A federal judge slammed Donald Trump on Wednesday, charging that his former lawyer John Eastman wrote in an email that the former president knew that voter fraud numbers were not accurate.
Central California US District Judge David Carter wrote in an order that Eastman must hand over 33 documents to the House Jan. 6 Committee, including records that the judge ruled were not covered under attorney-client privilege due to relating to an alleged crime, NBC News reported.
Carter ordered that Eastman, who figured prominently in Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election results, must provide the eight documents under the attorney-client "crime-fraud exception.”
The judge noted in the order that the attorney had an email conversation in which he wrote that Trump knew that the number of Georgia voter fraud challenges his legal team was fighting in a federal lawsuit was “inaccurate.”
Carter blasted Trump for nonetheless pushing forward with the suit and "swearing under oath" that the provided numbers were accurate.
According to the court order, Eastman wrote in an email in December 2020 that "although the President signed a verification for [the state court filing] back on Dec. 1, he has since been made aware that some of the allegations (and evidence proffered by the experts) has been inaccurate.”
“For him to sign a new verification with that knowledge (and incorporation by reference) would not be accurate,” Eastman said in the email.
"Trump and his attorneys ultimately filed the complaint with the same inaccurate numbers without rectifying, clarifying, or otherwise changing them,” Carter said in the order. “President Trump, moreover, signed a verification swearing under oath that the incorporated, inaccurate numbers 'are true and correct' or 'believed to be true and correct' to the best of his knowledge and belief."
Carter described the emails Eastman petitioned the court to not hand over were “sufficiently related to and in furtherance of a conspiracy to defraud the United States.”
“The emails show that President Trump knew that the specific numbers of voter fraud were wrong but continued to tout those numbers, both in court and to the public,” the judge said.