1/ Eastman’s Substack essay—the fact of it; its text; what it says and doesn’t say; the lies contained within it, both the painfully obvious and unhidden ones and the ones it takes an ardent January 6 researcher to see—is merely the jumping off point for a *very* complex report.
2/ I’ve tried to keep the legalese to a minimum here, but the fact remains this breaking news report is about the urgent necessity that the House January 6 Committee pivot to turn what’s presently an oversight investigation into one co-equal branch into an investigation of *two*.
3/ This is almost impossible. The Committee has six months left in its lifespan and only four hearings left in its currently announced run of televised hearings (which have been incredibly well done and uniformly explosive). It has asked to speak to Clarence Thomas’s wife, but...
4/ ...if you’ve been following January 6 news for the last 18 months you know how the story of Jim Jordan—sorry, Ginni Thomas—goes: it starts in claims of having nothing to hide and being willing to talk to the HJ6C and ends in lawyers, litigation, stonewalling, lies and silence.
5/ No one believes Clarence Thomas will ever recuse himself from a January 6 case—and few believe Ginni Thomas will ever give a cooperative interview with the House January 6 Committee. And the recently published (last 24 hours) lie-filled rant by John Eastman encapsulates *why*.
6/ Because the focus of the HJ6C has understandably been on Trump, every hearing topic is naturally Trump-focused: Trump-and-Pence, Trump-and-DOJ, Trump-and-his-campaign advisers, and so on.

It leaves no room to elide Trump from the picture for even a moment and consider, say...
7/ ...the Proud Boys-and-Oath Keepers or, as in this breaking news report, Trump Legal-and-SCOTUS. Trump’s in the background—sometimes foreground—of this story, but the fundamental plot is one devised and executed by lawyers. I previewed this problem here: https://sethabramson.substack.com/p/a-guide-to-watching-the-january-6
8/ The reason I call this report complex is because there are so many moving parts: multiple Trump lawyers; multiple dates, from December '20 to now; multiple forms of contact between Eastman and Ginni Thomas; multiple cases; and multiple forms of relief sought (e.g. injunction).
9/ But it is *also* confusing because of the stuff that is truly shocking here: the stunning synchronicity between the December 2020 Supreme Court leaks *no one ever reported on* and the ones that Republicans decided to howl about when they arose in the Dobbs case in May of 2022.
10/ That’s right—the far-right leak campaign originating inside the Supreme Court, which Justice Roberts says is one of the biggest threats to the Court in its history and began this year, in fact appears to have begun in December 2020 and relates *primarily* to the insurrection.
11/ So now you have a sense of the stakes here.
13/ Worse still, it appears Trump lawyers *factored this privileged access to SCOTUS deliberations* into their coup plot, which means anyone who was leaking to Trump lawyers in December 2020 was assisting in a seditious conspiracy.

And I think you all know where this is going.
14/ The lies told in Eastman’s just-published Substack essay are all part of a common plan or scheme that actually stretches back months and includes his 100+ invocations of his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination before House investigators: he’s hiding SCOTUS leaks.
15/ And Eastman’s hiding of those leaks puts him in such stunning danger of imminent federal indictment and imprisonment that it would take an enormous amount of loyalty not just to a cause but to a *person he has been dear friends with for decades* to justify that level of risk.
16/ I’m not trying to be coy here—the evidence suggests that the Dobbs leak was a Thomas-camp leak designed to pressure Kavanaugh and Barrett to overturn Roe. And it now appears Eastman thought he could use the same leak channel to pressure Kavanaugh and Barrett in December 2020.
17/ In other words, there was a test run for the May 2022 Dobbs leak 18 months before the Dobbs leak and that test run was immeasurably worse than the Dobbs leak because it was conducted as part of a cross-branch coup scheme that right now no one is reporting on or investigating.
18/ Here’s where the law comes in. PROOF has now—with this breaking news report—detailed an 8-point legal scheme by Trump’s lawyers to invest the judicial branch in its coup plot.

