john eastman Archives - Dr. Rich Swier

Tag Archive for: john eastman

Conservatives Shut Out By ‘Big Law’ Have Little Sympathy As Firms Face Major Upset Under Trump

April 12, 2025/in Commentary, Courts & Law, Elections, Hot Topics, Lawfare, National Security, News, Policy, Politics, Waste, Fraud and Abuse/by The Daily Caller

Lawyers who faced professional penalties for standing by President Donald Trump can’t help but view objections of law firms targeted by executive orders as hypocritical.

Those now positioning themselves as defenders of the legal system did nothing when Trump-allied attorneys were losing their law licenses and major firms were refusing to back the president, conservative supporters of Trump’s efforts say.

“Their silence in the face of the same conduct over the past 4 years against lawyers (including me) who represented President Trump is deafening,” John Eastman told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Following an order in February stripping security clearances from attorneys at Covington & Burling, the firm representing former special counsel Jack Smith, Trump fired off a series of orders limiting some of the nation’s top law firms’ access to government contracts and buildings.

Three firms targeted by executive orders, Perkins Coie, WilmerHale and Jenner & Block, have opted to fight back in court. Other firms — among them Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher and Flom; Willkie Farr & Gallagher; Milbank; and Paul Weiss — struck deals with the administration to provide millions in pro bono legal services and avoid diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) practices.

Eastman, who faced disbarment proceedings in California for aiding Trump’s effort challenge the 2020 election results, is unsure whether Trump’s orders will be upheld but finds it fascinating that “law firms and blue state AGs are weighing in screaming about how improper it is to target lawyers because of their representation of clients unpopular with the administration.” He is currently appealing last year’s California State Bar recommendation that he be disbarred.

“In my view, the only way to defeat the lawfare and weaponization of the last 4 years is to apply it on a reciprocal [basis] so that the perpetrators of that lawfare feel the heat now that the [shoe] is on the other foot,” Eastman told the DCNF. “Much like the Independent Prosecutor statute, which was weaponized against the Reagan Administration, went the way of the dodo bird once it was turned on the Clinton Administration.”

Big Law, Big Lib

Support for left-wing causes in “Big Law” firms is pervasive. A 2024 study by Notre Dame law professor Derek Muller found that 95% of pro bono amicus briefs filed by Big Law firms on issues of highest salience like abortion or LGBTQ issues took the liberal side, while 64% of the total 851 briefs analyzed supported the liberal position.

Fifth Circuit Judge James Ho made a similar observation in a March concurrence, writing that judges “shouldn’t be surprised when ‘topflight’ firms consistently jump in on only one side of politically charged disputes.”

Some of Trump’s legal allies see the orders as a smart way to right the ship — or at least save it from sinking into a complete ideological takeover.

1/8 Let me comment on what’s going on with the prominent law firms, often called BigLaw (a world I come out of but have been unjustly canceled from due to allegations both fake and which profoundly misunderstand how Article II of the Constitution and its adjacent legal…

— Jeff Clark (@JeffClarkUS) March 22, 2025

“Thank goodness for Trump, who saw that in just the span of 20 years, BigLaw had become so monolithic and dominated by the Left that he had to take some action to push back on these firms,” Jeff Clark, a former DOJ official who Trump recently selected to run the White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), wrote on X. “Allowing the trend to continue threatens liberty because the best legal know-how and resources are only put only on one side, accelerating a leftist political monopoly that would have destroyed the country and made it unrecognizable if it had not been halted.”

Clark was named a defendant in the now-doomed case brought against Trump by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, who was disqualified from prosecuting it in December due to her romantic relationship with a special prosecutor she appointed. The D.C. Bar disciplinary panel also recommended suspending his law license in August.

During the 2020 election, Trump was “starved of BigLaw support while Biden had his pick of the litter,” Clark noted on X.

“In just 20 years — from 2000 when BigLaw firm Gibson Dunn represented Bush the younger in Bush v Gore — not a single big firm would step up to try to help President Trump, which is backwards because (putting aside the anomaly of a big polling bounce after 9/11), President Trump is far more popular with ordinary people in larger numbers than Bush 43 ever was,” he wrote.

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, formerly a registered Democrat, left his post as partner at the oldest Wall Street law firm in 2023 to defend President Donald Trump in the case brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg.

Blanche’s former firm, Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft, signed a pro bono deal of at least $100 million with the administration on Friday, Trump announced on Truth Social.

Mike Davis, founder of the Article III project, told the DCNF that firms are going to feel the “legal, political and financial consequences” for lawfare against Trump, his aides and allies.

“What client is going to hire a law firm with Trump’s scarlet letter on it?” he said.

‘Making Big Law Great Again’

The pressure is bringing tensions inside and outside firms to a tipping point.

Over 500 firms signed on to an amicus brief filed by former Obama solicitor general Donald Beaton Verrilli Jr. in support of Perkins Coie.

Some law students at top schools are reconsidering offers to work at firms that made deals, with students at Georgetown Law canceling a recruiting event with Skadden Arps, the Wall Street Journal reported.

At Harvard Law School, more than 90 professors signed a letter to students that decried “severe challenges to the rule of law” taking place under the Trump administration.

Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule objected to his colleagues’ letter, writing in an open letter on substack that it “attempts to appropriate a shared ideal and turn it to sectarian ends, implicitly aiming to define anyone who disagrees as an opponent of the rule of law altogether.”

“Where were the letter’s signatories when federal prosecutors took the unprecedented step of bringing dozens of criminal charges against a former president, who also happened to be the leading electoral opponent of the then-incumbent president?” Vermeule questioned. “Where were the signatories when Jeff Clark, Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, and other lawyers were disbarred or threatened with disbarment, and indeed prosecuted, for their representation of President Trump? Was this not a threat to the rule of law? Where were the signatories when radical activists menaced Supreme Court Justices in their homes, or when a mob hammered on the doors of the Supreme Court itself?”

White House spokesman Harrison Fields told the DCNF that Trump is “Making Big Law Great Again.”

“Instead of using their power and influence to make our country dangerous and less free, Big Law is working to use its access to the federal government for good,” he said. “This is only possible because of the swift leadership of President Trump to hold Big Law accountable.”

Some conservatives see things differently. Paul Clement, solicitor general under George W. Bush, is representing WilmerHale in its lawsuit against the administration.

“It’s especially admirable of Paul Clement to be standing up for BigLaw when BigLaw didn’t have the courage to stand up for him,” conservative legal scholar Ed Whelan wrote on X.

Clement resigned from King & Spalding in 2011 after it declined to back House Republicans’ litigation over the Defense of Marriage Act and left Kirkland & Ellis in 2022 after it stopped representing clients in Second Amendment cases.

WilmerHale’s lawsuit states that it is “a core principle of our legal system that ‘one should not be penalized for merely defending or prosecuting a lawsuit.’”

“In an unprecedented assault on that bedrock principle, the President has issued multiple executive orders in recent weeks targeting law firms and their employees as an undisguised form of retaliation for representing clients and causes he disfavors or employing lawyers he dislikes,” it continues.

Hans von Spakovsky, senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation’s Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies, told the DCNF there is “no First Amendment right to a security clearance.”

“There is also no constitutional right to a government contract, especially when, as here, the president says that the firm engages in racial discrimination in its hiring and personnel policies, a violation of federal law,” he said.

Trump’s law firm deals are just one way the administration is taking on the legal establishment.

Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) Acting Chair Andrea Lucas requested information about diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) employment practices from 20 law firms in March. “No one is above the law—and certainly not the private bar,” she said in a statement.

Attorney General Pam Bondi Bondi wrote a letter to the American Bar Association (ABA) in February over diversity requirements in its accreditation standards for law schools, threatening to revoke its “privilege” as the sole accrediting body.

The DOJ restricted its attorneys on Wednesday from attending or speaking at ABA events.

“The ABA is free to litigate in support of activist causes, including by inserting itself into pending litigation as an amicus curiae,” Blanche wrote in a memo. “The Department of Justice must, consistent with the Constitution, be careful stewards of the public fisc, represent all Americans regardless of ideology or political preferences, and defend the policies chosen by America’s democratically elected leadership-as reflected in Congressionally enacted statutes and Presidential policy choices.”

The Department of Justice (DOJ) did not respond to a request for comment.

AUTHOR

Katelynn Richardson

Contributor.

RELATED ARTICLES:

Former Obama DOJ Official Leads Hundreds Of Law Firms To Oppose Trump Order Against Firm That Repped Clinton Campaign

Judge Rules Columbia Pro-Terror Jew-Hater Mahmoud Khalil Can Be Deported

MASSIVE UNEMPLOYMENT INSURANCE FRAUD: Thousands of Recipients Not Even Born Yet

All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

‘Rather Despicable’: John Eastman Speaks Out After Bank Of America, USAA Shut Down His Accounts

April 18, 2024/in Culture War, Economy, Elections, Hot Topics, News, Policy, Politics, Waste, Fraud and Abuse/by The Daily Caller

One of the left’s biggest political targets recently found himself “de-banked” with no warning and little avenue for recourse, the Daily Caller has learned.

John Eastman, once an attorney for former President Donald Trump, was de-banked twice in the span of several months by two prominent financial institutions, Bank of America and USAA, he told the Daily Caller. His accounts were closed as he faced substantial backlash for his work advising Trump around the time of the 2020 election.

Eastman said he had switched most of his banking from Bank of America to USAA, a company that provides financial services exclusively to military veterans as well as their families, due to the former’s “wokeness.” Both corporations are federally insured, and Bank of America was bailed out with billions of dollars in taxpayer funds during the global financial crisis.

Bank of America alerted Eastman in September of 2023 that it would be closing his accounts, a letter obtained by the Daily Caller shows. Shortly thereafter, USAA notified Eastman in November that his two bank accounts with the company would be closed, a separate letter shows.

“And then two months later, we get a similar letter from USAA saying that they’ve decided that they’re going to close your account and they did like three weeks later,” Eastman told the Daily Caller. “And so that was where all of our automatic payments were coming out of, all our automatic deposits. So it was a real pain to shift everything. We had to get a new bank account opened and shift everything over.”

Eastman was notified of his USAA accounts being closed on Nov. 20, 2023. A few weeks prior, a California judge made a preliminary decision saying that Eastman was culpable of ethics violations in a state bar disciplinary case, CNN reported.

USAA claimed in its letter that it was “exercising its right to no longer do banking business” with Eastman per its “Depository Agreement.”

“We may close your account for any reason without advance notice. We may require you to give us a minimum of seven (7) calendar days advance written notice when you intend to close your account by withdrawing your funds,” a section of the agreement reads.

USAA did not respond to the Daily Caller’s multiple requests for comment.

When Eastman inquired about the closures, the banks said it was their policy to not provide any more information on the matter, he told the Daily Caller. An audio recording of Eastman’s call to Bank of America, provided to the Daily Caller, reflects as much.

LISTEN:

“De-banking” is a phenomenon in which financial institutions refuse financial service to the targets of political activism, who often end up being conservatives.

“What these banks are doing is they’re saying you’re either high risk, or we don’t want to do business with you, or whatever it is. There’s no methodology behind this. There’s no kind of reason that matches traditional indicators or traditional metrics that a bank would use to calculate your liquidity, your credit score, whatever it is. They’re using these non-financial factors, and then making these decisions and just like closing people’s accounts,” Eric Bledsoe, an expert on de-banking for the Foundation for Government Accountability, told the Daily Caller.

In typical de-banking situations, it is normal for the banks to withhold their reason for suddenly closing their clients’ accounts, Bledsoe added.

Eastman told the Daily Caller he was using the accounts he had set up with Bank of America and USAA for personal finances. He and his wife qualified for USAA bank accounts because his father-in-law served in the Navy in WWII and in the Marines in the Korean War, the attorney told the Daily Caller.

“We had Bank of America accounts for about 40 years. But just because of their wokeness we kind of quit a couple of years ago, using them much. They’ve got physical locations and therefore easy ATM, so we kept our accounts there, but we didn’t use much. And about four or five years ago, we opened USAA bank accounts and we were using those as our primaries,” Eastman said.

The Daily Caller reached out to the Bank of America for comment, giving the corporation multiple days to respond. Bank of America initially told the Caller it would answer, though about an hour before the deadline provided, the company decided not to comment.

“Just as a general policy, we don’t comment on client matters. So I don’t have a comment at this point on the situation,” Bill Haldin, from Bank of America media relations, told the Daily Caller after asking if the focus of the story was solely on Eastman.

Bledsoe spoke to the political nature of de-banking and how it can make Americans’ lives harder.

“I’m gravely concerned. It really is the kind of next step in [Environmental, Social and Governance]. So ESG across the board, it really is about like, re-directing capital away from the politically disfavored and to the politically favored at the moment, without going through the political process at all,” Bledsoe said.

Neither bank specified to Eastman whether the closing of his accounts was for political reasons, though he has his suspicions.

“I’m 99.9% confident,” he said. “What I don’t know is whether they didn’t want to do business with me, or whether they didn’t want to continue to be hassled by federal regulators for doing business with me. I don’t know which of those two it is, either one of them is rather despicable.”

Eastman’s confidence could, in part, be attributed to the litany of challenges he has faced following the 2020 presidential election.

Since Eastman argued that Vice President Mike Pence had the power to help deliver Trump the 2020 presidential election, the attorney has seen his life be uprooted by his opponents. Just days after the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot, Eastman resigned as a law professor from Fowler School of Law at Chapman University after the school faced pressure to oust him, Forbes reported. In a statement of his own, Eastman said he had “mixed feelings” about resigning, though the school said the pair had reached an agreement on the matter.

Then, at the end of that month, the University of Colorado’s Benson Center for Western Civilization banned Eastman from speaking at the institution despite being a visiting scholar, according to Forbes.

“The University of Colorado Boulder relieved John Eastman of duties related to outreach and speaking as a representative of the Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization,” the institution said in a press release.

Nearly a year later, in June 2022, FBI agents seized Eastman’s phone as he was leaving a restaurant, the Associated Press reported. Eastman and his wife have also experienced death threats, graffiti threats in their neighborhood and have had spikes planted in their driveway, his friend Josh Hammer wrote in a column.

A number of red state attorneys general — including from Florida, Iowa, Missouri, Indiana and Montana — voiced their opposition to the de-banking trend after the Daily Caller laid out Eastman’s situation. Many of the state AGs pointed to politics as a potential reason Eastman’s accounts were closed.

“No American should lose their bank account because banks want to play politics. Time and time again, we are seeing banks target and cut off those they disagree with and refuse to explain why. That is unacceptable,” Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird told the Daily Caller.

“De-banking contradicts the very character of our nation, as elites wrongfully use their power to punish their political opponents. Here’s the bottom line: If financial institutions are punishing consumers who don’t fall in line with their political beliefs, that could constitute a violation of both state and federal law,” Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey told the Daily Caller.

Now, Eastman is being prosecuted by Fulton County, Georgia, District Attorney Fani Willis as part of her case against Trump. On March 27, a California judge ruled that Eastman should be disbarred due to his legal advice in the wake of the 2020 election. The case will now move to the state Supreme Court for a final decision.

“I just think this is a terrible trend. I think it’s harmful. I think it prohibits people from bringing their values and the public square into the marketplace. And they have every constitutional right under the Free Exercise clause to bring their values into the marketplace. And I think this is also I think this is something we’re just gonna have to fight against,” Sam Brownback, an attorney and former U.S. Senator whose Christian non-profit was de-banked, told the Daily Caller.

AUTHOR