Former Trump legal adviser John Eastman is attempting to shield thousands of his old work emails from the House Jan. 6 Committee on the basis of attorney-client privilege, according to his latest motion filed on Sunday in his lawsuit against the committee.
Eastman, who was ordered by the judge to sift through more than 94,000 pages in his Chapman University email account to determine which materials were privileged last month, argued on Sunday that the committee doesn’t have a right to access the more than 10,000 pages of what he claims to be privileged documents.
Eastman has handed over more than 8,409 pages of material to the committee and has “reviewed or excluded 46,205 of the 94,153 pages in the total production,” his lawyers stated in the Sunday filing. Of those 46,205 pages, 26,754 were mass emails that were automatically excluded.
That leaves about 11,000 pages so far that the ex-Trump adviser is refusing to hand over.
Eastman’s legal team urged the court to reject the committee’s request for documents due to the lawyer’s attorney-client relationship with ex-President Donald Trump, with whom he plotted to have then-Vice President Mike Pence steal the 2020 election, a scheme Pence ultimately chose not to go along with.
Eastman has been providing logs itemizing his privilege claims to the House committee as ordered, but the committee’s lawyers have complained that the logs don’t provide enough information and requested that the judge resolve the privilege issue ASAP.
On Sunday, Eastman’s lawyers accused the committee’s efforts to clear up the issue of being “motivated” by the upcoming 2022 midterms.
House attorneys and Eastman’s team are scheduled to appear in court on Monday to report their progress on the document exchange.
Read the filing below:
