According to John Eastman, an attorney for former President Donald Trump, 11,000 White House documents should not be seen by the House select committee investigating the attack on the United States Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, due to attorney-client privileges, according to a federal court ruling on Monday.
Eastern, who has backed Trump’s election-year challenges, claims that the records, which are among 46,000 he has reviewed as a result of a court order, are covered by either attorney-client privilege or work-product protection.
According to a federal judge, Eastman must analyze up to 94,000 pages of emails that were subpoenaed by his former employer Chapman University in order to clarify his claims of privilege against the university’s attorneys.
Representative Douglas Letters of the House of Representatives complained on Friday that Eastman has not supplied sufficient details on why the withheld documents should be categorized as privileged for the committee to decide whether or not the claims are legitimate.
As reported by The Independent, “the select committee’s urgent need for resolution of the privileged problems is heightened by the fact that the plaintiff has broadly asserted privileges over a vast swath of documents, many of which appear to be important to the select committee’s investigation.”
Eastman is said to have contributed to the development of Trump’s White House legal strategy to persuade then-Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the results of the 2020 Electoral College vote on Jan. 6, 2021, according to reports.
According to Vice President Mike Pence, who presided over the vote count, rejected the pressure.