Federal agents last week seized the cell phone of John Eastman, a lawyer who pushed false claims that mass voter fraud tainted the 2020 election and urged President Trump and other Republicans to block Joe Biden from becoming president.
Eastman’s lawyer, Charles Burnham, filed papers in federal court in New Mexico Monday asking a judge to order the cell phone returned to Eastman. It was seized pursuant to a search order when he left a restaurant last Wednesday — a day in which federal agents around the country delivered subpoenas, executed search warrants, and interviewed witnesses in a significant expansion of the criminal probes surrounding Jan. 6.
That same day, federal agents conducted a search at the northern Virginia home of Jeffrey Clark, a former Justice Department official who Trump considered appointing to run the department because he was willing to further a scheme to declare the election results invalid in some key states.
Both Clark and Eastman played crucial roles in Trump’s efforts in late 2020 and early 2021 to convince state legislators in about a half dozen states to replace the electors that Biden had won with electors for Trump. In theory, such a replacement would have kept Trump in the White House.
Monday’s court filings also suggest the Justice Department’s inspector general has become an important player in the criminal probes surrounding Jan. 6, because Eastman says his phone was taken by FBI agents acting on behalf of the inspector general. A...
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