There have not been a lot of attempts to depose elected American presidents in my lifetime, though I’m only 34. But what was described on those couple of pages is what all the stunts and subterfuge were building up to-notes, as it were, on a criminal fucking conspiracy. My colleague Becca Andrews was even in Atlanta on December 14 when Georgia Republicans showed up at the Capitol to endorse their own pretend slate of Trump electors-a bizarre sideshow that was nonetheless part of a scattershot, collective pretext for the strategy Eastman spelled out. Mother Jones and others covered closely the efforts from the Trump campaign to throw out votes in courts and disenfranchise entire states. Thursday marked the one-year anniversary of a Barton Gellman article in The Atlantic that laid out the strategy that Trump, with Eastman and others’ help, would pursue.
It is a little weird to read all these months later about something that was also plain as day at the time. “Howls, of course, from the Democrats,” he predicted in bullet-point four, immediately following the line, “Pence then gavels President Trump as re-elected.” Yeah, man, no kidding. It is by its nature extra-legal: It is a blueprint for a coup.Įastman anticipated the possibility that some people would be mad. The memo’s author, John Eastman, is a lawyer-at the time, he was even a tenured professor at Chapman University School of Law-but what he created is not a legal document. The plan counted on Republicans in those states to submit competing sets of electors, based on the false and fabricated premise that Trump had somehow won those states. In six concise bullet-points, the memo outlined a process by which Vice President Mike Pence could use his powers on January 6 to throw out the electors from seven states that President Joe Biden won in the 2020 election.
On Tuesday, CNN published a two-page memo written by a lawyer for then-President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign during the run-up to the January 6 certification of the Electoral College results. There was big news this week on what is known ominously and euphemistically as “the democracy beat,” and like all such news, it was bad.
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