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John Eastman is gone from Colorado, but not forgotten.
In fact, his name is back in the news right now, after Politico published a piece about the man behind President Donald Trump’s fight to end birthright citizenship. The president was at the United States Supreme Court this morning, listening to arguments that attorney Eastman has espoused for decades, arguments that provided the basis for Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship.
According to Eastman, despite the guarantees of the 14th Amendment, the Constitution doesn’t automatically confer citizenship on virtually all people born in the U.S. That’s an interpretation he’s been pushing since at least 2008.
A decade later, Eastman — then a law professor at Chapman University — came to Colorado as the University of Colorado Boulder’s Benson Center’s Visiting Scholar in Conservative Thought and Policy for the 2020-21 academic year, an appointment that came with a $186,000 stipend.
The Bruce D. Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization was founded by Bruce Benson, the former Republican gubernatorial candidate who became president of CU from 2008 to 2019, to support “research that explores the ideas emerging from historically Western traditions and traces their continued influence. It focuses particularly on their role in establishing the foundational ideals and institutions of the United States.”
It is not supposed to encourage the demolition of those foundational ideals and institutions.
Midway through his CU tenure, in December 2020, Eastman went to Washington, D.C., where he advised Trump on how he could secure the presidency despite losing the election that November. And Eastman was back on January 6, 2021, joining Rudy Giuliani to rally the troops on the Ellipse outside the White House.
Eastman’s strategy counted on the cooperation of former Vice President Mike Pence, who simply needed to postpone the count of electoral votes — but Pence refused to cooperate. He didn’t buy Eastman’s arguments then, and it looks like the Supreme Court won’t now, according to legal analysts.
CU was quick to jettison Eastman following the Insurrection, after university officials “determined Eastman’s continued pursuit of these duties would likely be disruptive and damage the interests of the campus and the Benson Center.” (It helped that only a handful of students had signed up for his two CU classes that term.) At the time, Eastman threatened to sue, but no legal action was forthcoming.
From that direction, at least. In December 2022, the House January 6 Committee recommended that Eastman – who’d taken the Fifth over a hundred times during his testimony – be prosecuted on two counts of conspiracy to defraud the U.S. and obstructing an official proceeding. The committee called for Trump to be prosecuted on four counts.
But Eastman is off the hook for that. He’s one of dozens of election deniers who were given pre-emptive pardons by Trump in November.
Since then, Eastman, who can no longer practice law in Colorado or California, has been relatively quiet, and he’s not cited by name in the Justice Department’s defense of Trump’s executive order.
“That doesn’t trouble me,” Eastman told Politico. “Remember, Ronald Reagan used to have a sign on his desk that there’s a lot you can get done in this town if you don’t care who gets credit for it.”
