John Eastman concedes that he and DJT were trying to overthrow the government

NOTE: I added material taken directly from the interview to this post so that people can see what Eastman said in his own words.

This is worth a stand alone post. Talking Points Memo published comments by John Eastman, a key architect of the 1/6 coup attempt. Eastman is a central figure in fomenting treason on 1/6. TPM writes:

John Eastman Comes Clean: Hell Yes 

We Were Trying to Overthrow the Government

I want to return to this revelatory interview with co-conspirator John Eastman, the last portion of which was published Thursday by Tom Klingenstein, the Chairman of the Trumpite Claremont Institute and then highlighted by our Josh Kovensky. There’s a lot of atmospherics in this interview, a lot of bookshelf-lined tweedy gentility mixed with complaints about OSHA regulations and Drag Queen story hours. But the central bit comes just over half way through the interview when Eastman gets into the core justification and purpose for trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election and overthrow the constitutional order itself. He invokes the Declaration of Independence and says quite clearly that yes, we were trying to overthrow the government and argues that they were justified because of the sheer existential threat America was under because of the election of Joe Biden.

January 6th conspirators have spent more than two years claiming either that nothing really happened at all in the weeks leading up to January 6th or that it was just a peaceful protest that got a bit out of hand or that they were just making a good faith effort to follow the legal process. Eastman cuts through all of this and makes clear they were trying to overthrow (“abolish”) the government; they were justified in doing so; and the warrant for their actions is none other than the Declaration of Independence itself.

“Our Founders lay this case out,” says Eastman. “There’s actually a provision in the Declaration of Independence that a people will suffer abuses while they remain sufferable, tolerable while they remain tolerable. At some point abuses become so intolerable that it becomes not only their right but their duty to alter or abolish the existing government.”

The Declaration of Independence has no legal force under American law. It’s not a legal document. It’s a public explanation of a political decision: to break the colonies’ allegiance to Great Britain and form a new country. But it contains a number of claims and principles that became and remain central to American political life.

The one Eastman invokes here is the right to overthrow governments. The claim is that governments have no legitimacy or authority beyond their ability to serve the governed. Governments shouldn’t be overthrown over minor or transitory concerns. But when they become truly oppressive people have a right to get rid of them and start over.

That anyone in DJT's close circle had the guts to admit the truth is astonishing to me. I never expected anyone in the inner circle to admit obvious truth. Hell yes, it was a coup attempt. 

What justified DJT's coup attempt in Eastman's mind? Decades of lies, slanders and crackpottery about nothingburger things like OSHA regulations, Drag Queen story hours, illegal immigration, woke, the LGBQT community and transgendered people. Those grievances are what has triggered most or nearly all of America's radical right into a lethal fit of blind fear, rage, hate, bigotry and outright support for dictatorship. Radical right supporters who know better, are cynical opportunists, grifters, trolls, thugs, deranged Christian nationalist theocrats and capitalist kleptocrats.

Of course, DJT will continue to lie and deny there was any coup attempt. The radical right Republican Party will continue to officially claim that 1/6 was “legitimate free speech.” 

In my firm opinion, Eastman, DJT and the rest of the inner circle should be tried for treason. 

Other sources are starting to report on this, e.g., Newsweek. I will wait to see if this turns out to be a fake story, but at this point it seems to be real. If it is real, it seems to be important.

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Added content from part 3 of the interview: Eastman's rationale for the coup attempt in his own words. This is from part 3 of the three part interview, starting at 20:55:

Key passages from the transcript (online here) are highlighted below.

John Eastman: Before we get to 2020. Let's have a brief stop over in 2000.

Tom Klingenstein: Okay

John Eastman: Because, because the claim is that Al Gore in conceding after Bush versus Gore rather than continuing to fight, exhibited the same kind of for the good of the country statesmanship, let's put an end to this. Um, I think that, uh, attributes to both of them, a greater magnanimity than is warranted. You look at Nixon's situation and every path, every judge in Texas, every judge in Illinois, uh, were Democrats. There was no way that he was gonna be able to bring election challenges that would result in his victory.

 And so if he did challenge and loses anyway, uh, uh, then he's put the country through a lot without any, any resolution, uh, it to the, the correct judgment. Same thing with Gore. I mean, we know for a fact that his folks had looked at every path. What happens if it gets to Congress, the joint session, what happens if it gets sent to the House of Representatives and in every path he loses no matter what happens in the litigation.

 So I, I don't want to give as much magnanimity of thought to either one of them. But, but let's assume the standard version and that Nixon is magnanimous, certainly not in 1960, but also not in 2000 were the stakes about the very existential threat that the country is under as great as they are. I mean, we're not talking about, you know, handing over to John Kennedy instead of Richard Nixon who's gonna deal with the Cold War.

Um, we're, we're, we are talking about whether we are gonna, as a nation completely repudiate every one of our founding principles, uh, which is what the modern Left-wing, which is in control of the Democrat Party, believes that we are the root of all evil in the world and we have to be eradicated. This is an existential threat to the very survivability, not just of our nation, but but of the, uh, example that our nation properly understood provides to the world.

That's the stakes, and Trump seems to understand that in a way a lot of Republican establishment types in Washington don't.  And it's the reason he gets so much support. In the hinterland, in the flyover country. People are fed up with folks, you know, get along, go along while the country is being destroyed.

