Quoted

March 8th, 2022

Jan. 6 Panel has Tough Case to Make on Trump Criminal Conspiracy

Ethics & Professional Responsibility Litigation Partner John B. Harris was quoted in the article, “Jan. 6 Panel has Tough Case to Make on Trump Criminal Conspiracy” published by The Hill. The article discusses the Jan. 6 riot investigation committee’s investigation into the attack on the capital and the committee’s newest claim that Trump engaged in a criminal conspiracy in his effort to overturn the 2020 election results. The filing by the committee looks to persuade a federal judge that it should be allowed to obtain Trump campaign attorney John Eastman’s communications. John B. Harris explains details could waver in a larger case against Trump because the department of justice would need to show he had intent to defraud as he carried out his plans. John says, “Here I think the problem is that if Trump's defense may be that he truly, truly believed these measures might be justifiable and decided to believe one set of advisers or another. The Government can bang on the table a lot say, ‘Well, you had more — and more credible — advisers on the side that said you need to stop this.’ And you had advisers using very strong language that it's illegal and unsupportable,” adding, “But if he had his own mindset that something terrible happened here … that creates a bit of a swamp and some murkiness that the government will have to deal with at a trial to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Trump did this knowing that it was all a sham.”

John, who specializes in attorney-client privilege, says that the question of whether the crime-fraud exception applies is not clear-cut. “To me, the tricky part of this is that Eastman apparently believed that as an academic theory what he was proposing about Pence or the electors was plausible. If that was something that he believed was a fair extension or interpretation of the law, that gives him some protection. It wouldn't automatically be a crime or fraud for him to propound an academic theory even if he believed that it was certain to lose.”

Read the full article here.