law was, and what he thought it ought to be — something a lot of professors neglect to do,” Brietigam said. “He was a very interesting teacher.”

“Fringe,” friends and former students said, is how Eastman himself — in an unguarded moment, with no microphones present — might describe the now-infamous memos he penned for President Donald Trump. In those pages, Eastman explored various ways the vice president might halt the peaceful transfer of power to President Joe Biden on Jan. 6, 2021, so states Trump narrowly lost could examine what he described as “illegalities” that may have affected the outcome.

Those memos made the former Orange County law professor a central player in the events of Jan. 6, and a political touchstone, one who is championed by Trump supporters as a freedom fighter and denounced by others as the architect of a failed coup.

The House select committee investigating the events want to know a lot more from Eastman. He has invoked his Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination in response to committee questions nearly 150 times. He has fought its subpoenas for documents in federal court, claiming attorney-client privilege. This month, a federal judge ordered Eastman to slog through thousands of emails archived on Chapman University’s email system and explain which he thinks are privileged and why — and to prove that he was ever formally hired by Trump as an attorney to begin with.

But beyond his adoption of a siege-style legal strategy, many view Eastman’s advice to the Trump as nothing less than a threat to democracy.

Erwin Chemerinsky, then founding dean of UC Irvine’s School of Law, and John Eastman, then Chapman University’s Donald P. Kennedy Chair in Law, debate. (Courtesy Chapman University)

“John Eastman’s memo outlined how to accomplish a coup,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of UC Berkeley’s law school, long the progressive yin to Eastman’s conservative yang.

“I debated John Eastman on a weekly radio show for 15 years. I debated him in countless other settings. We always got along well. But what he did here was beyond the pale and warrants investigations and sanctions. This would have been the end of American democracy: The candidate who lost both the popular vote and the Electoral College vote would be installed as president.”

Indeed, Chemerinsky was one of many who signed a complaint urging the California Bar to investigate Eastman, citing “serious evidence of professional misconduct” for “efforts to to hijack or postpone the final counting of the electoral votes at the January 6, 2021 Joint Session of Congress.”

Eastman did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this story. But he has been defending himself online and in interviews with conservative-friendly media platforms.

“All we were trying to do was get a public airing of the illegalities in the election,” he said on the Kim Monson show Feb. 11, dismissing the “coup memo” moniker as “laughable.”

“The propaganda to shut down the truth is just stunning. It’s the kind of thing one would expect to see out of Stalinist Russia. Yet it’s happening in this country on a daily basis.”

Long before Eastman spoke to that fired-up crowd alongside Rudy Giuliani at the “Stop the Steal” rally, long before rioters attacked police officers and overran the nation’s Capitol, and long before there was a January 6 Committee, “fringe” defined Eastman’s views on politics and the law.

Now, many say, he casts a shadow over Orange County, and over his former school.

“Chapman University always wanted national recognition,” one observer said. “But not for this.”

‘Trump Wins’

Eastman, once the dean of Chapman’s law school, was an attorney hired to do a job, friends said: Explore every possible legal scenario to challenge this election, based on what Trump claimed was widespread voter fraud — a claim that officials from both parties refute, going so far as to call the 2020 election the most secure ever.

President Donald Trump speaks with Vice President Mike Pence as they wait to view the SpaceX flight to the International Space Station, at Kennedy Space Center, Saturday, May 30, 2020, in Cape Canaveral, Fla. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

Thus, this thinking goes, Eastman’s memos don’t necessarily reflect his personal opinions, but rather, a legal “everything but the kitchen sink.” They’re built on the argument that the Vice President has far more power to accept and reject electoral votes than other Constitutional scholars say actually exists.

“VP (Mike) Pence, presiding over the joint session … begins to open and count the ballots,” the first Eastman memo said. “When he gets to Arizona, he announces that he has multiple slates of electors…. At the end, he announces that because of the ongoing disputes in the 7 States, there are no electors that can be deemed validly appointed in those States… Pence then gavels President Trump as re-elected. Howls, of course, from the Democrats….”

That, however, wasn’t Eastman’s favored option.

In a second, longer memo, under the heading “War Gaming the Alternatives,” Eastman sketched out nine different things Pence might do on Jan. 6, five resulting in Biden wins.

The path he favored — referenced while standing beside Rudy Giuliani at the “Save America” rally where Giuliani called for “trial by combat” — went like this:

“VP Pence determines that the ongoing election challenges must conclude before ballots can be counted, and adjourns the joint session of Congress,” he wrote. “Taking the cue, state legislatures convene, order a comprehensive audit/investigation of the election returns in their states, and then determine whether the slate of electors initially certified is valid, or whether the alternative slate of electors should be certified by the legislature….

“If, after investigation, proven fraud and illegality is insufficient to alter the results of the election, the original slate of electors would remain valid. BIDEN WINS. If, on the other hand, the investigation proves to the satisfaction of the legislature that there was sufficient fraud and illegality to affect the results of the election, the Legislature certifies the Trump electors. Upon reconvening the Joint Session of Congress, those votes are counted and TRUMP WINS.

