Judging Freedom - Judge Says Trump Knowingly Touted False Election Data ‘In Court,’

Episode Date: October 19, 2022

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Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Wednesday, October 19, 2022. It's about 525 in the afternoon here on the east coast of the United States. On the other coast of the United States, a federal judge has just released an opinion and an order that is utterly devastating to former President Donald Trump. A little bit of background. President Trump had a highly regarded constitutional expert on his legal team around the time of January 6th named John Eastman. John Eastman is the former dean of Chapman University Law School, a highly regarded constitutional scholar. John Eastman communicated with the president's lawyers in the White House and at their offices outside the White House at or about the time of January 6th. The January 6th Select Committee of the House of Representatives subpoenaed all of Professor Eastman's emails

from Chapman University, where he was employed at the time. He since has retired from the university. Professor Eastman filed a lawsuit in California where Chapman is and where he lives and asked a federal judge to enjoin the enforcement of the subpoena. The federal judge reviewed everything in the Chapman email account of Professor Eastman and made a determination that nearly all of it was attorney client privilege. However, he found four documents out of about 576 that while attorney client privilege were an exception to the attorney client privilege

because of what's known as the crime fraud exception. Here's how the crime fraud exception works. If the client, here the president, he was the president at the time, consults the attorney in order to perpetrate a fraud or commit a crime, or the attorney gives advice to the client in furtherance of a fraud or a crime, and those communications are reduced to writing, those writings are an exception to the attorney-client privilege. So there are four emails here which Judge David Carter found were in furtherance of a crime or a fraud, and therefore he ordered Professor Eastman to turn them over to the committee. Okay, that's not the big news. The big news is that in those

emails, Professor Eastman said to the president's lawyers, the president cannot make these assertions because they are untrue. And the assertions were that there were 14 or 15,000 people who voted in Georgia who were not authorized to vote because they were dead or they were in jail or they were just got out of jail and they hadn't re-registered, whatever the reason was. President Trump signed a certification to either a state judge or a federal judge in Georgia, asserting that these people had voted when he was told by his lawyers that they had not. So Judge Carter, a federal judge in California, has found that President Donald Trump committed a crime by falsely swearing under oath that the statements in an affidavit were true when in fact he knew they were not true. That, of course, removes the communications about that affidavit that then President Trump signed from the protection of the attorney-client privilege. I must tell you, this is the most damning judicial finding against former President Trump that I have seen since this January 6th saga began. Now, he was not a litigant in this case. The litigants in this case were Professor Eastman and the committee and the

university where Professor Eastman was employed. But the court has found as a matter of law, this is going to explode against President Trump in the Georgia investigation of whether or not he committed a crime in Georgia because a federal judge has now found as a matter of law, whether you like President Trump or not, whether you think he was reelected and Joe Biden is not the real president or not, is beside the point. A federal judge has now concluded as a matter of law that the then president and his then lawyer conspired to commit a crime and that Donald Trump, against the advice of the lawyer, did commit the crime. The crime was falsely swearing in an affidavit going to the court about something that he knew was not true.

We'll see where this goes. This is not good for the president at all, obviously. Expect the committee to make the most of this. Expect his opponents and the media to make the most of this. And expect prosecutors. This is where it's very dangerous for Donald Trump. Expect prosecutors in Georgia to make the most of this. Judge Napolitano for judging freedom.