Trump STUNNED as MAIN LAWYER Gets DISBARRED

Added: 2026-05-05

[00:00:00]a coup in search of a legal theory. That was a phrase used by a federal judge to describe the efforts of John Eastman who was just disbarred by the state of California on Wednesday. The California Supreme Court affirming his disbarment in California in a watershed point of accountability over the people who facilitated the January 6th insurrection. It took more than five years and it took a number of court proceedings, civil proceedings, criminal proceedings, and a disciplinary trial.

[00:00:34]And more than five years later, in the middle of an effort by Donald Trump to rewrite the history of the attack on the 2020 election and the attack on the US capital, the first sign of accountability against Eastman has been finalized by the California Supreme Court. Today on Allrise News and Legal AF, one of the key witnesses against Eastman in that disciplinary trial is joining us as a guest. He's Matthew Seligman. He's a founder at Greyhawk Law and a fellow at the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford University. Welcome to the show, Matthew, and I' love to hear your reaction to this development.

[00:01:18]>> Uh, thanks for having me on, Adam. Um, so this has been a long time coming. Uh, it was a long process. Um, but ultimately it reached the right result.

[00:01:27]Um, so several years ago, the trial judge, Judge Roland, recommended Eastman for disbarment, and now the California Supreme Court has confirmed uh his disbarment, and it's the just outcome.

[00:01:38]Um, January 6th is a um is a stain on American history. Uh there's been a shameful lack of accountability uh going all the way to the top. Donald Trump is now the president again um despite his actions related to January 6th and so much else. Um, but this is an important uh an important island of accountability. Um, and the reason is because the violence on January 6 was just the final act in an overall plot to try to reverse the results of the 2020 election. Um, the real threat for for the actual outcome of the election wasn't the violence on the steps, but rather the actions of the lawyers who attempted to manipulate the legal process. John Eastman was at the very center. He was the architect of that effort and he's been rightfully disbarred as a result.

[00:02:27]>> Can you go over some of the other consequences for the lawyers involved with it? I'm thinking of Rudy Giuliani uh especially in the wake of the fact that the criminal cases are no longer because Trump won the election.

[00:02:40]>> Yeah. And the criminal accountability has faded away. uh you know there is still the possibility of some state prosecutions but at this point when we're we're now more than 5 years out that's looking less and less likely and of course Donald Trump himself is back in the White House and he has pardoned um many of the people who are participated in the legal aspect of the of of the of January 6 as well as those who engaged in violence on the steps of the capital. Um so the criminal accountability is is not likely to play a huge role here. Um and so what we're left with is largely uh disciplinary proceedings by by state bars. Uh you know lawyers have ethical responsibilities um as lawyers and you know that the bars have consistently found that that the attorneys who participated in this plan have violated those uh those ethical responsibilities.

[00:03:32]Beyond John Eastman, there's Kenneth Chzbro who's faced disciplinary action from the New York bar and there's Rudy Giuliani who has uh also been disbarred.

[00:03:39]So you know other lawyers like Jenna Ellis and so on have also faced some disciplinary proceedings. Um so you know it's not as much as I think uh the country deserves but it's important and the reason it's important is because this is a plot the legal coup could not have been perpetrated without the execution by lawyers. Lawyers need to be held to a higher standard and that's exactly what these proceedings do.

[00:04:03]>> On that note, I'm going to read a quote from Judge David O'. Carter. This is from 2022. when he was hearing a matter over the House January 6 committee's attempt to get Dr. Eastman's uh records, as they put it, Dr. Eastman. Uh here's what the judge wrote. Quote, "Dr. Eastman and President Trump launched a campaign to overturn a Democratic election, an action unprecedented in American history. Their campaign was not confined to an ivory tower. It was a coup in search of a legal theory. The plan spurred violent attacks on the seat of our nation's government, led to the deaths of several law enforcement officers, and deepened public distrust in our political process." End quote. I should add that this ruling, in this ruling, Judge Carter found that the crime fraud exception applied because Trump and Eastman likely committed two federal felonies. the uh one for conspiring to defraud the United States and obstruction of an official proceeding, two charges ultimately charged against Donald Trump. What do you think it says that it has taken 5 years to get to this point in the Eastman case and there's still more to go? He's likely going to appeal this and there are potential disciplinary proceedings in other states where he's barred.

