A lawyer who pushed a ‘birther’ conspiracy about Kamala Harris has joined Trump’s election fight
birther #birther
A lawyer who pushed a “birther” conspiracy theory about Vice President-elect Kamala Harris is representing President Donald Trump in his latest election fight.
John Eastman, a law professor at Chapman University, has been cited as Trump’s counsel of record in a motion to join a Texas lawsuit that seeks to invalidate millions of votes in the 2020 presidential election, according to a court filing on Wednesday.
Eastman was widely criticised for writing a controversial op-ed in Newsweek in August about Harris, a California senator who was then-newly announced as President-elect Joe Biden’s running mate.
In the column, Eastman promoted a racist lie that Harris may be ineligible for the position because she has immigrant parents. Harris was born in California and is indisputably a US citizen.
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Newsweek appended an editor’s note to the article two days after its publication, stating: “All of us at Newsweek are horrified that this op-ed gave rise to a wave of vile Birtherism directed at Senator Harris.”
At the time, Trump elevated Eastman’s assertions, and hailed him as a “very highly qualified, very talented lawyer.” Trump similarly promoted racist birtherism claims about President Barack Obama.
The Trump campaign and Eastman did not immediately respond to Insider’s requests for comment.
Eastman is working on a case filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton straight to the Supreme Court — a long-shot attempt to overturn the election results in key battleground states won by President-elect Joe Biden, including Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Georgia.
“I’m honoured that the President asked me to represent him in this matter,” Eastman said in a statement released by the Trump campaign on Wednesday. “I think his intervention in this case strengthens an already very strong original action by the state of Texas.”
Many election law experts have described the litigation as factually inaccurate and unlikely to succeed. Republican attorneys general from 17 states have also backed the last-ditch effort, though other GOP members have criticised its legal basis.
Trump has lost more than three dozen legal challenges against the election thus far.