Just as he was emerging as a top target of the House committee investigating the Capitol attack, former Trump lawyer John Eastman took a trip to Wisconsin.
Eastman, a right-wing lawyer who drafted a plan for former President Donald Trump to cling to power by falsely claiming then-Vice President Mike Pence could reject legitimate electors during the 2020 presidential election, was part of a small group of Trump allies who secured a private meeting last month to try and convince the Republican leader of the Wisconsin state Assembly to decertify President Joe Biden’s win, multiple sources familiar with the meeting told ABC.
On March 16, Eastman and others spent nearly two hours behind closed doors pressuring Republican Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos to nullify the 2020 election and reclaim the electors awarded to Biden, the sources said, which legal experts say is impossible.
Eastman was subpoenaed by the congressional committee looking into the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol in November. He had been bucking the panel’s request for documents, claiming attorney client privilege, until a federal judge recently ordered most of them turned over.
Eastman in the meeting urged Vos to decertify the election, sources familiar with the meeting said. According to Jefferson Davis, a Wisconsin activist pushing to reverse Biden’s victory who was also in the meeting, Trump’s former lawyer pushed Vos to start “reclaiming the electors” and move forward with “either a do over or having a new slate of electors seated that would declare someone else the winner.”
When reached for comment, Eastman said in a statement to ABC News, “By explicit request from Speaker Vos, that meeting was confidential, so I am not able to make any comment.”
Following the meeting, Vos reiterated his position that the 2020 election can’t be decertified. Vos, however, has pushed claims of widespread election fraud and was held in contempt by a judge last month for failing to turn over documents related to a Republican-led investigation he had launched himself in May 2021 into the 2020 election.