Below is my column in the California Post and New York Post on the disbarment of John Eastman. I criticized the January 6th speeches while they were being given and disagreed with the legal theories presented to stop the certification. However, this action leaves troubling questions of consistency and clarity in the standards used to judge lawyers presenting novel or controversial legal arguments. It also is likely to have a chilling effect on the exercise of free speech by lawyers.
Here is the column:
Last week, the California Supreme Court upheld the disbarment of John Eastman. It is a decision that will prevent Eastman from practicing law – the most serious punishment the California State Bar can deliver.
Eastman is the former dean of the law school at Chapman University in California. He represented President Donald Trump in some of his election challenges in 2020.
In 2020, I publicly disagreed with Eastman’s legal theory that Congress could block the certification of President Joe Biden.
However, Eastman’s disbarment should be a concern for everyone who values the rule of law and free speech.
After the election, various legal advisers told Trump that there wasn’t enough evidence of fraud to overturn the election –– as some of us in the media also said.
But Eastman and other lawyers believed there were still arguable grounds to challenge the certification.
In the past, Democrats in Congress had moved to block the certification of Republican presidents, and Eastman believed that their playbook was legal, or at least defensible.
Election disputes are often difficult to resolve in court because time is quite limited.
As the date for the 2020 certification approached, Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, and others made sensational claims about voting machines and other conspiracies that they later admitted were not supported by evidence.
The courts uniformly rejected these challenges.
Eastman is being punished for a different reason: He helped to develop Trump’s legal argument for blocking the election certification.
He admitted that there were few cases to cite as precedent, and acknowledged that he and the Trump legal team were advancing novel theories.
But that is not unusual in controversial cases.
Public interest attorneys often advance novel legal arguments, challenging existing precedent and the status quo. Even longstanding precedents, like Roe v. Wade, have been overturned after years of litigation.California State Bar officials failed to address the implications that disbarring Eastman would have on other cases in which new legal theories are tested.
The animus of the California State Bar was also evident in the original charges against Eastman. He was ultimately found guilty on 10 of 11 charges of egregious and deceitful conduct.
The lower court’s decision placed great emphasis on Eastman’s public remarks on Jan. 6, 2021, at Trump’s “Stop the Steal” rally. The court dismissed his claims that his speech was protected by the First Amendment.
Democratic Party election lawyers have been punished by courts and accused of meritless or unsupported claims. However, bar associations in “blue” states have not moved to disbar them, and I would not support such an effort.
Take Democrat attorney Marc Elias. He was a critical player in the infamous Steele dossier on “Russia collusion,” and helped push the false Alfa Bank conspiracy.
The animus of the California State Bar was also evident in the original charges against Eastman. He was ultimately found guilty on 10 of 11 charges of egregious and deceitful conduct.
In Maryland, Elias’s team filed in support of an abusive gerrymandering of the election districts that a court found not only violated Maryland law, but also the state constitution’s equal protection, free speech and free elections clauses. The court found that the map “subverts the will of those governed.”
In 2024, the chief judge of the Western District of Wisconsin not only rejected but ridiculed the Elias Law Group for one of its challenges. Judge James Peterson (an Obama appointee) said that the argument “simply does not make any sense.”
Elias has been sanctioned in court. However, neither he nor associates were, of course, disbarred over prior challenges.
The California Bar and the California Supreme Court insist that they are merely imposing minimal standards of conduct in disbarring Eastman.
However, the record in this matter shows more distemper than deliberation on critical points.
The California State Bar has created new problems, rather than clarifying standards.
Even as someone who disagreed with John Eastman, I am not sure what the standard is for zealous advocacy by attorneys.
While Eastman was giving bad advice, he was not committing a crime or, in my view, committing an offense that deserved disbarment.
There cannot be a different standard for different candidates, or different clients.
Jonathan Turley is a law professor and the best-selling author of “Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution.”