“BOLD, Certainly. But this Election was Stolen by a strategic Democrat plan to systematically flout existing election laws for partisan advantage; we’re no longer playing by Queensbury Rules…”

The main thing, Eastman wrote, is that Pence should exercise his authority without seeking permission.

“The fact is that the Constitution assigns this power to the Vice President as the ultimate arbiter. We should take all of our actions with that in mind.”

President Donald Trump looks towards Vice President Mike Pence in the Oval Office of the White House on Sept. 11, 2020. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)

Oval Office, Jan. 4

It must have been heady for Eastman, who ran for elected office twice and lost, to be in the Oval Office with Trump on Jan. 4, trying to convince Pence that he could and should wield awesome power, friends said. 

While virtually no election expert “acknowledges” that there was illegal conduct on a scale large enough to change the outcome, Eastman and Trump insisted there was. Eastman’s memos argued that rule changes by state courts and elected officials — many aimed at making voting easier and safer during a pandemic — were unconstitutional because power over elections belongs to state legislatures alone.

Eastman provided a laundry list of this “illegal conduct”: The elimination of signature verification requirements in Pennsylvania and Georgia; the use of unmanned drop boxes and “human drop boxes” in Wisconsin; the mailing of absentee ballots to every registered voter in Michigan; machine inspection of signatures in Nevada. 

“The question is, did the impact of that affect the results of the election?”

John Eastman (left) stood on stage at a rally in support of President Trump in Washington, D.C. on Jan. 6 while former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani spoke. JACQUELYN MARTIN/ASSOCIATED PRESS

The Ellipse, Jan. 6

Eastman’s arguments didn’t work. Other legal scholars told Pence that Eastman’s read was incorrect —  “wrong at every turn,” as one put it — and that Pence did not in fact have the power to do what Trump and Eastman wanted.

Pence agreed. Still, the pressure continued.

On Jan. 6, when hundreds of thousands of furious people gathered at Washington D.C.’s “Save America” rally near the White House, Eastman found himself on stage beside Giuliani, for an unplanned speech.

Standing before a bank of American flags, looking a bit eccentric in brown fedora, tan coat and multi-colored scarf, Eastman smiled and nodded as Giuliani railed.

“Over the next 10 days, we get to see the machines that are crooked, the ballots that are fraudulent, and if we’re wrong, we will be made fools of,” Giuliani told the cheering crowd. “But if we’re right, a lot of them will go to jail. Let’s have trial by combat.”

Then it was Eastman’s turn.

An official sorts ballots during an audit at the Floyd County administration building in Rome, Ga., on Friday morning, Nov. 13, 2020. (AP Photo/Ben Gray)

“We know there was fraud – traditional fraud – that occurred,” such as dead people voting, he said. But voting machines were the new frontier, he claimed, conjuring a conspiracy where officials hid blank ballots in a “secret folder” in machines.

“All we are demanding of Vice President Pence is, this afternoon at 1 o’clock, he let the legislatures of the states look into this so we get to the bottom of it and the American people know whether we have control of the direction of our government or not.”

Not long after Eastman said those words, a noose went up at the Capitol. Soon after that, rioters chanting “Hang Mike Pence,” stormed inside.

Court documents show that shortly after the attack, Eastman emailed Pence’s lawyer. “(T)he ‘siege’ is because YOU and your boss did not do what was necessary. Pence should still not certify the results.”

Court documents also said that Eastman later called Pence “spineless” for refusing to follow the plan.

Trump supporters participate in a rally in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)

Final straw

Eastman’s professorship at Chapman hadn’t been threatened by his earlier fringe opinions.

He remained on faculty after he wrote, in 2000, that the “twin relics of barbarism” in the 1800s — slavery and polygamy — had given way to two new ones, homosexuality and abortion. He later led the charge against same sex marriage in California and several other states.

In 2020, Eastman survived an outcry from fellow faculty members after writing that Kamala Harris might not be eligible to be vice president because she was not a “natural born citizen.” Harris’s father was a Jamaican national, her mother was from India, and neither was a naturalized U.S. citizen when Harris was born in Oakland in 1964, he wrote.

Before that, Eastman expressed doubt about the validity of Barack Obama’s birth documents. He invited former U.S. attorney John Yoo — author of the “torture memos” that justified the Bush administration’s post 9/11 use of “advanced interrogation techniques” — to Chapman as a visiting professor. He told activists during his 2010 campaign for California Attorney General that voters have a right to respond to “insufferable government policies by rising up and abolishing those governments.”

But Jan. 6 was apparently a bridge too far.

A letter to the Los Angeles Times, signed by 169 members of Chapman faculty and Board of Trustees, demanded that the university take action. That created a hostile environment and Eastman no longer wanted to work at Chapman, he said. He retired on Jan. 14, 2021, agreeing not to take legal action against the university.

That’s not how things played out in Colorado. Eastman was a visiting professor of conservative thought and policy at the University at Boulder on Jan. 6, and school officials soon relieved him of his duties and cancelled his classes. Eastman claimed the school defamed him and seeks damages of almost $1.9 million.

