"Only the legislature can decide whether we're going to get rid of signature verification or water it down. Only the legislature can decide whether we can have drop boxes or human drop boxes. Only the legislature can decide we're not going to have bipartisan teams going into the nursing homes as Wisconsin required," Eastman explained.
"The decisions to alter those state election laws by county clerks, by secretaries of state, even in some instances by state court judges, were not only illegal under state election law, but because we're dealing with a federal election... those actions were unconstitutional."
"That alone made the election invalid. I don't have to prove fraud," he said. "The ignoring of state statutes that were designed to make it difficult to do those kinds of things, opened the door for fraud, and people with a lot at stake walked through that door."
JOHN EASTMAN: I have to start with this story. When I got a call from the White House switchboard, I thought they were joking. I thought it was an old buddy of mine saying, "The President is on the line. Can you take the call?" I said, "Steve, what are you doing? Get off the phone." And the President said, "I'd like you to represent me. We're trying to get an action before the Supreme Court of the United States."
That normally is something that would be considered the capstone of one's career. My daughter thought so. She took the brief we filed in the Supreme Court, my motion to intervene on behalf of the President in the Texas versus Pennsylvania case, she had it framed and gave it to me for Christmas that year. It still adorns my shelf at home.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the forum, as the old line says. Apparently, in 21st-century America, you're not supposed to challenge the status quo. You're not supposed to challenge what the government tells you, no matter how blatantly false it manifestly is. When they said masks should be worn or masks shouldn't be worn, we're supposed to act like they didn't change their mind and that it was equally the same. When they tell you it's okay to have 50-year-old men showing up naked in your daughter's showers, we're supposed to just say, "Well, this is what the government said is okay," or competing against your daughters in the swim meet. What's she going to do when she grows up and wants to get a scholarship swimming or running track and she's competing against a man? It's not fair. It's not American, and we need to stand up against it.
The same thing's true with elections. Bill Barr said that there was no evidence of fraud, he'd looked, except when we filed Public Records Act requests asking what he looked at, getting access to the investigatory materials that he based that statement on. Now, investigatory materials are exempt from FOIA, Freedom of Information Act, and what you get back normally says, "Yes, we have such materials, but it's exempt under whatever subsection of the statute it's exempt under." That was not the message that came back.
There was a fellow that filed FOIA requests in every swing state, U.S. attorney's office, and in Main Justice in Washington, asking for all the investigatory materials that supported Bill Barr's statement. The answer didn't come back, "We have these materials and they're exempt." The letter came back and said, "There are no such materials." In other words, what Bill Barr said was a lie.
Publicly, he's saying we're investigating election illegality. Privately, as we know from the U.S. attorney in Pennsylvania, Bill McSwain, he was separately calling him, saying, "Stand down. Hand the materials over to the Attorney General of Pennsylvania." Think about that. The Democrats in Philadelphia are stealing an election. You're going to hand it over to the Democrat Attorney General to conduct the investigation?
In other words, the investigation hasn't occurred. The head of CISA said it was the most secure election in history. I mean, you can't even say that with a straight face. I tried to sell that storyline to Hollywood. They turned it down as too implausible. No, I'm kidding.
So, an article I just recently published based on a speech I gave at the Gatestone Institute in New York some months back called, in quotes, "The Most Secure Election in History." I didn't even have to put a question mark after it. Everybody knew how laughable it was.
My job was to focus on the illegality, and I want to lay out the basic constitutional premise here. Article II of the Constitution is so clearly written that even lawyers should be able to understand it. It says that the states shall choose the manner... The state shall choose the presidential electors in the manner directed by the legislature of the state. The legislatures decide how presidential electors are going to be chosen.
In the first half-century of our nation's history, most of the state legislatures just chose the president themselves. You can imagine what those campaigns for state legislative office were like. It took on a whole new meaning every four years because whoever got in office would be the ones choosing the presidential electors from that state.