There was a lot going on at that time. The Constitution and the statute taken together made an election challenge a ridiculous race against time. Eastman believed (as I believed) that there were serious irregularities in the election that affected the outcome. However, time was short and Trump’s team pursued legal challenges in hostile courts when they should have focused on lobbying political support in the state legislatures to ignore the tainted election results which had been conducted by court created rules in violation of the rules passed by those state legislatures. Those legislatures were within their right to take back their authority to allocate their electoral votes as they saw fit. That was where the effort should have been focused.
However, they pursued various legal challenges in the courts instead. As I said, time was ridiculous short, and Trump’s lawyers were being inundated with reports of election irregularities. It is my belief that some reports were legitimate, others were zealous theories fed by political zeal, and (I believe) others were false conspiracies intentionally injected by Democrat operatives to discredit the entire movement to question the results. It is easier to disregard illegal drop boxes when the focus is on Venezuelan software and Serbian servers. It was difficult to impossible in the time frame permitted to investigate and vet all the legitimate and illegitimate theories swirling around.
It was now time to Count the electoral votes. That is where Eastman comes in. He honestly believed that there were irregularities that affected the outcome. I personally agreed, but it was my reading of the statute and Constitution that time had run out. They needed to have convinced the state legislatures to act before the date set for the counting of the electoral votes. Once that date arrived, it was too late. However, Eastman disagreed. He came up with a novel theory. The VP was given the duty to open and count the votes. Rather than that just being a ministerial duty, Eastman thought the VP had the discretion to delay the counting of the votes at the request of state legislators to give their respective state legislatures more time to examine the election irregularities. I personally disagreed with this theory, but I concede that we were in uncharted waters. Eastman proposed this strategy in a memo to the President, but the strategy was never implemented because it required the cooperation of the VP and he had his own lawyers that disagreed with Eastman’s theory. That’s it. That was why he was disbarred. He proposed a novel legal strategy in a novel situation that was never implemented. The rest was just protected political speech. He was made a scapegoat for the opinions he held and the uncontrollable outcome of a mob.
This was just part of a nationwide effort to retaliate against Trump’s lawyers to disbar them, indict them, coerce confessions from them, bankrupt them, all in an effort to chill zealous advocacy of the the former and once again President of the United States. This is all part of a calculated effort to deprive the President of legal representation, a violation of norms that forms a small part of a coup or color revolution. I have been a member of the California Bar for more than 35 years. This is an injustice, and I am ashamed.
Since not only you have published about this tragedy, it can be assumed that the interested public is as informed about it as ongoing aggressive democratic measures, to disbarr lawyers representing DJT and politicians close to him,
After VA’s Congressional Redistricing Referendum passed with around 89K votes (I had expected a much larger margin), the SC-VA (accepting briefs until tomorrow) will decide in due course, To legally decide, if whether it is permissible to compose districts in such a way that more than 40% of voters are represented by only one representative (= 9%) is certainly associated with huge implications.
These three major unsolved cases are siting before the SC-VA:
1. RNC’s lawsuit filed in Tazewell County arguing the process used to place the amendment on the ballot was illegal. Judge Hurley’s ruling [1] from 1/27/26 is challenged by DEMs.
2. GOP U.S. Reps. Morgan Griffith (VA-9) and Ben Cline (VA-6), along with two Republican committees, also originated in Tazewell County. That case challenges the wording of the ballot question, arguing it is misleading.
3. A similar lawsuit filed in Richmond by U.S. Rep. John McGuire (VA-5) and others also targets the ballot language.
Primary elections will take place on 8/4/26
[1] https://virginiamercury.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/Redistricting.pdf
Before the usual crowd jumps in, here is a little game for the group. Let’s see if we can guess the “novel legal theory” that X and his anonymous cronies will invent to defend this ruling before they even show up. If their standard is that a lawyer should be disbarred for pushing a new constitutional theory that fails, then they ought to be explaining why that same logic would not also wipe out half the lawyers in California who have been asking courts to rethink precedent for the last 30 years.
Group? What group, you’re mindless simps? Lets play a little game with Olly and his crazy followers, pretend to be a CA lawyer and spew BS all day with conspiracy theories. BTW folks, that guy Olly is not a lawyer, never was, never will be.
Little game? You mean put on dunce hats and dance around the kindergarten? Maybe stick stars on your face? Got the feeling this clown is a kindergarten teacher.
What bothers me here is how “novel legal theory” is being treated like a problem in itself. Every legal theory was novel the first time somebody said it out loud. Judicial review was novel. Incorporation was novel. One person one vote was novel. The founding generation’s whole claim that government exists to secure pre‑existing rights was a radically new way to look at power in 1776, and the British establishment did not treat it as “legitimate” at the time.
So the issue is not that a theory is new. The real question is whether it is a good‑faith reading of the text and history and whether it tends to protect people’s rights or strip them away. If Eastman’s theory was dangerous because it effectively let one officer throw out state‑certified votes, then say that plainly and argue that it attacks the rights of voters. That is a substantive criticism of his work, not a reason to declare novelty itself out of bounds.
For the last 30 years, a huge part of what the Supreme Court has done in big constitutional cases is accept or reject “novel” theories. That is how constitutional law actually moves. Under the California Supreme Court’s treatment of Eastman, every lawyer now arguing that his “novel” theory justifies disbarment is pushing their own brand new theory about the First Amendment and about the limits on attorney speech.
If they really believe a lawyer should lose his license just for pressing a new constitutional argument that courts have not blessed before, then they ought to be making the case to disbar themselves and every other California lawyer who has asked the courts to rethink precedent or extend doctrine over the last few decades. You cannot suddenly discover a brand new rule that says “this one lawyer, on this one issue, in this one political context, is outside the First Amendment because his theory was too novel” and then pretend that is not itself a radical departure from how we have treated attorney advocacy for generations.
What California has done here looks like a vague new rule that says if you represent the wrong client, push a new theory, and lose, the bar can come back later, call your advocacy “deceitful,” and end your career. That is its own kind of novel theory, and it runs straight into the First Amendment problem. Lawyers have to be able to talk through contested constitutional ideas with their clients, even half baked ones, without facing professional execution after the fact just because the argument was unpopular or ultimately rejected.
Here’s another folks, just yapping away, pretending to know constitutional law. This guy is not a lawyer, he just rewrote Turley’s opinion . At least Turley is a lawyer, this guy is a fraud and BS artist. And do note the fact that he uses NO FACTS, just made up nonsense pretending to be smart.
“NO FACTS, just made up nonsense pretending to be smart.” Sounds like ANON daily!
Seems there would be sufficient grounds for an appeal to a higher court since this would appear to be a violation of the first amendment. I do not know if such an appeal is allowable in the legal profession but since this removes his ability to earn a living in his profession in California, there were appear to be grounds for an appeal. Surely if it is a first amendment case in Colorado for the makers of confectionaries, an attorney doing a zealous job for his clients such have at least the same right in California.
Frankly I have never liked the idea of Bar Associations making such decisions even if the state has determined that the Bar association should function as certifying and investigating agent. I think that structure leads to exactly this type of decision. If anything it smacks of a monopoly where someone out of favor fails to get justice.
I prefer the model used by medical boards and other licensing boards. I hope an appeal is forthcoming. I want to see if Attorneys can truly allow justice in their ranks especially in this contentious era.
Why don’t you just state you are not a lawyer and have no idea what will happen instead of yapping away.
The fact that Marc Elias has yet to face significant disciplinary actions for his role in the 2016 election never ceases to amaze me. A comparison of the Eastman case with Elias’ actions is one example, IMO, of why the Bar is held in such low regard by many practitioners
“disciplinary actions …” What exactly did he do to piss off MAGA, you mean?
Chilling free speech of those lawyers that defend conservative interests is the point of much of the persecution, prosecution and disbarment of lawyers and others who stood in defense of Trumps claims. The Bae Association in many stares has been captured by the progressive Democrat party to effectively deny legal counsel and representation to conservatives.