Laura Ingraham seemed more interested in playing Trump defense attorney than rehabbing Eastman. But she threw him a bone by overlooking his lies.
First, Ingraham lets Eastman lie about January 6th
Here is Eastman's response to being asked for his reaction when he learned that the Capitol had been breached.
EASTMAN: It was terrible and anybody thinks that we had any hand or I had any any hand in coordinating it doesn't know how much it was contrary to what we were trying to do, which is, which is get the illegality and fraud allegations aired in a public way. That went out the window the second that Capitol was breached. So, it was as much against our interest as anybody's for that thing to have happened. And, you know, I mean, the peaceful rally down at the Ellipse, with somewhere between a quarter million and a half million people, another rally that was properly permitted to occur on the northeast corner of the Capitol, all of that peaceful right of the American people to petition their government for redress of grievances to speak out against what they saw was wrong with the election. All of that went out the window.
FACT CHECK: Eastman and Trump used the insurrection-caused delay of the certification vote at the Capitol to try to further their coup plan.
Via WaPo’s Philip Bump:
[T]he rally intended to take place outside the Capitol was “properly permitted” only after the organizers of the rally misrepresented who they were to Capitol Police. [More significantly,] Trump and his allies used the delay triggered by the riot to continue to cajole legislators to block the electors from states won by Joe Biden. Trump himself called Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) to make his pitch … though he’d actually been trying to reach Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.).
In fact, as Politico’s Kyle Cheney noted, Eastman even sent an email on the evening of Jan. 6 arguing that, because the debate over counting electors from Arizona had extended beyond the two hours allowed under the Electoral Count Act, Vice President Mike Pence should similarly stretch the bounds of that law to introduce a pause in the finalization of the count. The debate extended beyond two hours because it was interrupted by the riot.
Ingraham either didn’t know Eastman was lying or she deliberately gave him a pass. I vote for option 2, especially since they have the “clerked for Clarence Thomas” connection. Not exactly the best indication of good ethics, though.
Ingraham appears to be helping the Trump defense plan of blaming his lawyers for the coup attempts
Last month, Rolling Stone reported that Trump’s lawyers plan to defend him on the criminal charges related to his attempts to overturn the 2020 election by scapegoating Eastman.
“It is an argument the [former] president likes, and the team is on board with it,” one Trump adviser bluntly says, then somewhat ominously adding: “John [Eastman] and Rudy [Giuliani] gave a lot of counsel … Other people can decide how sound it was.”
That puts an interesting light on Ingraham’s comments about Eastman’s coup plans. For example, when Eastman said, “Some people had urged that Vice President Pence simply had power to reject electors whose certification was still pending,” Ingraham interrupted to say, “I don’t believe that, but go ahead. I don’t believe that.”
So, Eastman continued:
EASTMAN: I don't either and I and I explicitly told Vice President Pence in the oval office on January 4th, that even though it was an open issue, under the circumstances we had, I thought it was the weaker argument, and it would be foolish to exercise such power even if he had it. What I recommended, and I've said this repeatedly, is that he accede to requests from more than a hundred state legislators in the swing states to give them a week to try and sort out the impact of what everybody acknowledged was illegality in the conduct of the election election.
Ingraham interrupted again to say, “Yeah, not everyone acknowledges that.” She claimed, “there were obviously irregularities that everybody had seen … whether it rose to the level of changing the outcome of the election – again, without a legal proceeding in the states that mattered, the argument, ultimately, was a difficult one to make. I mean, hence here we are.”
Did Eastman put himself in more legal jeopardy in this interview?
Meanwhile, as Salon noted, legal experts think Eastman damaged his own case in this interview. Eastman has already been indicted in Georgia’s election interference case and is an as-yet unindicted co-defendant in the federal election interference case. “He's admitting to committing federal crimes on national television,” Georgia law professor Anthony Michael Kreis said.
After this interview aired, MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell tore apart Eastman’s lies. For one thing, when he said, “Some people had urged that Vice President Pence simply had power to reject electors,” Eastman failed to mention he was one of those people. O’Donnell went on to read from sworn testimony given to the federal grand jury indicating that Eastman very much tried to get Pence to reject the electors.
What’s been revealed here is that while Ingraham obviously feels some affinity for and kinship with Eastman, she’s throwing him under the bus, too.
You can watch it below, from the August 30, 2023 The Ingraham Angle. Underneath is O’Donnell’s fact check, from the August 30, 2023 The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell.