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HOST KiM MONSON [00:23:55]We're at a defining moment in America. And as messy and complex as this is, there's this blessing that the truth is coming out on all of this. Let's finish up with January 6, -- as you now call it, J6 -- because I guess you're getting to know it very well. Where is that in [inaudible]? [17.6s]
JOHN EASTMAN [00:24:13]So, you know, they've subpoenaed everybody that had anything to do with raising questions about the election, as if somehow that provoked what happened at the Capitol on January 6th. And so they couldn't get the information for me because I've got attorney-client and other constitutional right privileges that I asserted before the J6 committee. So they subpoenaed my phone company. We filed a court action to block my phone company from turning over-- not just all of my emails, my -- [correcting himself] excuse me, not e-mails -- my texts and my phone communications -- but those of anybody else on my account -- so, my wife, my son, my daughter. [laughs incredulously]. ... You know, this is what you call classic fishing expedition, to try and find something. We have a Fourth Amendment designed for -- this is like the old British king that [says], "I don't know if there's any been crime committed, but I know you people well enough to know that you must have been committing crimes. So, I'm going to issue a general warrant to allow my officers just to look at whatever they want, to see what they find. And then if they find any evidence of illegality, or anything that can be portrayed as evidence of illegality, we'll then bring charges." This is what the Fourth Amendment was designed to prohibit. And yet the J6 committee subpoenas are doing exactly that. They're massive fishing expeditions. When they couldn't get it from my phone company because of the lawsuit we filed, they discovered that my emails on my old employer at Chapman University had been archived, unbeknownst to me. When I removed them, when I left that university, they were supposed to be gone. But they had -- and they were going to turn over 94,000 pages of documents of my emails that were in the archive system, without my ability to even review them for privilege. I ran a legal clinic at Chapman University. I had dozens of clients whose attorney-client privilege materials were going to be in that cache of documents, and this was not anything specific to Jan. 6: "Did Eastman have any communications with the Proud Boys or anybody that's been indicted or any or arrested? We wanted everything from November through January in any way related to the election. This goes after core political speech in a very substantial way. So, they are First Amendment rights. It's like I said, an unreasonable dragnet looking -- a general warrant -- it's Fourth Amendment. It's protected material that I've asserted Fifth Amendment privilege over. It's attorney-client material, so my clients are being deprived of their Sixth Amendment rights, to have counsel in confidential conversations. I mean, they are shredding four of the ten Bill of Rights in their unfettered effort to try and build a narrative that will salvage the hemorrhaging on their political aspirations. This is egregious! And by the way, if anybody wants to help, I've got lawyers in D.C.. I've got lawyers in California. I've got lawyers elsewhere in the country, helping. We set up a legal defense fund. And I didn't do GoFundMe because I didn't want them to fund unfund me! [laughs] [142.4s]
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