The House 6 January committee probing the storming of the Capitol will be subpoenaing John Eastman – the lawyer who apparently chartered a course for Donald Trump to challenge his opponent Joe Biden's victory in the 2020 elections, the chairman of the committee told The Washington Post. While Chairman Bennie G. Thompson (D-MS) said "it will happen", he failed to specify when the subpoena will be issued.
The committee has already requested all the files, documents, and copies of communications between him and Trump's team, where he allegedly detailed how the then-president could challenge and overturn the outcome of the election. Eastman is believed to have penned two memos that served as a basis for a 4 January meeting in the Oval Office to discuss ways of overturning Biden's electoral victory.
The attorney himself claims he was asked to write those memo by an unidentified member of Trump's legal team.
An anonymous source told The Washington Post that Eastman could have avoided the subpoena, which remains to be issued, if he had cooperated with the case. Eastman himself insists he returned the call from the committee and left a voice message, having no further contact with them.
The lawyer insisted that the memos he wrote for the Trump team do not necessarily represent his views. At the same time, Eastman did not rule out the possibility that irregularities did take place on 3 November 2020, something that Trump's legal team failed to prove in courts. If that was the case, then the 6 January events, which Democrats and some Republicans call an "insurrection", could be looked at in a different light.
"There's all sorts of evidence out there and the notion that anybody just raising these problems with the election is somehow contributing to an insurrection? Look, if in fact the election was stolen then it's the people who stole the election not the people that are shining a light on the illegalities that occurred that are undermining our democratic institutions", Eastman said in an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network.
While Trump himself later condemned the actions of the mob that stormed the Capitol on 6 January, he refused to call it an "insurrection", labelling it a "protest" against alleged acts of voter fraud in the 2020 election instead. Republicans in several states are still trying to verify the claims that voting irregularities took place, but, so far, they've found no solid proof to back Trump's accusations of voter fraud.