CBS 60 minutes hit piece on John Eastman loaded with lies, Pence attorney Greg Jacob uninformed, Hawaii Election of 1960: Governor certified another slate of electors after errors found
CBS 60 minutes hit piece on John Eastman loaded with lies, Pence attorney Greg Jacob uninformed, Hawaii Election of 1960: Governor certified another slate of electors after errors found
From 60 minutes:
“John Eastman says he's innocent and he told us if he was ever guilty of anything it was giving bold legal advice to Donald Trump. Eastman was a little-known law professor who found himself at the center of history—among the architects of President Trump's bid to stay in power. One judge called Eastman's strategy "a coup in search of a legal theory." Today Eastman faces nine criminal counts in Georgia's election conspiracy case. And we found he's still handing out bold legal advice—this time to himself. facing possible years in prison he agreed to talk with us.
John Eastman: Well, that was the first advice I got from my legal team when I put them together, is that we don't talk about anything. In normal times, that's the right advice for lawyers to give their criminal defendant clients. Um, but I quickly determined that this fight was much more about the criminal law, the specific law, and a public fight. We did nothing wrong. And it's important to counteract the false narratives on that because all of my actions were designed to investigate illegality in the election to see if they had an impact. “
“John Eastman: Well, I do think existential, I think what we're seeing now in the criminalization of political opposition and the threat to shutting down speech of opposing political views, um, means that the people are no longer in charge of the direction of their government.
In November 2020, Eastman joined Rudy Giuliani's effort to persuade seven states to withhold certification of Joe Biden's victory.”
“Eastman testified on Zoom to lawmakers in Georgia. He said state election officials hadn't followed the law. And he leveled dubious claims of fraud including votes by 2,500 felons and 10,000 dead people.
John Eastman during testimony: Something is amiss here, and that the legislature simply must investigate as you are doing with this hearing today.
But not one state agreed to withhold certification of its vote. Fifty Trump lawsuits were failing. By January, the deadline was at hand.
On January 6th, electoral votes from the states are counted before a joint session of Congress. The Constitution appoints the vice president to "open all the certificates and the votes shall then be counted." But two days before the count, Eastman came to this Oval Office meeting with a radical interpretation of those words. Vice President Pence, he said, had the power to stop the count and return the votes to the states for reconsideration.
John Eastman: To delay. To let them finish their investigative work and make a determination on whether the illegality had affected the outcome of the election and if it didn't, to report back so that we could have some more certainty about the validity of the Biden electors. But if it did, then we wanted to make sure that the person who actually won the election was the one that was certified.
Greg Jacob: No vice president had ever exercised this authority. No vice president had ever claimed to have the power to exercise this authority.
Greg Jacob was Vice President Pence's legal counsel. He was in the Oval Office hearing Eastman read between the lines of the Constitution.
Greg Jacob: So it really was him inventing something without any historical roots or any historical foundations and then desperately trying to find some hook in the constitutional text that neither history, nor structure, nor practice, nor common sense supported.
Eastman disagreed with that and even predicted that the courts might not intervene.
Greg Jacob: If the courts stayed out of it, there is no other actor to decide that issue. And I expressed to Professor Eastman at our meeting the next morning, on January 5th, that if it's not the courts, it's effectively gonna be decided in the streets.
Greg Jacob told us Vice President Pence never believed he had the power to do anything but open and read the certified votes. Back in 2001, Pence was a freshman congressman when Vice President Al Gore read the votes that denied Gore the presidency in one of the closest elections of all time.
Scott Pelley: Did you see, at any point in this period, the vice president reconsider that view or waver--
Greg Jacob: No-
Scott Pelley: in that determination?
Greg Jacob: No. The vice president never wavered. It never made sense to him that the vice president would be empowered to decide issues like that by the framers. And he said, "Look, I know the rules that judges have to follow. You would never allow a judge to preside over and decide an issue when they have the kind of interest that I have in this case. I'm on the ticket. Obviously, I want us to win this election. How could it possibly be proper for the vice president of the United States to decide such an important question in which-- he has a personal interest like that?"“
Dubious claims of fraud???:
From Georgia Legislature:
“1- The November 3, 2020 election was chaotic and the results cannot be trusted.”
