A key lawyer for President Donald Trump who helped draft memos that sought to investigate claims of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election told The Epoch Times that he backs the charges by a recent committee witness that the January 6 committee lied to the American people.
In an exclusive interview with The Epoch Times, former Trump lawyer John Eastman said he supports Klukowski’s claims.
Cheney’s Claims
Cheney claimed that together, they proposed to “overturn the election”—failing to mention this was only possible if they could prove any significant allegations of elections fraud—with the cooperation of Jeff Clark, a former assistant attorney general at the DOJ.According to Eastman, while Klukowski had worked with him on a memo that asked the state of Pennsylvania to grant the Trump campaign time to investigate claims of election fraud, he was also in quarantine for three weeks after catching COVID-19.
“At some point, Ken stopped working on this stuff because he had a government job and got appointed [to the DOJ position],” Eastman told The Epoch Times of their collaboration.
“The notion that I somehow placed him in the Department of Justice is just laughable,” he said.
Klukowski explained in his statement to the Federalist that he provided to the committee the September 2020 date he requested the transfer from the Office of Management and Budget to the DOJ.
“I also suggested the committee review our email exchanges confirming my testimony, since they clearly had access to that information,” Klukowski said.
A former White House staffer who coordinated DOJ appointments previously confirmed to the Federalist that the Klukowski move to the DOJ had started months before any calls to independently investigate allegations of election fraud and had nothing to do with the election.
‘Dishonest’ Narrative
The statement is part of a “dishonest … narrative that there was no basis for [these memos calling for independent investigations that we wrote] and that therefore, we knew what we were doing was illegal,” Eastman told The Epoch Times. “That’s just false.”Eastman said that the committee is specifically lying in three different ways to advance the notion that what they did was illegal.
“Every time they use the word ‘baseless’ as describing our allegations of illegality and or fraud, that’s a lie,” Eastman said.
In fact, even before the election was held, some media outlets were claiming that any allegations of voter fraud were “baseless.”
Eastman said that his legal argument to allow states to send alternate electors if voter fraud is proven isn’t novel, nor is his argument that there is ambiguity on the question of whether the vice president may delay the appointment of electors.
The idea that the vice president had the authority to nullify state electors had been out there “for decades, including by a lot of leftist professors, after the Bush versus Gore campaign,” he said.
At the time, The Atlantic seemed to be worried that Vice President Pence could use his authority to slow down the counting of the electoral vote.
In reality, what the Trump campaign was trying to do was gain time for there to be a legitimate investigation of the vote totals in places like Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Georgia, Eastman said.
“We were seeking to have an investigation to see if the illegality affected the outcome of the election,” Eastman told The Epoch Times, stressing that there was no intention to illegally keep Trump in office.
Eastman also rejected the notion he said has been put forth by the January 6 committee that he ever asked Vice President Michael Pence to reject the electors outright and just declare Trump president.
Presidential Pardon
The media has used Eastman’s request for a presidential pardon as an admission of guilt, saying that he knew his legal representation of Trump was advancing a crime. He said that such logic is a fallacy.Eastman said he only sought to be on a potential presidential pardon list after Jan. 6, 2021, because of commentary that his speech had been an incitement for the crowd to riot.
“All we are demanding of Vice President Pence is this afternoon at 1 o’clock, he let the legislatures of the state look into this [allegations of fraud] so that we get to the bottom of it, and the American people know whether we have control of the direction of our government,” he said in his speech.
When jokingly approached initially by Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani about appearing on a pardon list, Eastman at first refused.
But then, after “five days of lies that my short, 3-minute speech had incited the violence,” and that Jan. 6 was an “insurrection,” he understood that whatever played out in the investigation wouldn’t be controlled by legalities, but politics.
“It was explicitly tied to the lies about my speech, and had absolutely nothing to do with my legal representation of President Trump or the efforts regarding state legislative authority,” he said of the potential presidential pardon.
The Epoch Times has reached out to Trump, Giuliani, Cheney, the January 6 committee, Clark, and Klukowski for comment.
Friends Read Free