“Eastman disbarment recommended by State Bar Court’s Review Department; California Supreme Court is next”

chicanery, election subversion risk

At the Lectern:

On Friday, the California State Bar Court’s three-judge Review Department came to the same conclusion as a hearing judge over a year ago and recommended the disbarment of President Trump’s former lawyer, John Eastman. (98-page decision and five-page concurrence here; news release here.)

Saying that “[i]n a democracy nothing can be more fundamental than the orderly transfer of power that occurs after a fair and unimpeded electoral process as established by law,” the Review Department concluded disbarment is “the appropriate discipline . . . when an attorney, who has sworn to uphold the laws and constitutions of the State of California and the United States, attempts to actively undermine the results of an election to the most powerful office in the United States with the goal of delaying or invalidating the lawful installation of his client’s electoral opponent and thereby keep his client in office.”

Eastman can ask the Review Department for reconsideration. He has 15 days to do so. (Rules of Procedure, 5.158(A).) If, as is likely, the Department’s opinion is not reconsidered, Eastman can seek California Supreme Court review of the disbarment recommendation. Under Rules of Court, rule 9.13(a), his petition for review is due 60 days after the recommendation is filed with the court….

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“Redistricting trial begins in North Carolina over allegations that GOP-enacted maps erode Black voting power”

redistricting, Voting Rights Act

PBS News

Plaintiffs allege “GOP legislative leaders violated federal law and the U.S. Constitution when they enacted new electoral maps.” Republicans claim the maps are a legal partisan gerrymander.

“Favorable rulings for the plaintiffs could force Republicans to redraw maps for the 2026 elections, making it harder to retain their partisan advantage. Otherwise, the districts could be used through the 2030 elections.”

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“Like School Shootings, Political Violence Is Becoming Almost Routine”

chicanery

NYT:

In the past three months alone, a man set fire to the Pennsylvania governor’s residence while Mr. Shapiro and his family were asleep inside; another man gunned down a pair of workers from the Israeli Embassy outside an event in Washington; protesters calling for the release of Israeli hostages in Boulder, Colo., were set on fire; and the Republican Party headquarters in New Mexico and a Tesla dealership near Albuquerque were firebombed.

And those were just the incidents that resulted in death or destruction.

Against that backdrop, it might have been shocking, but it was not really so surprising, when on Saturday morning, a Democratic state representative in Minnesota, Melissa Hortman, and her husband, Mark, were assassinated in their home, and a Democratic state senator, John A. Hoffman, and his wife, Yvette, were shot and wounded.

Slowly but surely, political violence has moved from the fringes to an inescapable reality. Violent threats and even assassinations, attempted or successful, have become part of the political landscape — a steady undercurrent of American life….

See also my earlier post: My Statement: Thoughts on the Despicable Assassination (and Attempted Assassination) of Minnesota Legislators, the Rise in Political Violence in the United States, and the Threats to Free and Fair Elections.

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“Trump’s Strategy in Law Firm Cases: Lose, Don’t Appeal, Yet Prevail”

authoritarian threats in US

Adam Liptak for the NYT:

The Trump administration is ordinarily quick to appeal its losses. When courts in recent weeks blocked President Trump’s tariff plans and his takeover of National Guard troops in California, government lawyers filed appeals within hours. The administration has also filed 19 emergency applications with the Supreme Court since the president took office.

But administration lawyers have done nothing to challenge a series of stinging rulings rejecting Mr. Trump’s efforts to punish prominent law firms for what he called “conduct detrimental to critical American interests” by representing clients and causes not to his liking.

The administration’s unconventional litigation strategy is telling, said W. Bradley Wendel, a law professor at Cornell who is an authority on legal ethics.

