Topic: WorldNetDaily
Rachel Alexander is a true believer that there was election fraud in 2020 -- despite the utter lack of credible evidence to prove it -- so it's not a surprise that she's running to the defense of the lawyer who manufactured a legal basis for overturning the 2020 election, John Eastman, as he faces a disbarment trial before the California bar. She wrote in her Sept. 4 WorldNetDaily column:
Former Republican Jennifer Rubin wrote an opinion piece for The Washington Post last week criticizing Trump attorney John Eastman's defense in the California bar disbarment trial against him. Unlike her, I've watched every minute of the trial, which is going into the third week. The bar is desperately trying to show there was no legal authority for Eastman to advise Trump that Mike Pence could have rejected electoral slates from states suspected of election fraud, but as more evidence comes out, their case is getting weaker and weaker.
But all Alexander is doing is nitpicking the prosecution without landing any serioius punches. She started by going after greg Jacob, former attorney for then-Vice President Mike Pence, who assered that it was "gravely irresponsible for you to entice the president with an academic theory that had no legal viability," but she claimed he "contradicted himself" by "that "scholars disagree" whether it's the vice president's responsibility to substantively deal with accepting electoral slates" and that the Constitution is "at best ambiguous." but as another, more honest reporter pointed out:
But Jacob made clear that while there are certainly reasons to quibble over some of the fine points of the Electoral Count Act of 1887 and the 12th Amendment — the two pillars of American government that lay out the Jan. 6 electoral vote counting process — there’s simply no basis in history or law that Pence would have had authority to determine the outcome of the election himself — or even to jumpstart a state-level process that would have the same effect.
Alexander then went way into the weeds to discuss elections from 150 years ago to try and impugn another prosecution witness:
Rubin also claimed that a 91-page report authored by the bar's expert witness Matthew Seligman somehow destroyed Eastman's defense. The report from Seligman, who has probably been illegally practicing law without an active license while assisting the California bar on this, was all over the board on that issue. Rubin said his report found that the 12th Amendment, the Electoral Count Act of 1887 and congressional precedent show that "the Eastman positions were so devoid of support that 'no reasonable attorney exercising appropriate diligence in the circumstances would adopt them.'"
However, Miller got Seligman to discuss the legislative debates of the 1876 election, where Republicans wanted the vice president to decide competing sets of electoral slates from some Southern states, but Democrats did not. There, a deal ultimately was reached by a special commission, allowing Republican Rutherford Hayes to become president, and Democrat Samuel Tilden conceded. No Republicans were prosecuted nor their attorneys disciplined.
If Seligman thought Eastman's position was so outrageous, why does he prominently feature a debate between Eastman and progressive legal scholar Lawrence Lessig about it on his website? One of the scholarly articles that Seligman wrote, "Disputed Presidential Elections and the Collapse of Constitutional Norms," discussed how a political party could have deserted "constitutional norms" "while staying within the strict bounds of the law" to "steal the presidency in 9 of the 34 elections since 1887 and the opposing party would have been powerless to stop the theft." Tellingly, Seligman wrote the article in 2018, shortly after Hillary Clinton claimed she lost to Trump due to election fraud.
Alexander's claim that Seligman was "has probably been illegally practicing law without an active license" linked to an article she wrote elsewhere obsessing over how his his law license was inactive because he was working as a teacher.
Alexander concluded by ranting that any discipline Eastman might face, in this case as well as in Georgia, will overturned by a biased right-wing Supreme Court:
The criminal prosecutions will likely go on for years, since the left wants to drag them out to damage Trump during the presidential race. But it is not likely that the U.S. Supreme Court will uphold a conviction sending Trump – or the others – to prison; not only does the current court lean to the right, but several of the justices were appointed by Trump. They won't stand for sending a president to prison over politics. Nor will they allow Eastman, a fellow legal academic who once clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas, to be disbarred over the First Amendment.
Rubin gleefully discussed the indictment of Eastman, but failed to discuss how a good prosecutor can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich, failed to discuss how RICO laws are so vague and broad they can be used to get anyone, and failed to discuss how attorneys regularly represent some of the most heinous criminals on earth and protect their lies. "Your honor, my client could not have been there bombing all those people since he was with a friend at the time."
Everyone already knows how Disciplinary Judge Yvette Roland, who contributed recently to Democrats while serving as a judge, is going to rule. Can't wait for the grown-ups – SCOTUS – to take over.
Meanwhile, in reality, Eastman's defense continues to do poorly. His first defense witness was Michael Gableman, a Wisconsin activist who had no experience in election law and said he did not have "any understand of how elections work" when Wisconsin Republicans -- mad that Biden won the state in 2020 -- chose him to look for evidence of rampant election fraud in the state (which he didn't find because there was none). Not an auspicious start -- not that Alexander will admit it, of course.
