Eastman and Down (for the count)
By 
And that’s that:
John Eastman, the veteran conservative attorney who devised a radical, last-ditch strategy to help Donald Trump subvert the 2020 election, can no longer practice law in California.
The California Supreme Court on Wednesday turned down Eastman’s final bid to salvage his law license, upholding the decision by lower-court judges to order Eastman’s disbarment over his role in the 2020 scheme. The court ordered that his name be “stricken from the roll of attorneys.”
The decision ends a three-year disciplinary process punctuated by a lengthy and high-stakes trial that reviewed Eastman’s emergence as a key architect of Trump’s effort to pressure then-Vice President Mike Pence to singlehandedly block Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory.
A judge on California’s State Bar Court ordered Eastman’s disbarment in 2024, but the decision was tied up in appeals ever since. In the interim, however, Eastman was suspended from practicing law.
Though the decision only applies to Eastman’s license to practice law in California, disbarment decisions are typically adopted by authorities in other jurisdictions in “reciprocal” rulings. Eastman is also a member of the bar in Washington, D.C., though his license has been suspended there as well.
Eastman remains one of the highest-profile figures in Trump’s orbit to face enduring consequences for his involvement in Trump’s 2020 effort. The former clerk to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was identified by former special counsel Jack Smith as a co-conspirator in Trump’s alleged criminal plot to remain in power. He was also criminally charged in Arizona and Georgia, alongside a long list of Trump allies, in cases that were derailed by procedural and prosecutorial defects. Attorneys Rudy Giuliani and Kenneth Chesebro, allies of Eastman in the effort, were similarly disbarred.
It’s just good that Donald Trump has no jurisdiction to overrule the decisions of the California bar. (Yet — you never know what Uncle Clarence will do on the shadow docket.)