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Friday, June 13, was a truly unlucky day for John Eastman, a key architect of President Trump’s plot to disrupt the results of the 2020 presidential election. A California appellate court, charged with reviewing recommendations to discipline lawyers in that state, affirmed the findings of a trial judge and recommended that Eastman “be disbarred from the practice of law in California and that Eastman’s name be stricken from the roll of attorneys.”

The judges found that his work on the 2020 election case was shoddy and deceptive. “Disbarment,” they said, “is necessary to protect the public, the courts, and the legal profession.”  

For any lawyer, this is a professional death sentence. But the court’s decision is not only a devastating blow to Eastman but also to the Trumpist myth that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. 

That lie drove MAGA’s 2024 election efforts and still animates Trump’s speeches, including the one he recently gave to troops at Fort Bragg, N.C. It is also embraced by the heads of the Justice Department and the FBI, as well as by Speaker of the House Mike Johnson.

And, as the court noted, Eastman himself continues, to this day, to claim that there were “nefarious forces behind former President Biden’s 2020 electoral win.”

But like the House Jan. 6 Committee and 60 other courts, the judges serving on the Review Department of the California State Bar Court would have none of it. They made clear that “in a democracy nothing can be more fundamental than the orderly transfer of power that occurs after a fair and unimpeded electoral process,” and that Trump and Eastman violated the law by conspiring and lying to disrupt the 2020 election. 

So why is Friday’s Eastman ruling significant? 

The case is unique and momentous because this is the only proceeding where Eastman, along with supporting denialist enthusiasts, testified under oath, cross-examined their critics and presented their full denialism defense. Eastman — assisted by his denialist apostles, who took 19 days to testify, present 7 witnesses and introduce over 180 document exhibits — had more than his day in court. He also presented his stolen election narrative to the public-at-large, with thousands watching by Zoom.

After considering this evidence, the Review Department court held that Eastman’s “false narrative” of “nefarious forces behind” President Biden’s 2020 win “resulted in the undermining of our country’s electoral process, reduced faith in election professionals, and lessened respect for the courts of this land.”  

And even if neither of the meticulous decisions of these two California courts changes the minds of the MAGA faithful nor shames Republican leadership into rejecting the Big Lie, the decisions and the evidence that support them will withstand the tests of time and help foil historical revisionism. They set the record straight and ensure that Trump and his accomplices will have difficulty escaping history’s judgment. 

As former Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes observed, court judgments like the one handed down last week are addressed not just to our present moment but “to the intelligence of a future day.”

The Eastman case demonstrates again that misinformation and lies collapse in a courtroom where facts and evidence rule. Among the courts’ key findings are: 

• Eastman admitted that he knew of no significant ballot fraud that would justify challenging the election results. 
   
• Eastman failed to “support the Constitution or laws of the United States” as all lawyers must do. 
   
• Eastman was grossly negligent in failing to investigate the bizarre results of statistical studies on which he relied to disrupt the presidential election — for example, that there was a one quadrillion to the fourth power chance of Biden winning four states after Clinton lost them in 2016. 
   
• Eastman knew that his Jan. 6, 2020, Ellipse speech was built on lies and willful blindness. “We know there was…traditional fraud that occurred,” he said. “We know that dead people voted.” At the time, he understood neither claim was true. And the Review Department rejected Eastman’s “merely ‘rhetorical hyperbole’” defense. 

  The courts also did not find his explanation a credible defense for his fraudulent actions and mischaracterizations. Both courts rejected Eastman’s claims that such statements and rhetorical hyperbole are constitutionally protected.

  While recognizing that all lawyers have a First Amendment right to make public statements, the Review Department court said that “this right does not extend to making knowing or reckless false statements of fact or law.” Nor does the First Amendment protect speech “that is employed as a tool in the commission of a crime.”

• Eastman falsely told the Jan. 6 “Stop the Steal” crowd and the nation that state election law irregularities and fraudulent voting had changed the result of the presidential election. Part of the proof? As the trial judge noted, on Nov. 29, 2020, Eastman wrote to fellow MAGA lawyer Cleta Mitchell that he knew of no actual evidence of outcome-determinative fraud in any states: “It would be nice to have actually hard documented evidence of the fraud.”  
   
