Clarence Thomas (Photo by Erin Schaff/Pool/Getty Images), John Eastman (Fulton County Sheriff’s Office)
The Supreme Court on Monday refused to hear “coup memo” lawyer John Eastman’s case against the Jan. 6 Committee over emails that the disgraced professor maintained should not have been publicized before his appeal was fully litigated.
In the order denying the case, the Supreme Court made sure to note that Justice Clarence Thomas “took no part in the consideration or decision of this petition.”
There are at least a few obvious reasons why Thomas did not get involved at all with the petition for a writ of certiorari that Eastman filed in April.
John Eastman, a former Chapman University law professor under indictment along with former President Donald Trump in Georgia, was once a clerk for Justice Thomas, as Eastman’s Federalist Society bio notes.
Beyond that fact, the very email evidence that Eastman sought to block from public disclosure, under the argument that they were covered by attorney-client privilege, contained a direct reference to Justice Thomas.
You may recall that Eastman lost out in federal court when U.S. District Judge David O. Carter in October 2022 applied the “crime-fraud” exception to Eastman’s emails, ruling in the civil case that Eastman and Trump “more likely than not” committed obstruction of an official proceeding and conspiracy to defraud the United States.
Legal wrangling for a stay of the crucial ruling followed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, but a deadline for Eastman to hand the emails over to the Jan. 6 Committee complicated matters.
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Before the production deadline, Eastman ended up sending the emails to the Jan. 6 Committee in a Dropbox link in the hopes that those emails would neither go public nor be viewed until his application for a stay of Carter’s ruling was handled. The emails were instead published in the press.
“At the deadline for production, Petitioner provided a link to the documents to congressional defendants but asked that they not view the documents until the Ninth Circuit ruled on Petitioner’s emergency application for a stay. Defendants ignored Petitioner’s request and distributed the emails to members of the committee,” Eastman’s petition said. “Then, in a public filing, defendants published the link to the confidential documents which were downloaded by several reporters following the case, thereby mooting Petitioner’s appeal. The Ninth Circuit subsequently denied Petitioner’s motion to vacate the judgment of the District Court.”
One of the emails that went public was an exchange involving Eastman and Georgia RICO co-defendant and lawyer Ken Chesebro, who drafted a legal memo to overturn the 2020 election. The attorneys were discussing whether Justice Thomas was their only chance to get the unheard-of relief they wanted out of the Supreme Court before Jan. 6, 2021.
Chesebro wrote on Dec. 31, 2020: “Realistically, our only chance to get a favorable judicial opinion by Jan. 6, which might hold up the Georgia count in Congress, is from Thomas — do you agree, Prof. Eastman?”
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In addition, Justice Thomas’ conservative activist wife Ginni Thomas was previously interviewed by the Jan. 6 Committee about her text communications with former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows (who is also facing a RICO prosecution in Georgia).
During her testimony, Ginni Thomas said she regretted the texts and “would take them all back if I could today.”
In one of the texts, Ginni Thomas urged Meadows to take a look into “Kraken” lawyer Sidney Powell’s conspiracy theories to “save us from the left.”
“Mark (don’t want to wake you)…,” Thomas wrote. “Sounds like Sidney and her team are getting inundated with evidence of fraud. Make a plan. Release the Kraken and save us from the left taking America down.”
Ginni Thomas also had questions about the Trump legal team distancing itself from Powell’s costly false claims about Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic shortly after the infamous “elite strike force” presser of mid-November 2020.
“Trying to understand the Sidney Powell distancing,” Ginni Thomas wrote.
“She doesn’t have anything or at least she won’t share it if she does,” Meadows replied.
“Wow!” Thomas answered.
Sidney Powell also faces a RICO indictment in Georgia.
Eastman’s petition to the Supreme Court only asked one question:
The question presented for review is whether vacatur is required where a case becomes moot solely by the action of defendants who had prevailed in the District Court and where Petitioner’s only actions were compliance with the court’s production order while his motion for emergency stay on appeal was pending?
That question went unanswered and there was no explanation as to why.
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