More than 37,000 pages of emails related to former President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election have been shielded from the Jan. 6 select committee by Trump’s attorney John Eastman, who has asserted attorney-client privilege on his work for Trump.
The situation has created a gargantuan dispute since the Jan. 6 committee has objected to every claim over those pages, which the US. District Court Judge David Carter will have to deal with now in a case-by-case review.
The scope of the dispute was revealed to Judge Carter by Eastman, whose three-month review conducted at Carter’s request forced him to review 1,000 to 1,500 pages per day since January.
The emails were all subpoenaed and drawn by the committee from Chapman University, where Eastman was employed until shortly after Jan. 6, but in an effort to slow down the process, Eastman sued the school and the select committee.
Although he described the select committee’s work as urgent and already ruled he believes that by engaging in a criminal conspiracy to obstruct Congress, Eastman and Trump were involved in a coup in search of a legal theory, Carter will now have to determine how to parse these pages in time for the committee to employ them in its ongoing investigation of Trump’s effort to impede the transfer of power.
Carter was urged by the committee to prioritize documents sent Jan. 4 – Jan. 7, 2021, the key period of the panel’s review which resulted in Carter’s bombshell ruling about Trump’s likely criminality but now he must turn to the broader review of emails stretching back the date of the presidential election, Nov. 3, 2020.
About 30,000 of the 90,000 pages of emails subject to the select committee subpoena, were immediately ruled out as irrelevant and Eastman made no privilege claims over an additional 25,000 pages of records.
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