 And so I think the stakes are much bigger. And, and, and that means a stolen election that thwarts the will of the people trying to correct course and get back on a path that understands the significance and the nobility of America and the American experiment is really at stake and we ought to fight for it.

 Tom Klingenstein: I'm assuming that if the conditions that obtained in this early sixties obtained now, you might not have made…

 John Eastman: I, I may, I may have come to a different conclusion and look, our Founders lay this case out. The prudential judgment they make in the Declaration of Independence is the same one. There's actually a provision in the Declaration of Independence that says, you know, a people will suffer abuses while they remain sufferable – Tolerable while they remain tolerable.

 But at some point, abuses become so intolerable that it's not only their right, but their duty to alter or abolish the existing government. So that's the question - have the abuses and the threat of abuses become so intolerable, uh, that we have to be willing to push back.

 Tom Klingenstein: To what degree are the differences between you and others on the fraud and the legal matters a function of a very different assessment of where we stand today.

John Eastman: So I had, I had one of my longtime friends call me and say, you know, you gotta quit with this Eastman. You know, it's all a blow over. Just write a book. You'll make a lot of money and everything will be fine. And I told them, “I said, you really don't understand the stakes of what we're dealing with, and I don't know how you can miss it, because it's just there for anybody with eyes to see.”

Tom Klingenstein: The narrative is Eastman and Trump tried to initiate a coup. Isn't that the narrative?

 John Eastman: Well, and I actually published an article saying, trying to trying to stop an illegal election is not a coup, but trying to thwart a coup. Um, but the fact that that true narrative is being censored and shut down so that the false narrative can prevail, uh, is I think part of the existential threat.

And it's not just shut down, it's, it's shut down any people that raise legitimate questions about the validity of the election.

Tom Klingenstein: And, and you are a good example in unfortunately this censoring and de-platforming comes almost as much from the Right as from the Left.   

John Eastman: Let's, let's kind of distinguish the Right. We've got, uh, what our friends at the Claremont Institute like to call Conservatism Inc. The, the establishment conservatives. Uh, they're, they're very much a part of the establishment and, and what Trump and more importantly, what, what the movement that Trump got ahead of, remember it was not called the MAGA movement until Trump came along. It was the Tea Party movement. It's the same movement.  It's the same, goes back to 2008 or 2010. They don't want the federal government controlling our healthcare, you know, taking over one sixth of the nation's economy. They don't want command and control. They don't want OSHA telling me what, what kind of chair I can have in my home office.

All of, they don't want them telling me that I can't have gas stoves in my kitchen. They're tired of that. That was a tea party movement. And the Republicans were as much opposed to the Tea party, populist uprising against what was happening and coming outta Washington as the Democrats were. And Trump got ahead of that movement, and it's now called the Make America Greater Movement.

Uh, uh, uh, again, movement, but, but that's what the establishment in DC or more broadly, the northeast corridor, if you will, to bring in New York. That's, that's, that's what they wanna stop. Mm-hmm. Partly because they think they're smarter than the average American, and therefore the average American just ought to bend the knee or whatever comes out of the expert.

And this is just a fruition of that a hundred year effort.  But it's, it's, uh, it's, uh, come to a rapid conclusion. I mean, it kind of, it kind of went, there were a couple of bumps when it increased quickly, but, but you look at that curve and it's been an exponential increase in the last few years.

You're gonna let 50 year old men naked into teenage girls' showers at public pools. That's one of the, or, or drag queens doing story hours to six year olds. If I had said that 10 years ago, you would've laughed me outta the room and you, you would've said, Eastman, you're way outta the limb. You're crazy.

Tom Klingenstein: Anything more?

John Eastman: No, I, I, I would just, you know, kind of bring it all together in this way. The amount of information about illegality, I thought was clear cut. That opened the door for fraud. And I think both the statistical evidence and the anecdotal evidence, if I had about people engaging in that fraud because the door had been open to it, was significant enough to have altered the results of the election.

And then the question is gonna be, is there any legal remedy to deal with a stolen election? Um, and I put together the best legal arguments that I thought, uh, were plausible to, to, to deal with that. But I did that because I thought the stakes were high. And I thought, uh, if we do not address the illegality here, what we're gonna see is they're, I mean, they use the institutions of government to affect the outcome of that election in ways that we now know - the Twitter files, the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop, those were done with collusion with agencies of the United States government, putting a big thumb on the scale of the election, and, and they did that when you know, when the incoming president was gonna be able to call him on it, and they continued to do it after the boss was their enemy.

Um, and, and if they can do it that time, when they then get a boss who's in agreement with them, then there are no longer, you know, any impediments to them preventing us from ever having a fair election again, which means there are no impediments to them blocking the consent of the governed, having control of the direction of the government, and we no longer are free people.

I mean, those are the stakes. And if those are the stakes, I, you know, what are you supposed to do? Just, just sit around and twiddle your thumb, eh? It would be too messy to do anything about this. I'll just. You know, and maybe when the alligators come for everybody else, they'll eat me last. No, that's not my nature. I'm the one out there on the rampart. If they eat me first, at least I've gone down fighting.

Qs: 

1. Did the TPM article sensationalize or distort what Eastman said? (FWIW, I think it sensationalized and distorted what Eastman said)

2. Was what Eastman supported and fomented on 1/6 as best he could, a coup attempt, an insurrection, legitimate political discourse, something else, or something unknowable?