Greg Jacob testified in John Eastman disbarment proceedings.
Moments before a pro-Trump mob would smash its way through a Capitol window, Greg Jacob was a few yards away at a self-serve coffee shop in the building’s Senate wing.
Jacob, then-Vice President Mike Pence’s top lawyer, was in the middle of a furious email exchange with John Eastman, the attorney who would soon become famous as the architect of former President Donald Trump’s final bid to remain in power. But as Jacob was drafting his most pointed salvo yet — a fierce rejection of Eastman’s claim that Pence could simply postpone the count of electoral votes — he heard an ear-splitting crash, the sound of a riot shield, stolen by a member of the Proud Boys, shattering a nearby window.
Jacob described this moment — the very second the Capitol was physically breached by rioters on Jan. 6, 2021 — on Wednesday as he testified virtually at Eastman’s California disbarment proceedings in Los Angeles.
There was a “large, loud ‘boom boom boom,’” Jacob recalled. “Suddenly the glass just shattered. The window was probably about 35 or 40 feet from where we were.”
For Jacob, who appeared Wednesday via Zoom, it was the first time he had been face to face with Eastman since that fateful Jan. 6 email exchange. And it came under extraordinarily different circumstances.
Today, Jacob is regarded as one of the key checks on an effort by Trump to cling to power despite losing the election. Eastman, on the other hand, is fighting to keep his bar license even as potential criminal charges loom, part of a wave of slow-moving accountability efforts by bar authorities for the lawyers who helped engineer and facilitate Trump’s plan.
Jacob has described the coffee run before — but on Wednesday he revealed that it came in the midst of drafting an email that would arrive in Eastman’s inbox at 2:14 pm on Jan. 6, 2021, one minute after Proud Boys member Dominic Pezzola breached the building. He had completed most of it when he heard the crash and sprinted — along with Pence’s military aide who carries his nuclear football — back to the Senate chamber. As they caught their breath and awaited direction from police, Jacob typed out one furious final line: “Thanks to your bullshit we are now under siege.”
Jacob was the first witness called by California bar attorneys — aside from Eastman himself — to testify about Eastman’s conduct in the weeks leading up to Jan. 6. It was Eastman who most pointedly pushed the notion in those weeks that Pence could single-handedly keep Trump in power by asserting unprecedented power to reject (or simply refuse to count) Joe Biden’s presidential electors. He lobbied Republican state legislators to mount local challenges to election results and appoint “alternate” slates of pro-Trump electors, which would give Pence the pretense of a “dispute” to resolve. And when no legislatures agreed, Eastman shifted his theory toward Pence, claiming he had complete power to determine the outcome of the election — a prospect Pence sharply rejected.
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Pence aide recalls fierce exchange with John Eastman as Capitol was breached https://t.co/FO4JIXo4km
— POLITICO (@politico) June 22, 2023
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