If it quacks like a duck. Eastman trial gets underway

"To take a photo next to a quote by the architect of the Holocaust would go further to me, as an expert, that there are potentially some antisemitic beliefs floating around in there,” Lewis said.

It’s Wednesday, Alaska!

In this edition: The trial challenging Rep. David Eastman’s eligibility to hold elected office under the Alaska Constitution’s disloyalty clause because of his membership in the Oath Keepers militia group got underway on Tuesday. The case could have a big impact on the organization of the Alaska House, where things are currently split.

Programming note: Sorry for the long, unplanned absence. I caught some post-Thanksgiving crud that really knocked me out and it’s taken a while to get back into the swing of things, but nothing like a really wonky, long trial to get into it.

Current mood: ☃️

Eastman trial gets underway

After a snow delay on Monday, oral arguments got underway in the lawsuit challenging far-right Wasilla Republican Rep. David Eastman’s eligibility to hold elected office.

The lawsuit, which was brought by Wasilla voter Randall Kowalke, argues Eastman should not be allowed to hold office under the Alaska Constitution’s disloyalty clause due to his lifetime membership in the Oath Keepers militia group. The group’s founder and other leaders have been convicted of seditious conspiracy for their involvement in the Jan. 6, 2021, breach of the U.S. Capitol building.

Eastman attended Trump’s rally outside the U.S. Capitol but there’s no evidence that he entered the U.S. Capitol or had any meaningful role in organizing Oath Keeper activities that day, which included efforts like staging a cache of weapons, an armed “quick-reaction force” and setting up roadblocks. He has not, however, renounced his membership in the Oath Keepers.

In his opening arguments, attorney Goriune Dudukgian said the case against Eastman is straightforward.

“The actual issues for trial are very simple. As the court stated in its recent orders, there are only two elements that we need to prove in the case. The first element is that Rep. Eastman aids or belongs to the Oath Keepers and the second element is that the Oath Keepers advocate concrete action to overthrow the U.S. government or has actually engaged in such conduct,” he said. “We are going to present overwhelming evidence on both of those elements.”

The trial is expected to run into next week with plenty of witnesses to be called.

Tuesday’s hearing focused almost entirely on the testimony of Jon Lewis, a research fellow at George Washington University who has studied domestic extremism and groups like the Oath Keepers. He testified to the Alaska Legislature earlier this year when Eastman’s membership in the Oath Keepers became an issue following a leak of the organization’s membership rolls. Republicans, who defended Eastman’s membership in the group, skipped the hearings altogether.

Eastman’s membership in the Oath Keepers—the first part of the test laid out by Superior Court Judge Jack McKenna in the pre-trial orders—isn’t in dispute. He’s a lifetime founding member who’s given the group more than $1,000 since he joined.

Instead, Lewis’ testimony largely focused on the second part of the test: Whether the Oath Keepers advocated concrete action to overthrow the government or took direct actions to do just that. His testimony ran down the history of the organization, its founder Stewart Rhodes and the many far-right conspiracy theories that they embraced. He explained that the imagery of taking the oath—a nod toward the oath service members and elected officials take—to uphold the constitution but said in reality it has always and clearly been much different.

“The idea that they were merely following their constitutional direction laid out by the founding fathers was really an attempt by Rhodes to leverage the patriotism of average Americans into his own anti-government ideologies,” he said. “They’re claiming that their only interest is to preserve American freedoms and stand up for democracy when in reality it was a group that due to the actions and ideologies of Stewart Rhodes had since its foundation been centered solely on anti-government activity.”

The Oath Keepers, he testified, were only interested in upholding their own conspiratorial ideas about the U.S. Constitution, which is riddled with white supremacy, antisemitism and covid conspiracies.

That led to a series of escalating communications with Oath Keepers membership imploring them to prepare for a bloody exchange with the government while leadership plotted a plan to interfere with the certification of the presidential election.

On Jan. 6 that included staging a cache of weapons nearby and making plans to go to battle with some fantastical mixture of the federal government and “antifa super soldiers.” They didn’t start the breach of the U.S. Capitol but quickly joined with their pseudo-military operations with armored members forming stacks to enter the building and look for leaders like Nancy Pelosi.

Follow the thread: Day one of oral arguments in the Eastman trial

If it quacks like a duck

Rep. David Eastman and his attorney, the far-right Joe Miller, are saving their opening arguments for later in the trial, but if the cross examination of Jon Lewis is anything to go by then it’s going to be… interesting.

Miller seemed to focus much of his attention trying to paint the Oath Keepers and Stewart Rhodes as distinctly separate entities that have little to no bearing on one another. He spent much of the time peppering Lewis with questions about the number of Oath Keepers that were present at the Jan. 6 insurrection—a figure that’s impossible to pinpoint because the federal government hasn’t named and charged everyone believed to have been there—and then went on to suggest that Rhodes didn’t have much sway because he could only get about 1/500th of his membership to attend the event.

He also sparred with Lewis over his opinion—shared during the depositions—that Eastman was both a white supremacist and an antisemite. Eastman cast several head-turning votes in the Legislature against the recognition of Alaska Natives and Black service members.

Miller seemed to think it was a strong line of questioning that undermined Lewis’ credibility, pointing to an infamous blog post authored by Eastman that was accompanied by a picture of Eastman posing in front of a Hitler quote at the Holocaust Museum. Miller said that Eastman was really just warning about the horrors of the Holocaust and covid-19.

Lewis replied that many, many groups see likening the systemic eradication of millions of people to covid-19 mandates as antisemitic but that the optics of the picture alone were clear.

“Going to a Holocaust museum and choosing of all images to take a photo next to a quote by the architect of the Holocaust would go further to me, as an expert, that there are potentially some antisemitic beliefs floating around in there,” Lewis replied.

He also noted that Eastman has shared posts by several virulent and well-known antisemites. Eastman has also posted a link to a Holocaust denial website.

As for the actions of the Oath Keepers on Jan. 6, Miller also sought to downplay the seriousness of the event by suggesting that people were acting with good intentions to halt the certification of the election in order to discover still-undiscovered widespread voter fraud. Miller even went as far as suggesting violence or intent to commit violence against Nancy Pelosi wasn’t as bad as it sounded.

“Violence, in and of itself, against an individual as terrible as it might be is not an attempt to overthrow government, is it?”

Lewis replied that it is when the person is the Speaker of the House.

At one point nearing the end of the day, Miller sparred with Lewis over Lewis’ testimony about true patriotism versus the “twisted patriotism” that Lewis said defined groups like the Oath Keepers. While Miller seemed to suggest that people who sincerely believed that there was widespread voter fraud and antifa super soldiers were acting patriotically, Lewis said it was anything but.

“I do not believe Stewart Rhodes is a patriot. I do not believe Stewart Rhodes follows the constitution,” Lewis said, later adding, “There’s no gray area when it comes to the true goals and motivations of the Oath Keepers. It’s certainly not a non-partisan organization to defend the constitution. It uses the oath as a cover, as propaganda, as nothing else.”