Eastman disbarred in California, plans Supreme Court appeal over 2020 election claims

California’s highest court disbarred John Eastman and ordered his name stricken from the roll of attorneys, capping a bar case that found the lawyer culpable on 10 of 11 charges tied to his role in Donald Trump’s effort to stop Joe Biden’s 2020 victory. The court also imposed $5,000 in sanctions, a formal rebuke that goes beyond suspension and bars Eastman from practicing law in California.

Eastman’s lawyer, Randall A. Miller, said he will seek review before the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing the punishment raises constitutional questions and conflicts with First Amendment protections for attorney speech. Eastman had already been on involuntary inactive status while appeals were pending, but the California ruling makes the discipline permanent in the state unless it is overturned. The decision could also follow him elsewhere through reciprocal discipline, and his Washington, D.C., bar license has already been suspended.

The case moved through a lengthy disciplinary track. The State Bar of California filed charges in 2023. In March 2024, the State Bar Court Hearing Department recommended disbarment. The State Bar Court Review Department affirmed that recommendation on June 14, 2025, and the California Supreme Court declined to take up Eastman’s appeal before issuing the disbarment order on April 15, 2026. State Bar officials said the courts concluded Eastman had advanced false claims about the 2020 presidential election to mislead courts, public officials and the public.

That finding reaches well beyond one lawyer. Eastman, who previously served as dean of Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law, became a central figure in Trump’s post-election effort to keep the electoral count from being finalized. The House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol said Eastman drafted a two-page memo on December 23, 2020, proposing that Mike Pence refuse to count electoral votes from Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, or delay the count so state legislatures could name new electors. The committee also said Trump met with Pence and Eastman on January 4, 2021, as the scheme took shape.

The ruling places Eastman alongside other Trump-aligned lawyers who have faced bar discipline, including Rudy Giuliani and Kenneth Chesebro. Constitutional-law attorney Matthew Seligman, who testified against Eastman in the disbarment trial, called the outcome “a just end to a story of injustice.” Jeffrey Clark, another Trump-era lawyer facing discipline, called the ruling “a travesty” and urged Eastman to pursue Supreme Court relief. The disbarment shows that professional regulators are willing to use the most severe sanction available when lawyers are found to have helped undermine the transfer of power after the 2020 election.