[00:05:30]I think it's um a reflection of the fact that the legal system even when it's operating well and I do think the California proceeding operated well uh unlike some others it was not delayed beyond what was sort of just part of the procedural process. It's now gone through multiple appeals that it's uh where his department has been upheld.

[00:05:49]But what it illustrates is that the legal system is not necessarily well suited to address the sort of issues that we confront in this, you know, this new wave of pseudo authoritarian uh attempts to consolidate and entrench power. Um the legal system moves slowly.

[00:06:07]Uh it moves deliberately. It's an adversarial process and that's incredibly important uh to ensure the fundamental fairness of these proceedings. And I can uh assure you having sat in that courtroom and having been cross-examined um for many hours by Dr. Een's attorney, he got a fair trial. And I think that's really important. So I'm not suggesting that the the legal system should change, but I am saying that the legal system is not uh necessarily up to the challenge of trying to confront these assaults on the legal system itself. Um it's just too slow. It's just too deliberate. And so I I think that we also need a political response. Um I think that uh both those within um the Republican party and those uh outside the Republican party have a responsibility to hold those accountable that whatever disagreements about policy, about tax policy, about tariff policy, about immigration policy and so on, those can and must be disputed within the rule of law. And when anyone steps outside of that, that's something that needs to be cast out out of uh sort of polite company in our political and legal systems. That didn't happen. Um Donald Trump was impeached, but he was not convicted. Um and you know, the uh the the attorneys who have now been disbarred, um some of them are still uh operating within the Republican uh legal community. I mean, Dr. Greeman has said that he one of the reasons why he didn't want to be disbarred is because he continues to represent Republican politicians. Now, he can't do that with his California bar license anymore. But the fact that he wasn't just cast aside, that Donald Trump wasn't just cast out of our political community as a result of his actions, I think, is a real failing.

[00:07:55]>> You mentioned your own testimony against Eastman. Can you give a sense of what was it like on the witness stand? You mentioned that there was vigorous cross-examination.

[00:08:05]What was your testimony at that time and what was it like?

[00:08:10]>> Uh, so I was the expert witness on constitutional and election law. Um, so the substance of my testimony as an expert witness was that there was no legal or historical basis for Dr. Eastman's theories. uh primarily the theory that Mike Pence could somehow intervene in the electoral count by rejecting electoral uh votes from certain states or purporting to count other electoral votes. Um in addition to that primary uh theory based on uh the vice president's purported powers, uh my testimony also focused on the alternate electors theory um and also the idea that state legislatures could um directly appoint electors after the fact after election day. Um, and so for each of those substantive legal issues, I uh went into the legal and and particularly the historical record uh for the powers of the vice president to to show that there was no legal or historical basis.

[00:09:05]Now um Dr. Eastman wrote uh two very short um not well-sighted memoranda um uh that subsequently became public. One was two pages, one was six pages. Um, and in those memoranda, uh, which this was in early January of, uh, 2021, just before January 6, where he wrote these memos to try to persuade, um, uh, Vice President Pence and his council to go along with the plot. Um, he alluded to historical precedent, uh, purported historical precedent where Thomas Jefferson had allegedly done what he was asking Mike Pence to do. And so uh a a significant part of my testimony was going back and actually looking at the the legal and historical records. Uh you know the annals of Congress, the records of the House and Senate actually do they write down everything that happened and it was very clear that Dr. Gman had never even looked at it. Um because if you had you would know that his theory was wrong. Um and so so the substance of my testimony was that he was wrong and that he was obviously wrong. the memos that you talk about, those are known popularly as the coup memos. Is that right?

[00:10:15]>> Uh yeah, I've I've heard that. Um you know, I I try to at least in my capacity as a as an expert witness, you know, you know, the idea of a coup I think is um you know, it's an interesting one because we don't really have the language uh to describe what happened here. Um you know, when you think of a coup, you often think of military coups, and that's not what this was. Thank God. um you know and this also wasn't sort of ordinary within the four corners of the rule of law disputes about election results that happens all the time um you know primarily through uh the judicial system but sometimes not sometimes you know Congress will make decisions about this about who to seed and so on um and so I think that this you know what happens uh the sort of legal manipulations that happen in late 2020 and early 2021 um exists in this different space in between where there was, you know, they didn't just stand up and say we're canceling the election.