Since the Civil War, all of the states, Colorado when it first entered, chose its own electors by the legislature. But since the Civil War, all of the states have chosen electors by having a popular vote. And what that means is the election code, how you conduct that election, becomes the manner for choosing presidential electors. Under that constitutional assignment of authority, plenary power, the Supreme Court has said to the state legislators, only the legislature can alter that manner.
Only the legislature can decide whether we're going to get rid of signature verification or water it down. Only the legislature can decide whether we can have drop boxes or human drop boxes. Only the legislature can decide we're not going to have bipartisan teams going into the nursing homes as Wisconsin required. Only the legislature can decide we're not going to bother making sure we have bipartisan teams at every counting table in TCF Center.
The decisions to alter those state election laws by county clerks, by secretaries of state, even in some instances by state court judges, were not only illegal under state election law, but because we're dealing with a federal election whose power to design that system comes from the federal Constitution, those actions were unconstitutional.
That alone made the election invalid. I don't have to prove fraud. Great, politically, you want to say it affected more votes than the outcome because you don't want to rest on a technicality here. But we know that the door opened by that illegality to fraud had people walk through it in significant enough numbers to have affected the outcome of the election, in at least in enough of the swing states to affect overall the outcome of the total election.
In Wisconsin, the Secretary of State there prohibited the mandatory bipartisan teams from going into nursing homes. Why do we have bipartisan teams as part of the law in Wisconsin? Because people in nursing homes tend to be particularly susceptible to undue influence, and we don't want that undue influence affecting their right to vote. So, you have bipartisan teams going to make sure that doesn't happen. She prohibited it, claimed it was because of COVID. The fish tank cleaners, I'm told, were still allowed to go in, but not the bipartisan teams to secure honesty in the vote from those nursing homes.
That opened the door for fraud. It was one of the main checks against fraud that the legislature had directed, and it was ignored by the Secretary of State without any constitutional authority. How do we know people walked through that door of fraud? Turnout rates in the nursing homes in Wisconsin went from a historic average of 20 to 30% to nearly 100%, including in memory care wings of the nursing homes, and many of the ballots were in the same handwriting.
"There's no evidence of fraud." How many have heard that a thousand times? That alone affected more ballots than the margin of victory in Wisconsin, which was just over 20,000.
Another thing which the courts have subsequently held was illegal in Wisconsin was drop boxes. There's no statutory authority for drop boxes, and in Wisconsin, they not only put drop boxes in heavily Democrat areas, they put "human dropboxes." They ran an operation called "Democracy in the Park," which was a ballot harvesting operation for college students in Madison, Wisconsin, where the University of Wisconsin is. In that one operation, over two Saturdays leading up to the election, they collected illegally 17,500 votes. The margin was 20,600 and something; just that one operation. These things have subsequently been held to be illegal, and yet people continue to insist that I am, what's the phrase they use in the California bar proceeding, I'm "exhibiting moral turpitude" because I continue to insist that there was illegality in the conduct of the election.
In Georgia, they ran what I call portapotty precincts all over town in Atlanta. They created portable precincts, which violated several laws in Georgia. The precincts have to be fixed, and you have to notify people ahead of time where they're going to be. I don't think they ever provided notice of what the route of the portable precinct was going to be. It makes it very difficult to have observers, violating the law. The Secretary of State there entered into a consent decree months before the election that completely obliterated and watered down the signature verification process. So much so that in Fulton County, they didn't even bother to try even the watered-down signature verification process. They admitted that in one of the cases down there. That was all illegal, and it affected many more votes than the 11,779 vote margin in Georgia.
In Pennsylvania, to this day, there are 120,000 more ballots cast than voters. Think about that for a minute. It kind of lends credence to the story that supposedly was "debunked" about the truck driver who said, "I trucked in 200,000 ballots from Long Island to Philadelphia, and I don't know what happened to them." 120,000 more ballots than people voted.
In my bar trial, the deputy secretary of state testified, said, "Well, you don't know what you're talking about because those numbers are based on the current data in the voter rolls, and that number constantly changes as people die or move out of state; it's reduced." So Heather Honey, who heads the voter integrity operation in Pennsylvania, told me how many people from election day to February, when Philadelphia and Pittsburgh had finally finished uploading their numbers so we could compare apples and apples. She said there were only 16,000 people that have been dropped from the rolls over those four months. So he lied when he said that that was the explanation for the 120,000 disparity. I said, if we'd been allowed to call Heather as a rebuttal witness, she would have said, "Well, 16,000, that means 120 minus 16, calculated high, calculated math, okay, still 104,000 more ballots than votes. That's a problem in a state where the margin was 80,000."
In Georgia, they got access. I think this particular judge didn't get the memo that you're not supposed to let people look at the machines. The case is Favorito versus Raffensperger, and a judge in Fulton County gave them access and discovery to conduct a forensic audit on one machine. They had it about a week before the judge withdrew the order. In that week, they discovered some very interesting things.
This is a little complicated, so let me explain it. Think about what happened in 2020 that had never really happened before. Normally, you go to your local school or the local church and you vote in your precinct, and the few people that would vote by mail, those votes would get delivered to that precinct, and they'd be counted together with the in-person votes. Then that precinct's total would be reported to the county and then to the state. Well, in the big cities, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Detroit, they decided to consolidate all of the mail-in ballots all in one place and count them all there. That means in Atlanta, you had ballots coming in from 490 different precincts all over the county, and every precinct has a different ballot because every precinct has different school boards, different city council races, and so the ballots have to have a key code to tell the counting machine what key to look to to decide how to count those bubbles on your ballot.
What they discovered in this forensic audit, you run 490 different precincts in random to create a batch to scan of 100. We got any mathematicians there? That means 100 to the 490th power is the odds that that same sequence would be replicated. In other words, zero possibility of a replication of the exact sequence of that 100. They found in that one week on that one machine over 5,000 ballots that were in the same identical sequence. In other words, the ballots are being scanned multiple times and counted multiple times, or they're being scanned once and replicated and counted multiple times.
Just yesterday, in the Georgia Board of Elections hearing, they identified this problem as well as several others, like 600,000 some ballots that there's no ballot image for.
In Mesa County, Colorado, again, somebody made a, she's about to suffer a felony trial for doing this, but they were going to update the software in the machines in her county all over the state per order of the Secretary of State. She said that's illegal because that update is going to destroy election data, and under federal law, we have to keep all election data for 22 months. I'm the one who's on the hook if that data isn't preserved because I'm the county clerk, the chief elections officer in my county. If that data is not preserved, I could go to jail. So she makes a mirror image copy of the machine data before they do the update, which destroys the data, and now she's got this thing and she gives it to the forensic scientist to have a look, and they discover that packets of vote data were deleted and then new ones uploaded in their place.
But Mr. Krebs says this is the most secure election in history. Here in Michigan, of course, you started all this stuff with Antrim County. Matt DePerno did a great job. I think it was very clever. Let's look at the school board race or whatever it was, because nobody will pay attention there. Everybody's focused on the presidential race. We get a judge to say, yeah, you can look at the machines, and he discovered, lo and behold, votes cast for Trump were recorded as for Biden.
Maybe there's an explanation on the update and whatever. I think Mr. Halderman kind of backed out and reverse-engineered what happened, and that seems to make a lot of sense. But both of them identified in the course of their review unbelievable security breaches. They're still using the same password for admins that is the way everybody accesses it, and it's been in place since 2008. Hasn't changed, and with that password, you can get into the system. Halderman has been going around the world for a decade or more raising these kinds of questions until the people that were concerned about it were on the other side of the political aisle from him, and now he thinks it's all perfect.
He was the guy who testified down in Georgia in the Curling litigation. They were going to throw out the use of the machines down there, but then they kept his report under seal for a long time, and it came out and showed security breaches. They found a Wi-Fi chip on the motherboard in the machine in Antrim County, and I think I recall seeing a news account that your attorney general was going to prosecute DePerno and his team for planting evidence, except he had already obtained in discovery a copy of the invoice that had a line item for the Wi-Fi chip.
