(POLITICO)The Jan. 6 select committee says its evidence has shown that then-President Donald Trump and his campaign tried to illegally obstruct Congress’ counting of electoral votes and “engaged in a criminal conspiracy to defraud the United States.”
In a major release of its findings, filed in federal court late Wednesday, the committee suggested that its evidence supported findings that Trump himself violated multiple laws by attempting to prevent Congress from certifying his defeat.
“The Select Committee also has a good-faith basis for concluding that the President and members of his Campaign engaged in a criminal conspiracy to defraud the United States,” the committee wrote in a filing submitted in U.S. District Court in the Central District of California.
[The] committee described a president who had been informed repeatedly that he lost the election and that his claims of fraud were unfounded — only to reject them and continue to mislead the American public.
[Trump] then pushed top advisers to continue strategizing ways to overturn the election results.
The panel released its findings as part of a legal push to force John Eastman, an attorney who was a key driver of Trump’s strategy to subvert the 2020 election, to produce crucial emails tying together elements of the scheme they described.
(NY Times)As part of the suit, Mr. Eastman sought to shield from release documents he said were covered by attorney-client privilege. In response, the committee argued — under the legal theory known as the crime-fraud exception — that the privilege does not cover information conveyed from a client to a lawyer if it was part of furthering or concealing a crime.
Mr. Eastman then argued the committee had offered “no evidence” of the existence of a crime-fraud exception, prompting the committee’s latest filing.
The quandary for Trump and Eastman are that they cannot seriously argue that they honestly believed Trump somehow won after losing 60 court cases, innumerable recounts proving otherwise and AG Barr and others in the administration saying Biden was the rightful winner. Willful ignorance is not a legitimate defense. --CA