WASHINGTON (AP) – A conservative lawyer who helped in the efforts of former President Donald Trump to annul the results of the 2020 elections and who has been repeatedly mentioned in the hearings of the House of Representatives on the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, said in a lawsuit Monday that federal agents seized his cell phone last week.
John Eastman said agents took his phone when he left a restaurant last Wednesday night, the same day law enforcement officials conducted similar activities across the country as part of expanding investigations into Trump’s allies’ efforts to cancel the election.
The move underscores the interest of federal investigators in the failed schemes proposed by Trump’s advisers to help the Republican president stay in power between the November 2020 election and the Capitol uprising two months later when Trump loyalists stormed the building to stop verifying the election results.
Eastman said the agents who approached him identified themselves as the FBI, but appeared to be serving an order on behalf of the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General, which he said had no jurisdiction to investigate. having never worked for the department. He said the seized mobile phone contained emails that had been the subject of a long-running dispute between him and the House committee.
“This trial has received widespread media attention, so it is difficult to imagine that the Department of Justice, which apparently filed the application for the order in question here, did not know about it,” wrote his lawyers Charles Burnham and Joseph Gribble.
The action was revealed in a document in the federal court in New Mexico, in which Eastman challenged the legitimacy of the order, calling it too broad, and asked the court to force the federal government to return his phone. He says the order does not specify a specific crime for which evidence from the phone may be relevant.
The documentation did not specify where the agents seized his phone, although the order was signed by a federal magistrate in New Mexico, and footage of the seizure, broadcast by Fox News on Monday night, described that it happened in the city of Santa Fe. Eastman’s lawyers did not immediately return an email asking for comment.
Federal agents investigating the January 6 riots last week handed out numerous subpoenas related to Trump’s allies’ scheme to present alternative or fake ballots in hopes of annulling the election won by Democrat Joe Biden. Also that day, agents searched the home of Jeffrey Clark in Virginia, an employee of Trump’s Department of Justice who promoted Trump’s election challenges.
A spokeswoman for the inspector general’s office declined to comment.
Eastman, who resigned last year as a law professor at Chapman University, was a central figure in the ongoing hearings by the House of Representatives Committee to Investigate the Capitol Revolt, although he was not among the witnesses to testify.
The commission has heard evidence of Eastman presenting a recent, unorthodox proposal challenging the operation of the 130-year-old Election Census Act, which governs the process of calculating congressional election results.
Eastman urged Vice President Mike Pence to step down from his ceremonial role and stop voting certification in the election, a step Pence had no legal authority to take, and he refused to try. His plan was to get the states to send alternative voter lists to states that Trump is challenging, including Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
With competing rankings for Trump or Biden, Pence will be forced to reject them, returning them to the states to sort things out according to plan.
Pence’s lawyer, Greg Jacob, told the commission in detail during a hearing earlier this month about how he repulsed Eastman’s pressure, and another witness, retired federal judge Michael Lutig, called Eastman’s plan “wrong at every turn.”
The panel released a video showing Eastman repeatedly referring to his fifth amendment against self-incrimination while being interviewed by the committee.
Eastman later tried to be “on the pardon list,” according to an email he sent to Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, shared by the committee.
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