Legal experts and other commentators say john eastman he did himself no favors foxnews.
first donald trump The attorney, a co-defendant in Georgia’s sprawling racketeering indictment against the former president, spoke with Laura Ingraham in a two-part interview that aired Tuesday and Wednesday.
He persistently repeated the lie that the 2020 election was riddled with fraud, prompting even Ingraham, a staunch supporter of Trump, to call it.
Eastman is accused of engineering a scheme to set up a fake voters list to falsely certify that Trump won the 2020 election and pressure the then-Vice President. Mike Pence during a January 4, 2021 meeting to “reject electoral votes from certain states or delay the joint session of Congress on January 6” to allow certain state legislatures to illegally nominate pro-Trump electors.
Eastman acknowledged that both options violated the law, according to the indictment.
In Wednesday’s interview installment, Eastman said he had asked Pence during that meeting to delay certifying the ballots, but insisted he did not tell Pence to reject them.
“What I have recommended, and have said repeatedly, is that you agree to ask more than 100 state legislators in your swing states to give them a week to try to resolve the impact of what they all agreed to be illegal on the conduct. of the elections,” he stated.
“I don’t think everyone recognized it,” Ingraham said.
For the record, Pence has said Trump and his “kooky lawyers” asked him to “literally turn down the votes.”
Legal commentators said Eastman’s television appearance was not a wise choice.
“He really seems to believe all this crap, and I don’t think he really understands the fact that he keeps digging a bigger and bigger hole for himself,” Tristan Snell, a former New York state attorney, said. said on MSNBC.
“He wanted to plead the Fifth when he had that statement, but every time he speaks in public he basically blames himself,” he continued.
In a post in X (formerly Twitter), Bradley P. Moss, a national security attorney, said Eastman “literally just confessed to the crime” on Fox News.
Conservative lawyer George Conway shared “professional legal advice” To Eastman: “If you’ve been accused of doing something, don’t talk about it on TV.”
Renato Mariotti, former federal prosecutor, noted that Eastman had even lost Ingraham, who went along with Trump’s lie after the 2020 elections.
(Fox News has restricted its coverage of the issue after two voting system companies sued for billions in damages for the right-wing network’s promotion of election falsehoods. It settled with one of them, with Dominion Voting Systems, for $787.5 million in April.)
Criminal defense attorney Sara Spector pointed out how Eastman’s argument was not helping her cause:
Aside from the legal experts, critics and other pundits also had a lot to say about the interview. Here is part of the talk: