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We learned this week the J6 committee is investigating Donald Trump and his advisor John Eastman for the same offense many foot soldiers of the insurrection are charged with. 

The committee suspects Trump and Eastman obstructed an official proceeding, a felony punishable by up to 20 years in prison. 

So many J6 insurgents are charged with this crime that Buzzfeed ran a trend piece on the phenomenon. Some insurgents already pleaded guilty and others failed in their attempts to get the charge thrown out. 

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According to the Post: “On the day of the attack, as he packed his bags, Stone told the filmmakers the riot was a mistake and would be ‘really bad’ for the pro-Trump movement.”

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A charge of disrupting an official proceeding would be a straightforward way to bridge the gap between the shock troops at the United States Capitol and the orchestrators of the insurrection. 

If ordinary goons are guilty of disrupting an official proceeding by rushing the seat of government, then arguably the ringleaders who incited them to do so are guilty as well. 

This charge might also fit the procedural coup into the framework of criminal law. The J6 committee’s blueprint for criminal prosecutions comes as new details have emerged about the culpability of Roger Stone, the architect of Trump’s “Stop the Steal” movement. However, we’re still a long way from seeing any of these guys stand trial.

The Post reviewed documentary footage of Stone by a Danish filmmaking crew made while he watched the insurrection unfold on television in a Washington hotel. According to the Post: “On the day of the attack, as he packed his bags, Stone told the filmmakers the riot was a mistake and would be ‘really bad’ for the pro-Trump movement.”

On the eve of the 2020 election, however, he seemed to welcome the prospect of clashes with left-wing activists. In a recorded conversation, as an aide spoke of driving trucks into crowds of racial justice protesters, Stone said: “Once there’s no more election, there’s no reason why we can’t mix it up. These people are going to get what they’ve been asking for.”

Seemingly aware of the crimes he and his goons were committing, Stone “lobbied for Trump to enact the ‘Stone Plan’ — a blanket presidential pardon to shield himself, Trump’s allies in Congress and ‘the America First movement’ from prosecution” for the insurrection.

Trump did pardon Stone. 

The rest of the J6 insurgents were not so lucky.

The J6 committee tipped its hand in a brief filed in federal court in California on Wednesday. This is a civil case where the select committee is asking a judge to review the 11,000 documents Eastman is withholding in the name of attorney-client privilege. 

These documents can be expected to deepen the committee’s understanding of the well-established Trump-Eastman plot to disrupt the certification of the 2020 election by enlisting Mike Pence to abort the ceremony on legally specious grounds in order to send the vote “back to the states” on an equally flimsy pretext. 

Eastman is a lawyer, at least for now, but it’s not clear he was acting as Trump’s attorney when he schemed with the former president. 

In any case, attorney-client privilege doesn’t apply to advising clients  how to commit crimes, let alone chatter about crimes a client and a lawyer do together. 

So the J6 committee’s lawyers listed all the crimes they have good reason to think Trump and Eastman teamed up for. 

The committee doesn’t have to prove Eastman and Trump are guilty. So far, it’s just asking the judge to look over Eastman’s supposedly privileged trove of documents to see if they contain any evidence of these alleged crimes. 

If so, the argument goes, those documents aren’t really privileged and Eastman must hand them over.  

To prove Eastman and Trump committed the crimes they are alleged to have committed, a hypothetical prosecutor would have to show they knew they were breaking the law, and possibly also that they knew claims of massive election fraud, the ones that formed the pretext for the procedural coup, were false. 

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If Pence had aborted certification on their orders, it would certainly have interrupted an official proceeding. But did Trump and Eastman know they were committing a crime when they badgered Pence to do so, as opposed to pursuing a dubious legal/political strategy? 

The ignoble fiction running through this whole saga is that Eastman was simply giving Trump advice on how to legally send the election “back to the states.” In this case, the line between crankery and criminality would be blurry. 

However, in one of his infamous memos, Eastman acknowledges that his plan is legally questionable at best. He falsely asserts that because Joe Biden stole the election, Team Trump is entitled to ignore “Queensbury Rules,” ie, the rules against fighting dirty. 

The fact that Eastman invoked the Fifth Amendment 146 times in his testimony to the J6 committee means the former law professor believes discussing his actions in this case would incriminate him. 

The brief makes a compelling argument that Trump knew, or should have known, that his claims of massive election fraud were false. 

After all, he was informed by everyone from his campaign data analyst to his senior appointees at the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security to state-level elections investigators – everyone said he lost fair and square. 

The J6 committee has no authority to charge anyone with a crime on its own, but depending on what their investigation reveals, the committee may ultimately make a criminal referral to the DOJ. 

It can’t force it to open a criminal investigation on Trump or anyone else, but such a referral would put significant pressure on US Attorney General Merrick Garland to launch a criminal probe. 

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