Legal organization files ethics complaint on Trump lawyer Eastman

A legal organization filed an ethics complaint on Thursday seeking to have a lawyer, John Eastman, investigated for advising former President Trump in efforts to overturn the 2020 election results. 

The ethics complaint, filed by the Lawyers Defending American Democracy, was addressed to the State Bar of California. 

“The undersigned attorneys file this ethics complaint against John C. Eastman, a member of the bar of the State of California, because, based on a broad range of publicly available information, we believe that Mr. Eastman violated California rules of professional conduct while acting in his capacity as an attorney for President Donald J. Trump,” the letter, which was signed by over 1,300 people, reads.

“In so doing, Mr. Eastman appears to have acted in concert with other attorneys, notably Rudolph W. Giuliani and Jeffrey C. Clark, in an effort to install Mr. Trump in the office of President of the United States for another four years notwithstanding the irrefutable fact that the people of the United States had chosen Joseph R. Biden to replace him,” the letter continues. 

“We believe that concerted unethical action by lawyers aggravates the circumstances of their violation.”

The letter claimed that Eastman was not working in his capacity to provide independent legal advice to the former president, but rather, that he “was participating with Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Clark in a carefully orchestrated collective plan to overturn the results of the 2020 Presidential election.”

The signatories asked that the State Bar of California investigate Eastman and to look into whether any sanctions need to be imposed against the lawyer.

The Hill has reached out to a lawyer for Eastman for comment.

The founding director of the Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence, Eastman was allegedly part of efforts to push then-Vice President Mike Pence to have the 2020 presidential election results overturned.

The conservative lawyer has refused to cooperate with the House select committee investigating the events of the Jan. 6 Capitol attack, and earlier this week sued both the committee and Verizon in an effort to stop his phone records from being released.