“They knew that these were losing positions from the beginning and were not actually hoping to win in court, but rather to intimidate firms into settling, as many firms did,” he said. “Now that they have racked up the four losses in district courts, it is not surprising that they are not appealing, because I don’t think they ever thought these were serious positions.”…

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ELB Book Corner: Ciara Torres-Spelliscy: “Not Corruption’s First Rodeo”

ELB Book Corner

I am pleased to welcome Ciara Torres-Spelliscy to the ELB Book Corner, writing about her new book Corporatocracy. This is the first of four posts:

Press coverage of the political events in 2025 often lament that the corruption unfolding is unprecedented. Adopting this framing requires a rather cherry-picked history. As someone who writes about corruption in the United States, I can say: this not corruption’s first rodeo.

One of the episodes of political corruption I write about in my new book Corporatocracy is the Teapot Dome Scandal.  This scandal was a welter of crimes in the midst of the immoral Harding administration.  Arguably the nation only knows about what happened because President Harding abruptly died, leaving President Coolidge to appoint special counsels to investigate the crimes.

This was mostly a scheme about oilmen Harry Sinclair of Mammoth Oil and Edward Doheny of Pan American Petroleum getting the ability to drill in formerly off-limits military oil reserves in exchange for bribes paid to Harding’s Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall.

Fall might have gotten away with taking the bribes, but for some nosy neighbors. Neighbors in Wyoming saw Sinclair’s trucks driving into the formerly off-limits oil reserve, and the neighbors in New Mexico reported remarkable improvements on Fall’s previously ramshackle ranch. Edward W. Knappman relates, “soon Senator Robert M. LaFollette . . . [said] Fall’s Interior Department was ‘the sluice-way for ninety percent of the corruption in government.’” The question for curious Senators was: “How did Albert Fall become so rich so fast?”

The whole mess started years before in a separate scheme was hatched by oilmen who met in a hotel in New York in 1921. The oil executives first pulled off phony oil sales through a dummy corporation, the Continental Trading Company. Then oilman Sinclair took the profits from that scam, turned them into Liberty Bonds, and used those bonds to bribe Secretary Fall. In other words, proceeds of one scam were used to fund another crime.

This was also a money in politics story. The Teapot Dome scandal “was so monumental [that] a Senate Report called it a ‘criminal conspiracy . . . unparalleled in the history of this or any other civilized nation.’” One fact uncovered by the Senate’s inquiries was that Sinclair gave the Republican Party $75,000 in cash to help retire the party’s debts from the 1920 campaign to elect Harding. One cost the party incurred was paying $25,000 to one of Harding’s mistresses, Carrie Phillips, as hush money. These payments were funneled through a secret bank account. Sinclair had provided an additional $185,000 in Liberty Bonds to the RNC.

Secretary Fall became the first cabinet member to be convicted of a crime.  Sinclair stonewalled the Senate investigation so thoroughly that he was indicted for contempt of Congress. At Sinclair’s first criminal trial for bribery, he was acquitted, but there was evidence he had bribed one juror with an offer of “a car as long as this block.” Sinclair got six months in jail for contempt of court in addition to three months for contempt of Congress.

Why did so many involved in Teapot Dome get away with it? Many of the participants had a penchant for burning incriminating evidence including Harding’s Attorney General Harry Daugherty, Harry’s banker brother Mally, Harry’s assistant Jess Smith, President Harding’s widow and the owner of the Washington Post who tried to cover for Fall early in the investigation.  This missing burned evidence made convictions hard to come by. AG Harry Daugherty was tried twice but never convicted. See any parallels to corrupt actions today? They nearly jump off the page. To learn more, please read Corporatocracy or listen to my new radio show Democracy & Destiny.

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My Statement: Thoughts on the Despicable Assassination (and Attempted Assassination) of Minnesota Legislators, the Rise in Political Violence in the United States, and the Threats to Free and Fair Elections

authoritarian threats in US, chicanery
Violence directed at innocent people is abhorrent and political violence even more so because it is an attack not just on people but on the institution of democracy itself and an attempt to change government not through elections but through… Continue reading