Trump lawyers saw Clarence Thomas as ‘only chance’ to overturn 2020 vote
Former President Donald Trump’s legal team thought that getting a case challenging Georgia’s election results before Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was their “only chance” to derail the Jan. 6, 2021 congressional vote count certifying the election of Joe Biden, newly published emails show.
“We want to frame things so that Thomas could be the one to issue some sort of stay or other circuit justice opinion saying Georgia is in legitimate doubt,” Trump attorney Kenneth Chesebro wrote in a Dec. 31, 2020 message to his colleagues obtained by Politico.
Though the states had certified Biden as the winner of the 2020 election, Trump’s legal team was trying a variety of ways to stall Congress from officially counting the votes.
In the same message, Chesebro added that Thomas would be “our only chance to get a favorable judicial opinion by Jan. 6, which might hold up the Georgia count in Congress.”
“I think I agree with this,” replied John Eastman, a conservative law professor and Trump adviser who went on to suggest that a favorable ruling by Thomas would “kick the Georgia legislature into gear.”
Thomas is the Supreme Court justice designated to handle emergency requests arising from the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, which covers Georgia.
In a separate Dec. 31, 2020 email Chesebro acknowledged that though it was “late in the day” to challenge the election results, “if we can just get this case pending before the Supreme Court by Jan. 5, ideally with something positive written by a judge or justice, hopefully Thomas, I think it’s our best shot at holding up the count of a state in Congress.”
Eastman had sought to withhold the emails published Wednesday from the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol riot. However, a California federal judge ordered him to turn over the messages last month, saying they were likely evidence of crimes committed by Eastman and Trump.
Politico obtained Eastman’s emails through a Dropbox link that his lawyers created to share with the Jan. 6 committee, according to a letter submitted Wednesday by House general counsel Douglas Letter to the Ninth US Circuit Court of Appeals. The link was included in evidence House lawyers uploaded to a public court records system Tuesday.
“We were not aware that the links in Dr. Eastman’s email remained active and had no intention to provide this type of public access to the materials at this stage,” Letter wrote Wednesday.
The folder has since been deleted, according to Dropbox
“The emails show that President Trump knew that the specific numbers of voter fraud were wrong but continued to tout those numbers, both in court and to the public,” US District Judge David Carter wrote in his Oct. 19 opinion.
Carter specifically cited claims by Trump’s legal team in Dec. 4, 2021 court filing that election workers in Fulton County, where Atlanta is located, had improperly counted more than 10,000 votes cast by dead people, felons and unregistered voters.
Later that month, Eastman warned in a message that Trump had been made aware that “some of the allegations (and evidence proffered by the experts)” in that Georgia filing “has been inaccurate.”
Yet even after the message from Eastman, Trump and his team filed another legal complaint that had “the same inaccurate numbers,” the judge wrote. Trump under oath verified the complaint was true to the best of his knowledge.
Separately, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis has convened a special grand jury to investigate whether Trump or his allies illegally tried to overturn the Peach State’s 2020 election results.
With Post wires