In Georgia, in Coffee County, they had a problem, and the local tech on-site walks out of the room and calls the home office, and they fix the problem remotely. I just have a simple question: How do they do that if it's not connected to the internet? And if it's not connected to the internet, I want to know what kind of communication system they've got that I don't know about, because it sounds pretty good. Maybe it works better than Verizon; I don't know.
These are the kinds of things we know, and it means that the illegality, the ignoring of state statutes that were designed to make it difficult to do those kinds of things, opened the door for fraud, and people with a lot at stake walked through that door.
Now let me talk about what's happened for anybody that dares stand up to this. What is it? It's often attributed to George Orwell. I don't know if he ever actually said it, but it certainly fits with the kinds of things he would have said: "In an era of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act." I like to make a different comparison. The English used to have a law on seditious libel. It's one of the reasons we fought a revolutionary war. If you criticized the government, you could be prosecuted for seditious libel, and if what you said was true, that didn't matter. Truth was not a defense because the greater the truth, the greater the libel. In other words, if what you were saying in criticizing the government was true, it brought them into greater disrepute, and we needed to prosecute you more. That, ladies and gentlemen, I fear, is the step we've taken in this country. People that are simply shining a light on what went on and telling the truth about it are essentially being accused of seditious libel.
There, I'm "unindicted co-conspirator number two" in D.C. I'm indicted co-Conspirator number two in DC, I'm "indicted co-conspirator number three in Georgia," and last week I get indicted in Arizona. I had zero communications with the electors in Arizona. I had zero involvement with the election challenges in Arizona. I responded to a request from a legislator to talk to the speaker of the assembly for about five minutes. That was it, and yet I'm "indicted co-conspirator number 13" in Arizona. I was a little hesitant to come to Michigan because I know what's going on here with the electors here. Let me send a message to your attorney general: I had zero communications with your electors. In fact, I've now met one elector just tonight, about four years after the election. I had zero involvement with the Michigan litigation, and I think I had maybe two five-minute conversations with a couple of lawyers here in Michigan because my focus was in Pennsylvania and in Georgia. It was not here. So if you decide you want to add me to that indictment of the electors, I would call that malicious prosecution. At some point, we've got to start pushing back and holding people to account for these fraudulent things.
So you know, when the indictments started coming down, my lawyer, the first lawyer, the criminal defense lawyer I had to hire to deal with the completely bipartisan, neutral January 6 Committee in the House of Representatives. You know, criminal defense lawyers always tell their clients right out of the box, "Don't say a word. Don't say a word. It'll be used against you." And I, you know, I mean, I understand that's the right advice in almost all circumstances, but I also understood before he did that these are not normal circumstances. The battles I'm dealing with have precious little to do with the actual law. These are political battles, and for me not to be out speaking means I am ceding the turf on the only battlefield that matters, which is the court of public opinion.
It took him a couple of months to come around to that view, but he agreed. Now, I do interviews all the time, even with hostile press, even with 60 Minutes, even all sorts of things, because the American people need to have a light shined on what went on. Because if they don't, it'll go on again and again, and elections will cease to matter in this country.
And as Patrice pointed out, the reason that is so important comes straight from our Declaration of Independence. All men, all human beings, are created equal. That's the fundamental self-evident truth set out in that document. The corollary truths mean that nobody gets to rule others without their consent. The only legitimate form of government is one based on consent. Our forebears gave that consent by ratifying the Constitution. We give that consent every four years or every two years by a fair election. We still are the sovereign authority in this country, and the government works for us, not the other way around.
If those elections are conducted illegally, they are not fair by definition. We no longer are being governed by the consent of the governed. We cease to be free people, free citizens in a self-governing republic, and we become subjects of an increasingly oppressive or tyrannical government.
