The Daily Fuckup

By March 29, 2022, the fallout from Judge David Carter’s March 28 order was already clear: John Eastman’s bid to keep most of his disputed emails out of the hands of the House Jan. 6 committee had failed, and the ruling gave investigators a fuller look at the legal advice that surrounded Donald Trump’s effort to reverse his 2020 loss.

Carter, a federal judge in California, ordered Eastman to turn over 101 of 111 disputed documents. The ruling did not convict Trump or Eastman of anything. It was a civil privilege decision, and Carter said one email fell within the crime-fraud exception because the committee had shown, by a preponderance of the evidence, that the communication likely furthered crimes including obstruction of an official proceeding and conspiracy to defraud the United States.

That distinction matters. Carter was not handing down a criminal judgment. He was deciding whether Eastman could use attorney-client privilege and related protections to keep materials from a congressional investigation. In that setting, the judge concluded the privilege did not apply to at least part of the record because the evidence suggested the communications were tied to conduct that may have crossed a legal line.

The practical effect was to widen the committee’s window into the post-election pressure campaign. Eastman was not a side character. He was one of the lawyers most closely associated with the push to delay or derail certification of Joe Biden’s victory, including the arguments aimed at then-Vice President Mike Pence. Once the court said the committee could see most of the emails, the fight shifted away from whether the documents would stay hidden and toward what they revealed about the planning around Trump’s election challenge.

For Trump, the ruling was a political problem even if it was not a criminal verdict. Carter’s findings were limited to the materials before him in Eastman’s privilege case, and Trump was not a party to that lawsuit. Still, the order reinforced a basic reality that Trump’s allies have tried to paper over for more than a year: the effort to stay in power after the 2020 election was not just angry rhetoric or loose talk about fraud. It was supported by a paper trail, and that paper trail was now moving into the committee’s hands.

The larger significance was not that a court had declared the entire effort illegal in some final sense. It had not. The significance was that a federal judge found enough evidence to apply the crime-fraud exception, which is a serious finding in a privilege dispute and a bad one for anyone trying to keep the surrounding emails buried. In plain English, the ruling said the committee was entitled to see most of what Eastman had tried to shield because the documents may have helped carry out a crime.

That left Trump with a familiar problem: every time a court, a committee, or a new filing forces another look at the post-election scramble, the story becomes harder to sell as ordinary hardball politics. Carter’s order did not settle Trump’s ultimate legal exposure. It did, however, make the record around Eastman more visible and the defense of that record more difficult. In the Washington around the former president, that was enough to turn one lawyer’s email fight into another fresh liability problem for Trump’s orbit.