[00:11:12]They didn't just stand up and say, you know, Donald Trump is proclaimed as dictator for life. And so it doesn't fit some of the foreign models for coups.

[00:11:21]Um, but it also isn't just what they claimed it was, which was, hey, I'm just, you know, uh, disputing election results just like Bush vGore. And this was clearly very different than that.

[00:11:30]And so one of the things that's been difficult I think in the public understanding the gravity of what happened is that it exists in this space where they were pretending to to uh operate uh within the law. They were pretending uh to operate by the law and through the law. And that's part of what makes this so dangerous because I don't think that America's democratic culture would be willing to accept Donald Trump standing up uh at the beginning of his ellipse speech um on the morning of January 6 saying I'm staying in power.

[00:12:00]You know, I've you know, I'm rejecting you, we no longer live in a democracy because the United States does have a very deep democratic uh tradition. Um but I do think that uh if you know and I think that the reason why they fell on to the theories that they had was that there's a mythology about uh the framers and the founders um that people can invoke that alleged historical pedigree and legal uh basis of course whether it's true or not but um there the reason why this is a legal coup is because it was an attempt to manipulate the legal system um not and and it was unlaw awful and it's important to keep that in mind.

[00:12:40]But the mechanism through which it was executed was this, you know, it talked in the language of originalism and and original intent and the founders and that's exactly what made it so dangerous. So I think it's important to really be clear about what we mean by legal coup in order, you know, we're not attacking a straw man or, you know, it was a military coup or something like that, but it was something that in the American context is, I think, even more dangerous >> and it was attempt to legitimize the idea of unlawfully staying in power. You know, when I hear the reaction to Eastman's disbarment from Trump loyalists, MAGA more generally, what you hear a lot is it's the job of attorneys to defend unpopular even odious uh clients or ideas and that this is uh this is a in their view dangerous precedent because of that. How do you respond to what they are saying there?

[00:13:35]And specifically, Eastman faced 11 disciplinary charges about specific ethics violations, including cander to the tribunal. Where does this cross over from being simply representing a unpopular or odious idea to being repeated serial misconduct?

[00:13:57]>> It's clearly not about the identity of the client. Donald Trump's lead criminal defense lawyer is currently the acting attorney general of the United States, Todd Blanch. So, you know, I think it's just um obviously and farically incorrect to say that this is about John Eastman representing Donald Trump. It's not. It's what John Eastman did and what he said in the course of that representation. He lied. He claimed that there was fraud in voting machines when there was not. He claimed that dead people voted when they did not. He claimed that undocumented immigrants voted when they did not. And ultimately, he claimed that the Constitution authorized uh the vice president, Mike Pence, to reverse the results of the election. That legal position has no legal or historical basis at all. And that's what he was disbarred for. It's not about representing unpopular clients. It's about staying within the generous limits of what um ethically proper representation of those unpopular clients can involve. John Eastman uh crossed that boundary repeatedly and uh not just by a little bit and that is why he has been disbarred. This is not an attack on the adversarial system. This is not a way to uh you know it's sometimes said uh to uh engage in lawfare to uh disable uh the your political opponents from having legal representation. Not at all. um you know see the many hundreds of Republican party lawyers some of whom worked for Donald Trump's re-election campaign who refused to go along with this because they recognized that there is a difference between uh advocating within the limits of fact and law for the interests of your clients which they were willing to do and violating your ethical responsibilities as an attorney which they were not willing to do. So the defenses of John Eastman here um are are simply empty and missed the deeper point that it is what he did and what he said that was unethical and that's why he was despared.

[00:16:10]And it's notable that he's invoking what many would say to be the top ideals of the legal system while trying to uh being a key participant in an effort that would have deeply damaged, if not broken, the rule of law itself. Thank you very much, Matthew, for joining All Rise News and Legal AF.

[00:16:32]>> Thanks very much, Adam. Good to see you.

[00:16:34]>> Good to see you as well. And for folks who want to find out more about this or other topics, take a moment to visit Allrise News either on Substack or by visiting www.allisnews.com.

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