On YouTube, Trump coup memo author John Eastman and Dinesh D'Souza spread lies about the 2020 election
Eastman claims “There was massive cheating that went on” in the 2020 election.
Published
Citation From the August 3, 2022, edition of Dinesh D'Souza's podcast as posted to YouTube
DINESH D'SOUZA (HOST): John has also been a lawyer for Trump. And this is actually what we want to talk about is the – is the actions of the left and trying to go after John and others for their work for former President Trump. John, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for joining me. We actually go kind of way back. As you might remember, I was a Publius Fellow at the Claremont Institute right after Dartmouth. And that's where I met – I met the whole gang of Clare-monsters, as we might call them, who have had such a tremendous influence on American public policy. You have gone on to a really distinguished career. I'd like you to start by just talking about those kind of tense days in the maybe even leading up to the election, but certainly in the aftermath of the election. What is it that you did that is supposedly now driving the left off a cliff and causing them to sort of summon this big kind of lynch mob against you, as if to say that you are a grave enemy of the country and the Constitution.
JOHN EASTMAN (GUEST): Well, in fact, in one of the litigations I'm currently involved with, the January 6 committee actually says not only was I wrong, but I was dangerous. I guess the danger there lies in standing up and speaking the truth to power. And I'm – and I'm catching the same kind of assault that you've been under, Dinesh, for the terrific movie you did, 2000 Mules that starts to expose some of the corruption. You focus there on some very important evidence of outright fraud. I focused mostly on the evidence of illegality. Our Constitution is very clear. Article two of the Constitution gives to the legislatures of the states the plenary power to, quote, direct the manner of choosing presidential electors. Most people would find this odd today, but for the first half-century of our nation's history, the legislatures just chose the electors themselves. And – and even when they submit that decision to popular vote as – as all the states have done since the Civil War, the manner that they set out is the election code. And when you had non-legislative officials, secretaries of state, county clerks, what have you, simply ignoring the existing election code laws on absentee ballots, on the requirement of signature verification, all of these steps that the legislatures put in to prevent fraud from occurring because it's so difficult to discover it after the fact. Those things were just dispensed with by non-legislative officials, and that meant that the election was conducted illegally, even unconstitutionally. And that's what we focused on. And the left doesn't want anybody talking about that, at least not talking about it since 2020. Of course, they talked about it a lot in 2018 and 2016 and what have you. And so what they are now attempting to do is criminalize those that spoke up against the admitted illegality in the conduct of the election. That is, as your movie and other investigations are showing, actually led to the very fraud that those statutory restrictions were put in place to try and prevent.
D'SOUZA: John, you're making a crucial point here, and I want to slow it down because I – I want to make sure I understand it clearly. What you're saying is that even though Trump believed there was fraud and there were, of course, accusations of fraud from the very beginning, you're saying that your argument didn't really depend on that. It didn't depend upon being able to prove instance A, B, C, or D of fraud. You're saying that there is a process that needs to be in place for the Constitution to be upheld. The Constitution dictates how elections should be conducted and who should run them. And the Constitution specifies that the answer to that is state legislatures. And so in the state legislatures and what they specifically put in the code is undercut by secretaries of state, by other officials. Then, in a sense, we have a – an illegal – illegally conducted election, even if you're unable to prove any fraud at all. Am I correct in summarizing that is the argument you're making?
EASTMAN: That's right. And – and the reason that's so important is because of how difficult it is to prove fraud after the fact. And I'll give you one very good example. Wisconsin prohibits drop boxes, unmanned drop boxes, what have you. They also require extensive signature verification and witness signatures on the absentee ballots before they're counted. And the law is very clear. If it doesn't include those things, the ballots shall not be counted. Now, once you separate the ballot from the envelope and after the fact, try and determined, well, that we didn't have a signature. How do we know that was actually the illegal voter who cast that ballot? Well, you could say, okay, there and now we've got evidence of fraud. But – but how was the vote cast? The ballot is now separated from the envelope and it can't be proved which way it went. In 2018, in North Carolina's 9th congressional district, there was an illegal ballot harvesting scheme that was conducted on behalf of one of the candidates. Without his knowledge, I might point out. But – but the elections board said we cannot prove then, given the number of illegal ballots that were collected, we can't prove or certify what the actual result of the election is. And they ordered a new election. This is the reason these rules are in place ahead of time.
There was massive cheating that went on. Whether that actually produced the fraud that it was designed to make it difficult to accomplish or not is immaterial to the illegality that occurred. And that's what I tried to focus on in our Supreme Court briefs, both in – in my motion to intervene on behalf of President Trump in the Texas litigation, but in a cert petition filed from Pennsylvania on three of the illegally changed statutes, I mean, they changed the deadlines. They changed the signature verification. They said, oh, if you're in the room in the Philadelphia Convention Center, which is about as big as a football field, standing all the way at one end, that's good enough to be able to observe what's happening a hundred yards away. I mean, it was insane. And – and they and – they threw out the ability for people to make any election challenge. They said, even though we've been doing signature verification for a hundred years, we don't find that anywhere in the statutes and all of those statutory provisions that – that seem to acknowledge that those are just archaic relics and you can just ignore them. I mean, this is what the court actually said and the notion that we can change the rules. And by the way, some of that went on after the election up to two weeks after the election. They were still changing the rules for partisan benefit in Pennsylvania. This kind of stuff, we used to call it cheating and they're now trying to go after criminally those people who are calling them out on the illegality, the unconstitutionality, and the cheating.
D'SOUZA: John, let's take a pause.