Eastman shielding 37,000 pages of Trump-related email from Jan. 6 committee
Attorney John Eastman revealed Monday that he has asserted attorney-client privilege on 37,000 pages of emails related to his work for then-President Donald Trump in the effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
The Jan. 6 select committee has objected to “every claim” over those pages, which now sends the gargantuan dispute to U.S. District Court Judge David Carter for a case-by-case review.
Eastman revealed the scope of the dispute in a status report to Carter, concluding a three-month review that Carter demanded he undertake. Since January, Eastman has been
reviewing 1,000 to 1,500 pages per day.
Carter has
already ruled that he believes Eastman and Trump “more likely than not” engaged in a criminal conspiracy to obstruct Congress, an effort he called “a coup in search of a legal theory.” He has described the select committee’s work as urgent, but he must now determine how to parse these 37,000 pages in time for the committee to employ them in its ongoing investigation of Trump’s effort to subvert the transfer of power.
The emails are all drawn from Chapman University, where Eastman was employed until shortly after Jan. 6. The committee subpoenaed Chapman to obtain the emails, but Eastman sued the school and the select committee to slow the process. Carter then ordered the review that Eastman undertook.
Of the 90,000 pages of emails subject to the select committee subpoena, about 30,000 were immediately ruled out as irrelevant mass emails. Eastman made no privilege claims over an additional 25,000 pages of records.
“Defendants made no objection to Dr. Eastman’s claims of privilege over 643 documents totaling 3,006 pages, but did object to every claim of attorney-client privilege and work-product protection that Dr. Eastman asserted with respect to his representation of former President Trump and/or his campaign committee,” Eastman’s attorney Charles Burnham wrote. “Those 3,264 documents, totaling 37,650 pages, have therefore been submitted for in camera inspection.”
The dispute over the documents is heading to District Court Judge David Carter for a case-by-case review.
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