He remains a senior fellow at the conservative Claremont Institute and director of its Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence, which is raising money to challenge Colorado’s open primary system and to finance litigation aimed at “election integrity and cancel culture.”

He’s also raising money for himself.

On the Christian fundraising site GiveSendGo, Eastman is soliciting donations for his legal bills. “He has been targeted by hard core leftist activists who have filed a bar complaint against him, seeking to have him disbarred and thereby lose his source of income. He has also been subpoenaed by the hyper-partisan January 6 Committee in the House of Representatives, which is targeting anyone involved in election integrity efforts …. Responding to both of these attacks has required Dr. Eastman to hire outside counsel, at significant cost to himself.”

Eastman’s goal is $200,000, and he has raised more than $175,000. He has also garnered almost 1,000 prayers from well-wishers.

He has also rejected any responsibility for the chaos of Jan. 6.

“What happened at the Capitol was a travesty and everyone involved in breaching the Capitol should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law,” he said on CNN, arguing that he was miles away when it was breached. “It ought not to apply to people peaceably expressing their views.”

Jon Fleischman, former executive director of the California Republican Party, would agree. He has known Eastman for decades.

“He is a wonderful man. He cares about this country. He’s a student of the Constitution and was an instructor of mine when I went through Claremont,” Fleischman said. “I don’t agree with the stuff in John’s memo. To be honest, I can’t think of another time I disagreed with him on Constitutional issues. But no one in America should be persecuted for his political beliefs, and he’s being unfairly persecuted by Chapman.  At the end of the day, John took on as a client someone the liberal faculty didn’t like and set off a firebomb.”

Enthusiast or embarrassment?

As Eastman battles in court over what documents must be handed over to the Jan. 6 committee, he has some passionate defenders.

“We cannot thank you enough… for being a steadfast defender of the Constitution and our liberties. I am deeply sorry that you are being unfairly targeted. You are a true hero & patriot!” Tammi McCoy posted on his fundraiser, along with a $50 donation.

Orange County Republican stalwarts Doy Henley and Buck Johns were among Eastman’s biggest donors, at $1,000 each. And at Chapman, students in the Chapman Republicans club have his back.

“I think it’s pretty clear that Jan. 6 was disgusting. I would never want to see anything like that again,” said sophomore Ethan Oppenheim. “With that said, I do believe the (Jan. 6) committee is a partisan sham in a way. There’s not much left to be investigated, but it’s a way for Democrats to score points with voters. With inflation so high and big bills stalled in Congress, they’re using Jan. 6 to mitigate their losses. That’s one way – depict Republicans as insurrectionists and traitors.”

Oppenheim would like to see Eastman teach again.

“They’re caving to the student body and the professors,” Oppenheim said. “I definitely think they didn’t like his read of the law.”

At Chapman Law, students may have disagreed with Eastman’s politics, but he was, for some, an admired and respected teacher.

“No one knows the Constitution like John Eastman,” said Allison J. Brandt, who now lives in Florida and counts Eastman as one of her all-time favorite professors. “His enthusiasm – the way he taught all the classes — he absolutely loved what he did, loved teaching and sharing his knowledge.”

She tended to agree with Eastman on a lot of issues, and has reached out to him to offer support.

Paul R. Kelly wound up going to Chapman Law thanks to Eastman’s salesmanship. “He was very friendly and jovial,” said Kelly, of Long Beach. “He sold me on Chapman within an hour. He believed that Orange County should have a good law school and Chapman could be that law school — it had great resources, a great library, a great campus, and just needed to attract good people to get the scores up and the ball would start rolling. He was an amazing salesman. He made you want to be a part of building something new.”

Others, however, suggest Eastman’s role at Chapman was, and is, a stain.

Bethany Everson Na was more conservative than a lot of her classmates. She especially enjoyed the jousting between Eastman and Chemerinsky — and noted that they used Chemerinsky’s text book in Eastman’s class.

But over the years, Eastman seemed to get “more and more fringe,” Na said. “And all of a sudden, lately, I go on Twitter and it’s humiliation. To have Chapman mentioned in connection with subpoenas and the House committee coup investigation — it’s just not a good look.”

Chapman hasn’t quite become the great law school Eastman envisioned. UC Irvine’s law school — founded a decade after Chapman’s — ranks 35th in the nation, while Chapman ranks 134, according to U.S. News and World Report.

And, post Jan. 6, Eastman’s future as an attorney might be in jeopardy.

In New York, Giuliani’s law license was suspended for making “demonstrably false and misleading” statements about the integrity of the 2020 presidential election. In California, the state Bar acknowledged receiving complaints about Eastman.

George Cardona, the Bar’s chief trial counsel, said the agency can’t comment on whether any individual attorney is under investigation. But he did suggest the stakes could be high for any attorney deemed part of an effort to overthrow the government.

“Every lawyer admitted to practice in California takes an oath outlined by statute: To support the Constitution of the United States,” he said.

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