1/ Eastman’s Substack essay—the fact of it; its text; what it says and doesn’t say; the lies contained within it, both the painfully obvious and unhidden ones and the ones it takes an ardent January 6 researcher to see—is merely the jumping off point for a *very* complex report.
2/ I’ve tried to keep the legalese to a minimum here, but the fact remains this breaking news report is about the urgent necessity that the House January 6 Committee pivot to turn what’s presently an oversight investigation into one co-equal branch into an investigation of *two*.
3/ This is almost impossible. The Committee has six months left in its lifespan and only four hearings left in its currently announced run of televised hearings (which have been incredibly well done and uniformly explosive). It has asked to speak to Clarence Thomas’s wife, but...
4/ ...if you’ve been following January 6 news for the last 18 months you know how the story of Jim Jordan—sorry, Ginni Thomas—goes: it starts in claims of having nothing to hide and being willing to talk to the HJ6C and ends in lawyers, litigation, stonewalling, lies and silence.
5/ No one believes Clarence Thomas will ever recuse himself from a January 6 case—and few believe Ginni Thomas will ever give a cooperative interview with the House January 6 Committee. And the recently published (last 24 hours) lie-filled rant by John Eastman encapsulates *why*.
6/ Because the focus of the HJ6C has understandably been on Trump, every hearing topic is naturally Trump-focused: Trump-and-Pence, Trump-and-DOJ, Trump-and-his-campaign advisers, and so on.
It leaves no room to elide Trump from the picture for even a moment and consider, say...
7/ ...the Proud Boys-and-Oath Keepers or, as in this breaking news report, Trump Legal-and-SCOTUS. Trump’s in the background—sometimes foreground—of this story, but the fundamental plot is one devised and executed by lawyers. I previewed this problem here:
sethabramson.substack.com
A Guide to Watching the January 6 Hearings
Congress will televise its most significant hearings in a half-century beginning June 9. PROOF has offered readers America’s most comprehensive January 6 coverage; now it offers a HJ6C viewing guide.
8/ The reason I call this report complex is because there are so many moving parts: multiple Trump lawyers; multiple dates, from December '20 to now; multiple forms of contact between Eastman and Ginni Thomas; multiple cases; and multiple forms of relief sought (e.g. injunction).
9/ But it is *also* confusing because of the stuff that is truly shocking here: the stunning synchronicity between the December 2020 Supreme Court leaks *no one ever reported on* and the ones that Republicans decided to howl about when they arose in the Dobbs case in May of 2022.
10/ That’s right—the far-right leak campaign originating inside the Supreme Court, which Justice Roberts says is one of the biggest threats to the Court in its history and began this year, in fact appears to have begun in December 2020 and relates *primarily* to the insurrection.
11/ So now you have a sense of the stakes here.
12/ The evidence suggests Trump’s lawyers repeatedly had non-public intel on secret SCOTUS deliberations in December 2020, 18 months before the evidence indicates—see the PROOF report below—Thomas or Alito aides began leaking on Dobbs to WSJ and Politico.
sethabramson.substack.com
The Real Supreme Court Leak in Dobbs v. Jackson Isn’t the One You Think—and May Point Toward the...
It turns out Alito’s draft opinion on abortion may have leaked earlier than believed, and not to Politico but another—farther right—outlet. This revelation may hold the key to a historic leak probe.
13/ Worse still, it appears Trump lawyers *factored this privileged access to SCOTUS deliberations* into their coup plot, which means anyone who was leaking to Trump lawyers in December 2020 was assisting in a seditious conspiracy.
And I think you all know where this is going.
14/ The lies told in Eastman’s just-published Substack essay are all part of a common plan or scheme that actually stretches back months and includes his 100+ invocations of his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination before House investigators: he’s hiding SCOTUS leaks.
15/ And Eastman’s hiding of those leaks puts him in such stunning danger of imminent federal indictment and imprisonment that it would take an enormous amount of loyalty not just to a cause but to a *person he has been dear friends with for decades* to justify that level of risk.
