Former President Donald Trump urged Vice President Mike Pence to 'listen' to a conservative lawyer who drew up a 6-point for Pence to overturn the election results, according to Bob Woodward's new book.
Trump made the pitch to Pence in a January 4th Oval Office meeting that included the lawyer, James Eastman, who was then the dean of the Chapman University Law School, and was among a group of figures pushing Trump's electoral fraud claims up until his final days in office.
'You really need to listen to John. He's a respected constitutional scholar. Hear him out,' Trump told Pence, according to Peril, by Woodward and journalist Robert Costa.
The authors write about a six-point memo that Eastman, who later spoke at the 'Stop the Steal Rally' near the White House Jan. 6th, drafted.
Former Chapman University law professor John Eastman, next to U.S. President Donald Trump's personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, drafted a six-point memo spelling out his beliefs about how Vice President Mike Pence could refuse to accept votes from seven states where Trump allies were claiming fraud
The memo sketches out steps Eastman proposed Pence could take while presiding over counting the Electoral College votes from the states – a role that Pence himself and numerous constitutional scholars concluded was largely ceremonial.
The Eastman memo, published by CNN, carves out a pivotal role for Pence. When counting votes from states where Trump was claiming fraud, Pence would cite 'ongoing disputes in the 7 States' to claim that there are in fact 'no electors that can be deemed validly appointed in those States.'
Doing so would put Trump ahead, by 232 to 222 electoral votes. 'Pence then gavels President Trump as re-elected,' Eastman rights.
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