This mirrors the 7-point Trump scheme that the HJ6C says was focused on *executive*-branch actions.
20/ In America, there’s one path to winning an election: voters. But Don Jr. appeared (with that word “all”) to be referencing at least *3*. The evidence suggests this is what he was referring to:

â–Ș Federal Executive Branch
â–Ș State Legislative Branch
â–Ș Federal Judicial Branch
21/ And one could add an asterisk to denote a *fourth* option—as the Trumps’ operational control over the White House, SCOTUS, and state legislatures in the battleground states *could* have ultimately thrown the election to Congress in a by-delegation vote the *GOP would’ve won*.
22/ So—based on how the evidence has come in—there’s no great surprise about why Don Jr. was so certain his father would get a second term, and why Trump was so inexplicably enraged when the operational control his son must have been telling him (like Meadows) existed fell apart.
23/ Perhaps journalists dropped this story because it seemed obvious: Don Jr. just meant SCOTUS was in significant part appointed by Trump, right? And that the battleground states had GOP legislatures?

Sure—and no. Because “operational control” means more than passive authority.
24/ We’ve seen, since Don Jr. uttered those anti-democratic words via private text 20 months ago, that Team Trump didn’t just have implicit, passive sway over several branches of government, but a *plan* on how to use it. Remember, Eastman came aboard Team Trump in *summer 2020*.
25/ (Not for nothing, Eastman was brought aboard Trump’s legal team in late summer 2020 at the demand of none other than Cleta Mitchell—a Trump lawyer and Ginni Thomas’ best friend. So Ginni orchestrated John, a longtime family friend, becoming a *second* conduit on Trump Legal.)
26/ So what was the operational control Don Jr. felt—by a month after Ginni’s friends Cleta and John were on Trump’s SCOTUS litigation team—his dad had with respect to SCOTUS? Clearly it was rather more than just the fact that Trump appointed three Justices. That’s not “control.”
27/ The evidence now suggests that Team Trump believed there was and would be a backchannel (and maybe more than one) between SCOTUS and Trump Legal, *and*—and this is where it gets even more confusing—Trump Legal did *not* need five votes on any case it brought before the Court.
28/ If you understand the basic fact that there are 9 Justices on the Supreme Court and you need 5 to win a case, that last tweet seems *incomprehensible* at first blush. How could you win a case with fewer than five votes? Answer: if a win doesn’t require a ruling in your favor.
29/ What if all you need is for the Court to agree to *hear arguments* on a case, because that could give you injunctive relief as you seek to push back a session of Congress? That only requires 4 votes.

Or what if all you need is a *note* attached by 1 Justice to a declination?
30/ This new PROOF report explains why this is in fact *exactly* how Trump Legal saw things post-election. They didn’t believe they needed 5 votes, and didn’t think they could *get* 5 votes. But they could get 1 Justice to declare an issue a “political question” in a declination.
31/ Moreover, what sort of *crazy* magic could turn 2 Justices you know you have on your side based on leaks (Thomas, Alito) into the *4* Justices you need to get you *injunctive relief* in advance of oral argument? How can a leak turn 2 Justices into 4?

Well—just look at Dobbs.
32/ We now know—as is fully sourced in the report atop this thread—that at least the first two of the three Dobbs leaks were far-right Thomas/Alito camp leaks designed to pressure Kavanaugh/Barrett to join Thomas and Alito. But this is not the first time this maneuver was sought.
33/ Eastman apparently had a leak channel he profoundly trusted from the Thomas/Alito camp—a channel he’s still lying to protect, and quite obviously so, in his most recent Substack essay—that he believed could help turn 2 votes into 4 just when Trump needed that magic to happen.
34/ The House January 6 Committee tried to ask Eastman about that channel in a sworn deposition.

Eastman said—100+ times—that answering questions of that sort would incriminate him.

More *must* be done with and about this than simply making it a sidelight of a hearing on Pence.
35/ Now we have Ginni Thomas telling Tucker Carlson’s blog THE DAILY CALLER that she’d be only *too happy* to sit for an hours-long conversation with a Democrat-led select committee her party is about to destroy utterly in 6 months.

Who believes that? Did you believe Jim Jordan?
36/ Jordan told America he’d nothing to hide—and he was able to hold onto that line for *well* over 6 months before disclosing that he would give testimony about January 6 over his dead body (figuratively speaking).

Ginni Thomas can *easily* stonewall until the GOP has Congress.
37/ And this is why I wrote such a long and complex report at PROOF about how the Trump Legal coup plot *exploited* its apparent SCOTUS backchannel—and on the extraordinary lengths it has gone to since to hide it. Because the HJ6C is unlikely to *ever* get any testimony on this.
38/ By the same token, major media is—candidly—so far behind in understanding the positively Boschean dimensions of the January 6 timeline and (sub)narratives, which dwarf in both depth and number anything we saw during Watergate, that it will be little help in the months ahead.
39/ But we are running out of time. DOJ will, I believe, indict Trump, but it cannot do so quickly enough. It will not happen this summer or before Trump announces his 2024 candidacy. It will happen in 2023, and then Trump will use his megaphone to incite violence across America.
40/ And if, in the midst of this, we have a compromised Supreme Court—with a Justice whose wife is allegedly a coup co-conspirator who co-wrote Trump’s “Green Bay Sweep” coup plot, but who will not recuse himself from *any* January 6 cases—we could be looking at even more mayhem.
41/ So you tell me: who’ll investigate the Court? When? How? To what end? And how will a Committee facing disbanding at the hands of GOP insurrectionists in the House get testimony from those who know about the Trump Legal-SCOTUS pipeline—one of whom pleaded the Fifth 100+ times?
42/ The only avenue now known is interviewing Ginni Thomas—which is how you know she’ll do just as Jim Jordan, did and speak regularly to conservative media outlets about how *much* she wants to help out the January 6 investigation right up until she tells America to f*ck itself.
43/ So hopefully everyone now understands the stakes in having independent media outlets like PROOF—which has been almost exclusively covering the January 6 investigation for a year and a half—open up this new front in the January 6 investigation as it enters its last six months.
44/ Breaking news reports on this will delve into topics other January 6 reports don’t—who is Kenneth Chesebro? What is TEXAS v. PENNSYLVANIA? What is the Gohmert Lawsuit? What does the phrase “a Bush v. Gore-style injunction” mean?—but that doesn’t make them any less critical.
45/ I’m going to admit I’ve more questions than answers right now. How to handle Thomas? An impeachment *investigation* should’ve been opened long ago, surely—it’s inexplicable that Pelosi is allowing only one select committee at a time—but it’s not clear that will happen at all.
46/ (Keep in mind an impeachment *investigation* is *not* Articles of Impeachment or an impeachment trial. It’s just what it says: an investigation—opened on just the sort of reasonable basis Congress already has to open it—to determine if Articles of Impeachment are warranted.)
47/ Speaker Pelosi could decide *right now* that if a) Ginni Thomas stonewalls Congress despite agreeing to speak to it or b) speaks to HJ6C investigators and lies or refuses to answer key questions, it will *force* Congress to open up an impeachment *investigation*—but will she?
48/ Alternately or in addition, HJ6C could speed up its deconfliction procedures with DOJ to hasten the seemingly inevitable Eastman indictment—putting a squeeze on him to cooperate sooner rather than later—or it could *subpoena* Ginni Thomas the *second* she balks (as she will).
49/ But all of these things are on hard six-month timelines that seem to make them impossible or impractical (indeed, a small part of me thinks that Ginni Thomas may be delusional enough to briefly entertain actually speaking to Congress on the theory that she can outsmart them).
50/ So for now, in advance of what I earnestly (but with horror) believe will be localized civil unrest in 2023, all I can say is America must get caught up as quickly as possible with the key players in what looks like a coup plot within a *second* branch of our government. /end
PS/ As ever, I’ll answer questions in the comment section of the article atop this thread. It may be tomorrow, however, as I’m exhausted beyond words from the multiple live-streams this week, the multiple articles, and the fact that I’m still working on two *more* PROOF articles.
PS2/ The articles coming to PROOF shortly involve the biggest unanswered questions about the Insurrection Eve “Loudermilk Tour”—and they’re *big* ones—and the recap of the Thursday HJ6C hearing, which I believe was the most complex but *explosive* one yet. http://sethabramson.substack.com 
You can follow @SethAbramson.
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