• Eastman’s biggest lie was that Vice President Pence had the authority to interfere in the electoral vote. Both Eastman and Trump knew Pence had no such authority, but, on the president’s behalf, Eastman continued to press Pence and his lawyer to disrupt the Electoral College count.  

  Even Eastman’s own testifying constitutional expert and family friend, conservative Professor John Yoo, flipped on Eastman. Yoo breathtakingly admitted that the Trump-Eastman alternative elector notion was “a made-up dispute rather than a real one” and that Pence’s rejection of the pair’s arguments was “unassailable.” 

• The Review Department also emphasized that Eastman’s testimony during the bar disciplinary proceedings demonstrated that his beliefs were not sincere, honest or credible. From start to finish, the court found, he “used his skills to push a false narrative in the courtroom, the White House, and the media.” 

Despite such plentiful and well-documented findings, which California law insists must meet the heavy burden of “clear and convincing evidence” before an attorney can be disbarred, Trump’s top election lawyer has remained defiant, disingenuous and not credible. Eastman characterized the bar proceeding as “political persecution.” 

He insisted that those who brought charges against him “should themselves be disbarred,” and that the Office of Chief Trial Counsel of the State Bar and the trial judge were “partisan” actors who had made campaign contributions to Democrats.  

This rhetoric, of course, sounds eerily familiar.  

Eastman will likely appeal to the California Supreme Court and, if he loses there, eventually to the U.S. Supreme Court on First Amendment grounds.

It is also possible that when the next Supreme Court vacancy occurs, Trump may nominate Eastman. After all, if we can have a convicted felon in the White House, why not a disbarred, but loyal, lawyer on the nation’s highest court? 

Whatever unfolds for Eastman, and despite the profound damage that Trump’s election denialism has done to American democracy, the Eastman case compellingly illustrates Alexander Hamilton’s confidence that this nation is well served by an independent judiciary. 

As if anticipating the election denialism of Trump and Eastman, Hamilton argued that courts would “guard the Constitution and the rights of individuals from the effects of…the acts of designing men or the influence of particular [circumstances which] sometimes disseminate among the people themselves…” 

Nearly 250 years later, Hamilton sounds positively clairvoyant. 

 

Neil Goteiner was a pro-bono trial attorney consultant to the California State Bar during the Eastman proceedings.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell called his party’s presidential nominee, Donald Trump, a “stupid,” “ill-tempered,” and “despicable human being,” according to his own records.

McConnell made the withering assessments in a series of private “personal oral histories” that he gave to Michael Tackett, the deputy Washington bureau chief of the Associated Press, who has a forthcoming biography about the Kentucky senator called The Price of Power. The AP conveniently reported the book’s juicy details.

The Senate Republican leader since 2007, he also expressed confidence in the “good judgment of the American people” for rejecting Trump that year.

“They’ve had just enough of the misrepresentations, the outright lies almost on a daily basis, and they fired him,” he said, in one of his recorded diaries.

McConnell, 82, announced earlier this year that he will step down as leader at the end of November.

Despite his private protestations and his public blaming of Trump as “practically responsible” for the “disgraceful” Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, McConnell is one of several formerly disaffected Republicans to turn around and endorse the former president this year.

“It should come as no surprise that as nominee, he will have my support,” he said in March.

That puts him in league with Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), two other GOP stalwarts who had variously criticized Trump and later had a come-to-MAGA moment.

After Trump lost the election and in the weeks leading up to the Jan. 6 attack, McConnell privately mused about his escalating instability, Tackett’s book will reveal.

U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee has suggested to President Donald Trump that he should use a nuclear bomb against Iran, urging Trump to listen to the voice he will “hear from heaven” and follow its guidance in making decisions about Israel’s war on Iran.

In a post on Truth Social on Tuesday, Trump posted a screenshot of the lengthy text he says was sent to him by Huckabee, an evangelical and Christian Zionist who Trump praises as a “Great Person!”

In the text, Huckabee says Trump’s current decision on whether or not to involve the U.S. further in attacks on Iran is akin to the decision President Harry Truman faced in 1945 — when Truman dropped two atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing hundreds of thousands of innocent people in Japan and decimating the cities.

Huckabee further says that he seeks not to persuade but to “encourage” Trump. “God spared you in Butler, PA to be the most consequential President in a century — maybe ever,” Huckabee writes. “No President in my lifetime has been in a position like yours. Not since Truman in 1945.”

The rambling message is extremely ironic, considering that Huckabee is suggesting that Trump should use a nuclear bomb against Iran in a war that was started by Israel to supposedly target Iran’s nuclear weapons program, though most of the targets and casualties so far appear to be civilian.

Huckabee also urges Trump to listen to “HIS voice,” an apparent reference to God, saying that Trump “will hear from heaven” about the issue.

Like many evangelical Christians in the U.S., Huckabee is a Christian Zionist who subscribes to the belief that Israel must dominate Palestine in order to bring about the end-times prophecy and second coming of Jesus Christ. Christ would then rule over Israel in the new age, where all people worship Christ or get eliminated and condemned to hell.

Some Christian Zionists have outright preached that Israel must claim dominance over enemies like Iran, who will try to destroy Israel as it pursues total control over Palestine. Huckabee has been heavily criticized for his erasure of the occupied West Bank, which he refers to as Judea and Samaria, and for saying once that there is “really no such thing as a Palestinian.”

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina), who has spent over a decade urging the U.S. to enter into a war with Iran, praised Huckabee’s text, saying it is “spot on.”

“It is now time to end this terrible chapter in the Middle East and start a new chapter,” said Graham, seemingly referring to an old neo-conservative fantasy of regime change in Iran.

The text, seeking to stoke Trump into using extreme force against Iran, comes at a fragile moment as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is openly urging Trump to attack Iran, lending Israel even more support on top of the current defensive backing from U.S. military assets.

Similarly to Trump’s statement on Tuesday brushing aside the U.S. intelligence community’s assessment that Iran isn’t pursuing a nuclear weapon, Huckabee’s invocation of a higher purpose echoes President George W. Bush’s bizarre reasoning for starting the Iraq War. Just months after the U.S.’s invasion initially began, Bush reportedly told an Israeli-Palestinian summit that he was “driven with a mission from God.”

It’s unclear what Trump’s next move will be. He has repeatedly said that his goal is to force Iran to capitulate on his administration’s demands for a nuclear deal. “COMPLETE SURRENDER,” he wrote on Truth Social on Tuesday.

Trump has said that he may be sending Vice President J.D. Vance or his Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff to conduct negotiations. According to sources cited by Axios, the president was reportedly considering striking Iran ahead of a meeting about the war with his national security team in the White House Situation Room on Tuesday.

When I started at the Department of Education in the 1990s, student loans were a popular middle-class benefit. College affordability was rarely front-page news. Our dingy offices, a converted World War II warehouse, were a daily reminder of how our work seemed overlooked, too. But in those hallways—literally, my desk was in a hallway—we celebrated lower interest rates, fewer loan defaults, and record college enrollments.

When I returned to the Education Department a decade later, reports of deceptive recruiting tactics at for-profit colleges raised new questions about the value of college loans. My bosses wanted to know whether these abuses were widespread. Were they a few bad apples or a rotten orchard?

College degrees still led to huge earnings gains, on average, for students who were awarded them. The Department of Labor economists pegged the value of bachelor’s degrees at $1 million over a career. But there was very little data on the actual payoff from any particular college or program.

Instead, we looked at a simple proxy to measure the program’s value: whether loan balances were growing or shrinking. If interest accrued faster than borrowers could pay it down, that was a problem with student loan debt. We thought that might be the case for about a third of borrowers who recently left school. But the real number gave me a knot in my stomach. It was double our estimate: more than two-thirds of students saw their loans getting bigger, not smaller, over time. And while some caught up after years in repayment, one in three borrowers were still underwater, even on the oldest loans in the analysis.