“9- The oral testimonies of witnesses on December 3, 2020, and subsequently, the written testimonies submitted by many others, provide ample evidence that the 2020 Georgia General Election was so compromised by systemic irregularities and voter fraud that it should not be certified.””
From Pennsylvania Legislature:
“Due to the numerous unawful violations taken by Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf; Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar; and the rogue State Supreme Court, the balance of power was taken from the State Legislature, who by the US and PA Constitutions set the time, place and manner of holding elections.”
“Due to these inconsistent and questionable activities, we believe that PA election results should not have been certified by our Secretary of State,”
Attorney Greg Jacob: No historical precedent eh ???:
From Bush v Gore 2000:
In the interest of finality, however, the majority effectively orders the disenfranchisement of an unknown number of voters whose ballots reveal their intent-and are therefore legal votes under state law-but were for some reason rejected by ballot-counting machines. It does so on the basis of the deadlines set forth in Title 3 of the United States Code. Ante, at 110. But, as I have already noted, those provisions merely provide rules of decision for Congress to follow when selecting among conflicting slates of electors. Supra, at 124. They do not prohibit a State from counting what the majority concedes to be legal votes until a bona fide winner is determined. Indeed, in 1960, Hawaii appointed two slates of electors and Congress chose to count the one appointed on January 4, 1961, well after the Title 3 deadlines. See Josephson & Ross, Repairing the Electoral College, 22 J. Legis. 145, 166, n. 154 (1996).5 Thus, nothing prevents the majority, even if it properly found an equal protection violation, from ordering relief appropriate to remedy that violation without depriving Florida voters of their right to have their votes counted. As the majority notes, "[a] desire for speed is not a general excuse for ignoring equal protection guarantees." Ante, at 108.”
Nixon Adds Hawaii's 3 Electoral Votes To Kennedy's Column
“On Friday, January 6, 1961, the electoral votes were tallied by roll-call in a joint session of Congress with Vice-President Richard M. Nixon presiding.
The roll-call went smoothly until Hawaii was reached. There were three sets of documents for Hawaii, which finally went to Kennedy after the official recount which had not been completed when the electors met in Honolulu on December 19th.
The tellers tossed that problem into Nixon's lap, and the Vice-President held without opposition that the latest document, dated January 4 and certifying the Kennedy electors, was the one that should be counted.
That made the presidential tally 303 for Kennedy, 219 for Nixon and 15 for Senator Harry F. Byrd of Virginia.
The outgoing Vice-President presided over the joint session under a constitutional provision that requires Congress to canvass the electoral votes. The votes actually were cast on December 19 by the electors of the 50 states.
Hawaii's vote was originally certified for Nixon, who held a 141 vote margin before a recount swung the state to Kennedy by 115 votes.”
What John Eastman stated:
“Our Country is deeply divided in ways that it arguably has not been seen since the election of 1860.There is a high level of distrust between the opposing
sides, compounded by the fact that, in the election just held, election officials in key swing states, for apparently partisan advantage, failed to conduct their state
elections in compliance with state election law, in direct violation of the plenary power that Article II of the U.S. Constitution confers on the Legislatures of
the States.”
“We are in uncharted territory, but there are a couple of things to point to,” Eastman said. “We can point to the Hawaii Election of 1960, when the Governor subsequently certified another slate of electors after they discovered error in the initial certification.”
“We can point to Section 2 of Title 3 of the United States Code that says when a state has had an election, and has failed to make a choice on the day prescribed by law, which is, you know, the choice that was made. The assumption was that it was fraudulently given because of illegal votes. The electors may be appointed on a subsequent day in such manner as the legislature of such state may direct,” Eastman explained. “So that recognizes the authority of the Legislature to fix a problem.”
“We also have a backdrop of Common Law, which is, when you have a fraud, the actions taken pursuant to the fraud, are unraveled after discovery of the fraud. If the evidence really does come in as definitive, that the election and the electorals cast from Arizona were fraudulently given, and they should have been given in the other direction, then I think there is ample authority to fix this problem,” Eastman added. “We don’t have to live with a fraudulent election.”
