October 02, 2025 01:48 PM UTC

Boulder Republicans Welcome CU Coupster John Eastman Because #LOLNothingMatters

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• by: Colorado Pols

Last week, the Boulder County Republican Party announced their keynote speaker for their upcoming annual fundraiser known as the Make-Lincoln-Turn-Over-In-His-Grave Dinner–and for all the deliberately provocative names local Republicans regularly fly in to headline their fundraisers, their choice in this locale is what the experts call a real doozy:

John Eastman, as readers who haven’t jammed his name down the memory hole are aware, was the University of Colorado’s “Visiting Conservative Scholar” in early December of 2020 when he got the call that the Trump administration needed some legal help with their plot to not concede defeat in the recently held presidential election Trump had lost. Eastman proceeded to concoct a plan to throw the normally routine certification of the election by Congress into procedural chaos on January 6th, 2021, a plan that failed when Vice President Mike Pence arguably saved American democracy by refusing to cooperate. As a result of Eastman’s actions as a member of the Trump campaign’s “Elite Strike Force” of dubiously qualified lawyers that included Colorado’s own Jenna Ellis, Eastman was disbarred by the state of California, taking him off cases in which he was representing the Colorado Republican Party, and criminally indicted in Georgia and Arizona.

After the House committee investigating the January 6th, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol referred Eastman to the Justice Department for federal prosecution in December of 2022, CU further disowned Eastman’s conduct, which led to calls to close the school’s “conservative affirmative action” Benson Center:

“John Eastman has not been affiliated with CU for some 20 months. As CU Boulder Chancellor Philip DiStefano clearly noted immediately following the Jan. 6 riot, Eastman’s conduct in the weeks preceding Jan. 6 and on that day was shameful and it certainly does not reflect CU’s values. He is an embarrassment. We respect both the January 6 Committee’s right to make a referral to the Justice Department and the department’s ability to evaluate the evidence and determine whether to seek charges against him.”

In addition to the state-level indictments, Eastman was an unindicted co-conspirator in the federal case brought against Donald Trump by special prosecutor Jack Smith. That prosecution screeched to a halt after Trump’s once-unthinkable re-election last November, while the two state cases have bogged down in a politically convenient pre-trial swamp of second-guessing.

Despite Trump’s determination to erase his actions after the 2020 presidential election from the historical record, Eastman was disbarred, and was condemned by the university he worked for while he plotted Trump’s failed coup attempt. If we were in Eastman’s shoes, our sense of shame would preclude taking a stage in Boulder to pretend none of that happened or was somehow justified.

But we would be kidding ourselves to imagine that Eastman has any shame left.