These data led Barack Obama’s administration to set minimum standards for for-profit colleges and career programs, protecting hundreds of thousands of students from unaffordable debts. But there remained a larger question: How many students had education loans they would never pay down—and what would become of them?

In her new book, Sunk Cost, Jillian Berman sets out to explain how student loans went from a widely supported student benefit to a generational grievance. Covering the student loan industry for over a decade at the financial news service, MarketWatch, she explains how the student loan programs evolved, revealing how key policy decisions ultimately affected the lives of individual students.

In Berman’s telling, policy debates have a familiar echo from decade to decade. Political leaders call for the opening of the doors of college to everyone, regardless of income, but few were willing to invest the money necessary to pay college costs. Student loans were how they reconciled lofty ideals with paltry budgets. 

“Lawmakers were interested in expanding access to college,” Berman writes, but “they wanted to keep costs to the government low. Crucially, policymakers were confident that students would benefit financially from their education, which justified the idea that students should be investing in it themselves.” 

President Lyndon B. Johnson created the federal student loan program in 1965, saying, “This nation could never rest while the door to knowledge remained closed to any American.” But his student loan program was “trying to hold the budget down,” according to the New York Times.

Johnson, Richard Nixon (who signed Pell Grants into law in 1972), and Jimmy Carter argued that making college affordable was in the country’s and individual students’ best interests. That view changed under Ronald Reagan. As governor, Reagan imposed the first tuition charges at the University of California. As president, he starved Pell Grants of funding. As his Secretary of Education Bill Bennett said, “Students are the principal beneficiaries of their investment in higher education” and therefore should “shoulder most of the costs.”

Other themes echo through the decades: Ostensibly a benefit for students, loan programs were shaped by commercial interests, intentionally providing ample profits to financial institutions. Quality standards were watered down to benefit for-profit colleges. Student aid programs also tolerated or even exacerbated racial disparities, even before the advent of LBJ’s student loan program. The G.I. Bill funded a segregated system of higher education. Tuition hikes in California and other states coincided with the growing enrollment of students of color. Black students were—and still are—more likely to go into debt, borrow more, and struggle to repay their loans.

To assess these policies, Berman relies on the voices of borrowers. Her reporting is filled with arresting accounts: single mothers piecing together child care around full-time jobs and full-time course loads, students lured by false promises and left with unpayable debts, some never finishing, others graduating only to find their degrees worthless, and some carrying student debt into retirement.

Crippling student debt is often painted as the consequence of irresponsible decisions. But, as Berman points out, it usually isn’t a choice at all. Many of these borrowers believed they were enrolled in the cheapest college they could find or that it represented their only option for post-secondary education.

Looking for a chance to be her own boss, Patricia Gary enrolled in a Bronx beauty school. The instruction was poor, and she dropped out owing $6,000. Over the next 30 years, as an educator and social worker, she repaid $23,000—sometimes through garnished wages and tax refunds—but could not repay her entire loan. Her balance was finally forgiven at age 75.

Sandra Hinz returned to school in her fifties to become a medical assistant. But when her adult son became disabled in a motorcycle accident, she was forced to become a full-time caregiver. She struggled to get help with her $28,000 loan despite income-driven repayment plans designed to help people like her.

As a young mother, Kendra Brooks attended community college for seven years, followed up with a four-year degree and an MBA at age 50. She borrowed $50,000 over the years to pursue economic security for her family. Now, a Philadelphia council member, Brooks, says that her personal experience—and that of her constituents—is that college never quite pays off.

I have met many people with similar stories. But student loans are a double-edged sword. Many borrowers do graduate and go on to successful careers. Economists say that, at least at current tuition levels, loans increase graduation rates and pay off in the long run. Berman never grapples with the question of whether, in some circumstances, loans might be a reasonable way to pay tuition bills.

