Washington, D.C. According to a federal judge’s order on Wednesday, former President Donald Trump approved court paperwork contesting the outcome of the 2020 election that included charges of voting fraud that he knew to be untrue.
Four emails between Trump and lawyer John Eastman were ordered to be provided to the House committee looking into the attack on the Capitol on January 6 by U. S. District Court Judge David Carter, according to an 18-page judgement.
He claimed that since the emails include evidence of potential crimes, they cannot be withheld.
Though the judge’s conclusion has no practical bearing on a separate Justice Department investigation into efforts to overturn the election, any evidence that Trump signed documents he knew to be false could at minimum be a notable data point for criminal prosecutors trying to sort out culpability for far-ranging efforts to undo the results.
The judge explicitly referenced Trump’s attorneys’ allegations that more than 10,000 votes cast by deceased individuals, convicts, and unregistered voters in Fulton County, Georgia, were wrongly counted. On December 4, 2021, Trump’s legal team filed a document in Georgia state court that included those fraudulent accusations.
Later that month, Eastman forewarned Trump in a message that “some of the charges (and evidence supplied by the experts)” in the Georgia petition “has been erroneous.” Trump had been made aware of this, according to Eastman.
Even nevertheless, the judge noted, “Trump and his team filed another legal lawsuit with the same erroneous data after receiving the Eastman communication. Under oath, Trump attested that, to the best of his knowledge, the complaint was accurate.
“The emails show that President Trump knew that the specific numbers of voter fraud were wrong but continued to tout those numbers, both in court and to the public,” Carter wrote.
A conspiracy to defraud the United States, he claimed, is sufficiently related to and furthered by the emails.
Requests for comment from representatives of Trump and Eastman were not immediately fulfilled.
The ruling is the latest development in a monthslong legal battle between Eastman — a conservative lawyer and lead architect of Trump’s last-ditch efforts to stay in office — and congressional investigators.
On the grounds of assertions of attorney-client privilege, Eastman has attempted to withhold papers from the committee. The committee has claimed that a legal exception exists that permits the publication of information pertaining to current or upcoming offences. And Carter has mostly agreed, ordering the release of hundreds of emails to the House committee since the spring.
The judge stated that it is “more likely than not” that Trump committed crimes in his attempt to thwart the certification of the 2020 election in an astonishing judgement from March.
Carter in his ruling Wednesday said the messages he has reviewed from Eastman and other attorneys show that the “primary goal” for some of their litigation was delaying or disrupting the certification of President Joe Biden’s election win.
The judge concluded that “Trump filed various cases not to get legal relief but to disrupt or postpone the January 6 congressional procedures through the courts.” This conclusion was supported by all available information.
The House committee is looking into a complex scheme by Trump and his associates to rig the 2020 election and cause unrest at the Capitol, and the emails from Eastman are a part of that inquiry.
The judge ordered Eastman to give the documents to the committee by the afternoon of Oct. 28.
Eric Tucker, a journalist for the Associated Press, contributed from Washington.
Judge: Trump was aware that the allegations of vote fraud in the court documents were untrue.
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