16/ I’m not trying to be coy here—the evidence suggests that the Dobbs leak was a Thomas-camp leak designed to pressure Kavanaugh and Barrett to overturn Roe. And it now appears Eastman thought he could use the same leak channel to pressure Kavanaugh and Barrett in December 2020.
17/ In other words, there was a test run for the May 2022 Dobbs leak 18 months before the Dobbs leak and that test run was immeasurably worse than the Dobbs leak because it was conducted as part of a cross-branch coup scheme that right now no one is reporting on or investigating.
18/ Here’s where the law comes in. PROOF has now—with this breaking news report—detailed an 8-point legal scheme by Trump’s lawyers to invest the judicial branch in its coup plot.
This mirrors the 7-point Trump scheme that the HJ6C says was focused on *executive*-branch actions.
19/ Do you recall this stunning report that just came and went like it wasn’t *mind-blowing*?
TRUMP JR. to MEADOWS (pre-election): “We have operational control. It’s very simple—we have multiple paths [to win the election]. We control them all.”
Um, WTF?
cnn.com
CNN Exclusive: 'We control them all': Donald Trump Jr. texted Meadows ideas for overturning 2020...
Two days after the 2020 presidential election, as votes were still being tallied, Donald Trump's eldest son texted then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows that "we have operational control" to...
20/ In America, there’s one path to winning an election: voters. But Don Jr. appeared (with that word “all”) to be referencing at least *3*. The evidence suggests this is what he was referring to:
▪️ Federal Executive Branch
▪️ State Legislative Branch
▪️ Federal Judicial Branch
21/ And one could add an asterisk to denote a *fourth* option—as the Trumps’ operational control over the White House, SCOTUS, and state legislatures in the battleground states *could* have ultimately thrown the election to Congress in a by-delegation vote the *GOP would’ve won*.
22/ So—based on how the evidence has come in—there’s no great surprise about why Don Jr. was so certain his father would get a second term, and why Trump was so inexplicably enraged when the operational control his son must have been telling him (like Meadows) existed fell apart.
23/ Perhaps journalists dropped this story because it seemed obvious: Don Jr. just meant SCOTUS was in significant part appointed by Trump, right? And that the battleground states had GOP legislatures?
Sure—and no. Because “operational control” means more than passive authority.
24/ We’ve seen, since Don Jr. uttered those anti-democratic words via private text 20 months ago, that Team Trump didn’t just have implicit, passive sway over several branches of government, but a *plan* on how to use it. Remember, Eastman came aboard Team Trump in *summer 2020*.
25/ (Not for nothing, Eastman was brought aboard Trump’s legal team in late summer 2020 at the demand of none other than Cleta Mitchell—a Trump lawyer and Ginni Thomas’ best friend. So Ginni orchestrated John, a longtime family friend, becoming a *second* conduit on Trump Legal.)
26/ So what was the operational control Don Jr. felt—by a month after Ginni’s friends Cleta and John were on Trump’s SCOTUS litigation team—his dad had with respect to SCOTUS? Clearly it was rather more than just the fact that Trump appointed three Justices. That’s not “control.”
27/ The evidence now suggests that Team Trump believed there was and would be a backchannel (and maybe more than one) between SCOTUS and Trump Legal, *and*—and this is where it gets even more confusing—Trump Legal did *not* need five votes on any case it brought before the Court.
28/ If you understand the basic fact that there are 9 Justices on the Supreme Court and you need 5 to win a case, that last tweet seems *incomprehensible* at first blush. How could you win a case with fewer than five votes? Answer: if a win doesn’t require a ruling in your favor.
29/ What if all you need is for the Court to agree to *hear arguments* on a case, because that could give you injunctive relief as you seek to push back a session of Congress? That only requires 4 votes.
Or what if all you need is a *note* attached by 1 Justice to a declination?
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