But the numbers also say that it is not rare for borrowers to be worse off than if they had never gone to college. Before the student loan pause during the pandemic, a million students defaulted on their loans yearly. One in three borrowers never graduate. Typical Black borrowers owe nearly as much as they borrowed, even 10 years later, having made no dent in the principal. The experiences Berman describes may not be universal, but they are far from isolated anecdotes. The stories and data suggest something is seriously wrong with the student loan program.

As I was peering at my charts around 2010, the student loan debt problem was getting worse. The Great Recession triggered state budget cuts, increasing tuition and student borrowing. For-profit online universities boomed, leaving millions with unaffordable debts. Graduates struggled to find footing in a weak job market, making their loan payments even more burdensome.

Around the same time, a political movement was brewing in Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan. The Occupy Wall Street activists called for free college, student loan debt cancellation, and broader economic reforms. From that ferment emerged the Debt Collective, a determined and idealistic group of borrower activists.

Berman describes how the Debt Collective spent years raising grassroots funds to buy and forgive defaulted loans. They organized borrowers cheated by their colleges to press for their legal rights. They recruited allies to push for change through the political process.

In 2020, one of their allies, Senator Elizabeth Warren, then running for president, made debt cancellation mainstream with a campaign pledge to forgive up to $50,000 in debt for each borrower. It resonated. Soon, other presidential candidates joined her, as did teachers’ unions, civil rights groups, and a new cadre of borrower groups like the Student Borrower Protection Center.

When President Joe Biden won the White House in 2020, the focus turned to executive action rather than legislation. In 2022, Biden canceled up to $20,000 in debt per borrower. But only months later, the Supreme Court struck down the Biden plan, finding it to be an executive overreach.

President Biden advanced a second set of student loan reforms that received less attention but had a similar price tag, were intended to be permanent, and provided complete forgiveness to struggling borrowers. The Washington Monthly called the Saving for a Valuable Education (SAVE) repayment plan a “revolutionary” solution for borrowers with low incomes and large debts. The administration also broke down the bureaucratic obstacles within existing loan forgiveness programs—for public servants and borrowers with disabilities, among others—from discharging the entire loans of 5 million borrowers, including several people Berman profiles. But the income-driven SAVE plan is now tied up in courts, and the Donald Trump administration laid off entire teams that help borrowers receive benefits.

So, where do student-loan borrowers go from here?

Berman says we need a “philosophical shift to change our higher education system to one in which individuals take on less of a risk and taxpayers take on more.” She calls for fixes to the student loan program, “truly free” options at public colleges, and addressing broader economic issues that have made college—and therefore student loans—feel indispensable to young people.

Right now, Congress is going the other direction. The Republican budget bill would cut Pell Grants and make loans more expensive for many borrowers, redirecting some $300 billion to help pay for tax cuts that accrue primarily to high earners and corporations. Republicans also plan to cut off loans for programs whose former students have low earnings. In principle, this is right—we should stop making loans, as we know borrowers will not be able to repay them—and a spirit similar to Biden’s college accountability rules.

But without replacing more loans with more scholarships, the Republican plan will only encourage higher-cost private student loans and push college further out of reach for low-income students and students of color. It would also whittle down the goals of college to students’ future earnings at the expense of upward mobility, public service, religion, the arts, and many other social goals. A better approach would replace loans with a combination of free college, scholarships, and student loan benefits, especially for students who did not receive the ordinary economic benefits of a college degree.

We can also make college a more reliable investment. Over the last decade, we have boosted the college graduation rate by 8 percentage points, but it is still only 61 percent. Leading colleges have found ways to help many students graduate and then connect their degrees to promising careers, using data and fostering advising and counseling. But we have not yet invested in making those steps the norm, particularly at the community colleges and regional public universities that serve most students.

Readers wondering how debt relief became a top-tier political issue should confront the stories in Sunk Cost. It tells the same story as that chart I saw over a decade ago: The system is not working for a sizeable share of borrowers. A new approach to college finance, with substantial new investments, is needed to finally take advantage of higher education’s potential to build stronger lives and a stronger society.

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