Three lawsuits attempting to bankrupt a constitutional scholar for giving the prior Republican president legal advice will cost him $3 to $3.5 million, John Eastman said Friday. Eastman was a target of Democrats’ illegal Jan. 6 Committee and has been harassed by the FBI and courts since assisting Donald Trump in 2020 constitutional litigation.
“This is what I call the authoritarian moment in our history,” Eastman told reporter Julie Kelly and podcast cohost Liz Sheld. “The whole premise here is: ‘The government has spoken and you continue to say otherwise. Therefore you must be lying.'”
Eastman’s legal defense fund has raised more than half a million dollars so far, “less than a third of what we’ve already incurred and less than about a sixth or seventh of what we’re likely to incur before we’re done,” Eastman said. To defend himself legally in a Georgia prosecutor’s case against Trump and dozens of his associates, Eastman needs to raise $1 million by February, he said: “I’m trying very hard not to completely deplete my wife’s retirement fund.”
“When our founders pledged their lives and their fortunes and their sacred honors to create a government of a free people with free institutions, they put everything on the line,” he responded when Kelly asked how he and his wife are holding up. “And we are at a crossroads in our country on whether we’re going to go back to a tyrannical form of government where we are subjects, not free citizens, or whether we are going to fight like our forefathers fought and our foremothers fought, for liberty.”