This is the fight for our time. It is a fight comparable to the fight our founders waged against the greatest empire on Earth at the time. They pledged to each other their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor, and many of them gave one or the other of those or a combination. Our grandparents fought in World War I or World War II to defend freedom here and abroad. The greatest generation, they call it. Well, this is the fight for us to stand up.
Last summer, I teach summer fellowship programs with the Claremont Institute, the organization that has kept me employed after my other ones decided not to. We have three fellowship programs over the summer: the Publius Fellows, the Lincoln Fellows, and the one for lawyers, recent law grads, the John Marshall Fellows. I teach a little bit in all three of them, but primarily in the Marshall Fellows program. At the end of the week, and this is, you know, it's not your normal policy thing, we teach them about the fundamental principles that underlie our country. We begin with Aristotle and Cicero and natural law, and we do this. At the end of the week, we throw them a nice dinner, some good wine, and they roast and toast each other. Occasionally, they'll give a little nod to the faculty from the week.
But this year was the year that the Georgia indictment came down while I was in teaching. They decided to roast me a little bit. Eastman was conducting a seminar on the religion clauses with Justice Rogers Brown and Phil Munoz from Notre Dame, and black booted thugs started repelling down from the rooftops and came in and arrested him and carted him off. Now they didn't do that, but it was part of the roast. It was fun. He kept teaching about the religion clauses. He was bound and determined to get that across to us. They all drew from that an observation of courage, and that courage was contagious. They all saw what was going on and decided to redouble themselves in their careers, not to stand down in the face of such oppression.
The guy then turned serious and quoted a line from our Star-Spangled Banner, our national anthem. The famous question is, "Is the flag still waving?" And he said, "If you think about it, the question is not so much about whether the flag still waves, but what kind of land it waves over. Is it still the land of the free and the home of the brave, or is it the land of the coward and the home of the slave?"
I, ladies and gentlemen, am not willing to let that latter be our destiny or the thing I bequeath to my children and grandchildren. I am going to fight for the former because that's what we received from our forebears.
I draw such energy from groups like this because it means people are watching. This happens all over the country. I was invited by the local ladies club in Palm Springs. I figured it would be like 20 or 30 people. They had to rent out the convention center; 400 people showed up.
People are awakened to what's going on. It's not just elections; it's CRT. It's all of this crap that our government is feeding us that is simply not true. People are waking up, saying, "You're now hitting home. You're affecting my kids and my life. I go to the grocery store, and it costs me $482 for a slice of bread," or whatever it is. That's not true. I don't mean to make a misrepresentation, Mr. Attorney General. It was an exaggeration, Madam Attorney General. People are waking up all over the country, homegrown groups like this in every precinct, in every county, in every state in the country. Millions of eyes on what's going on. I think it's going to make it much more difficult, but we still have to be diligent.
And then we've got to worry about the next generation because they've utterly destroyed our public school system. One of my clients right now is a kid named Jaden Rodriguez. That name probably doesn't ring a bell, but I'll bet his story does when I tell it to you. Jaden Rodriguez is the 12-year-old who was suspended from his school because he had a Gadsden flag patch on his backpack. His assistant principal told him he couldn't wear it because it was a symbol of slavery. He said, "No ma'am, it's a symbol of freedom fighting against government tyranny." This 12-year-old knew more than the people that were supposed to be educating him. More importantly for this part of the story, he had the courage to stand up to it. Now, ladies and gentlemen, that's the kind of kid that when my time comes to pass the baton, I will be honored to pass it to him. We need more kids like that, and we need to make sure that we're generating that. I draw strength from things like that in the bleakest moments. You need to have hope, and I do.
Right before Christmas, a reporter for the LA Times contacted me. They were working on a human interest story about me and my family. The story they wanted to run in the LA Times on Christmas Day was how devastated we are because I participated in the big lie and joined with the orange man. Don't I regret all of this? Wouldn't life better if I hadn't done any of that? I said, "Where are you getting that? Our country is on the precipice of losing our freedom, and for whatever reason, I've been cast in the forefront of this war. I can't think of anything more honorable to do than to be participating in protecting freedom for our kids and grandkids."
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