Jan. 6th panel says lawyer behind Trump election memos invoked 5th amendment 146 times

According to a lawyer for the House Select Committee investigating the January 6 riot on the Capitol, conservative law professor John Eastman, who authored memos outlining how President Donald Trump could overturn the 2020 election results, invoked his Fifth Amendment rights 146 times while being questioned. The committee lawyer revealed the statistic late on Monday. 

The revelation came during a court hearing before U.S. District Judge David Carter in Santa Ana, California regarding Eastman’s ongoing lawsuit to block a subpoena from the committee.

That subpoena would require Chapman University, where Eastman was previously employed as a professor, to hand over more than 19,000 emails in relation to his work for Trump in the months after the 2020 presidential election on November 3. 

The committee has considered those emails to be crucial pieces of evidence because they say the professor’s memos mapped out a way for a constitutional coup. The memos allegedly argued that Vice President Mike Pence could refuse to accept the certified results of the Electoral College vote slating President-elect Joe Biden the true victor.

Pence publicly went against Eastman’s advice, siding instead with the majority of other legal experts who said he was not afforded the power to reverse those votes.

When Eastman was questioned by the committee early in December, he refused to answer anything, saying it could violate his rights against self-incrimination for potential criminal activity, which is a right enshrined in the Fifth Amendment.

Still, former President Trump backed Eastman’s legal views and criticized Pence on January 6, 2021, encouraging his vice president to bolster “extreme courage” while participating in the vote certification.

Eastman also spoke at the “Stop the Steal” rally that took place that day in Washington, where Trump told his supporters to “fight like hell” in support of overturning the election results, claiming widespread voter fraud was responsible for Biden securing the presidency.