Left: Attorney John Eastman, the architect of a legal strategy aimed at keeping former President Donald Trump in power, gets out of an SUV to talk to reporters after a hearing in Los Angeles, Tuesday, June 20, 2023. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong). Right: Eastman speaks at the so-called “Stop the Steal” rally in support of Donald Trump on Jan. 6, 2021 (via YouTube screengrab).
The lawyer behind the so-called “coup memo” that purported to give legal cover to former President Donald Trump’s alleged effort to subvert the results of the 2020 presidential election has filed a lawsuit to stop Colorado voters from participating in certain primary elections.
Attorney John Eastman, representing the Colorado Republican Party, sued Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold over Colorado’s Proposition 108. That measure, which passed in 2016, allows voters unaffiliated with a political party to vote in a major party’s primary election without having to register with that party.
Griswold “either knows, or should know, that Proposition 108, in whole or in part [is] are a blatant violation of the constitutional rights of Plaintiff’s members not to have their votes diluted,” the complaint alleges.
According to Eastman, the measure deprives the state’s Republican party of its civil rights.
“Proposition 108 harms Plaintiff and its members by infringing upon their rights of free speech and association secured by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution (as incorporated and made applicable to the States by the Fourteenth Amendment) and their rights to equal protection of the laws secured by the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution,” the complaint says.
A lawyer has confirmed that Eastman is “Co-Conspirator 2” in Trump’s indictment for conspiracy and obstruction, including a conspiracy to block votes in certain states from being counted.
Eastman argued that the First Amendment’s free speech and free association guarantees “include the right of political parties to choose their nominees for office without interference by those who are not members of the party and have chosen not to affiliate with the party.”
The complaint says that there are some 1.8 million unaffiliated voters in the Centennial State — enough to possibly have an impact on who wins a given primary election.
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“Because ballots are cast anonymously, it is impossible to determine the precise extent to which unaffiliated voters voting in Republican primary elections would hand, indeed have handed, the nomination to someone who did not receive a majority or even plurality of votes from Republican Party members, thereby placing the Party’s imprimatur on a candidate without majority or even plurality support from the Party’s members.”
Eastman cited news articles as support for the idea that there was at least somewhat of an organized effort to get Democrats to switch their voter affiliation to unaffiliated in order to stop Rep. Lauren Boebert from winning a second term. He also said that the number of unaffiliated voters in the 2022 Republican primary “exceeded the margin of victory in each of the three contested statewide races.”
The complaint says the law “does not provide a political party with an unbiased, even-handed choice between an open primary election and another candidate selection method. Rather, it makes an open primary automatic and places significant burdens on the political party to escape the open primary. Accordingly, the absence of a party’s vote to ‘opt out’ of an open primary is not a ‘choice;’ it is an absence of a choice.”
“There is no compelling or even legitimate government interest sufficient to justify” enforcement of the proposition, the complaint also says.
In the complaint, Eastman requests an injunction blocking Griswold from enforcing the law and a declaration that the law is unconstitutional.
Eastman’s six-part plan to replace legitimate state electors with alternate pro-Trump slates that would throw their votes to Trump in 2020 has become known as the “coup memo.” Following the 2020 presidential election and its aftermath, Eastman reportedly asked to be put on the outgoing president’s “pardon list, and he is now currently facing possible disbarment in California, where he has served as the dean of Chapman University law school.
Read the complaint, below.
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