His refuted claims of massive fraud in the 2020 US presidential election put Donald Trump at new legal risk.
A judge in California found on Wednesday that the ex-president knowingly misrepresented alleged fraud figures in court documents. The judge saw this as sufficient evidence of an attempted misdemeanor to suspend attorney-client privilege for several emails between Trump and his attorney, John Eastman.
The lawsuits concern Eastman’s attempts to keep email exchanges with Trump from before the US House of Representatives investigative committee into the January 2021 attack on the Capitol in Washington. Trump’s supporters stormed the parliament building at the time – while Joe Biden’s victory in the presidential election was to be officially sealed there. Trump had previously incited supporters at a White House rally by repeating his false allegations that Biden only won through voter fraud.
After the election, Trump and his companions filed a few dozen lawsuits across the United States about alleged voting irregularities – practically all of them failed. The judge specifically referred to a lawsuit filed in Georgia, in which Trump and his attorneys allege, among other things, that 10,315 deceased votes were counted in Fulton County.
A day later, Eastman wrote in an email that Trump was then advised that some of the information was incorrect. Still, Trump and his attorneys “filed the lawsuit with the same incorrect numbers,” the judge noted. And Trump also assured under oath that all the information was correct to the best of his knowledge.
“The emails demonstrate that President Trump knew these particular voter fraud numbers were incorrect, but continued to disseminate them, both in court documents and to the public,” wrote California Judge David Carter. Eastman’s emails were related to a “conspiracy to defraud the United States.” Eastman is now scheduled to submit 33 documents to the investigating committee by October 28. The committee recently decided to subpoena Trump.
