Did you hear about the golfer who started a colonoscopy clinic? He does 18 holes a day! Drum roll please.  I was thinking about colonoscopy jokes as I read the slew of headlines regarding the January 6 committee’s latest effort to crawl up Donald Trump’s ass.  Politico, The Hill and The Washington Post were all salivating over click bate headlines citing potential “criminal conspiracy” by Donald Trump and one of his lawyers, John Eastman to block Congress from certifying the election in 2020.  I must tell you, as much digging as Congress and others have done in the last five plus years to ensnare Trump criminally, he must be the squeakiest President we’ve had in years!  If only my colonoscopies came out that clean.

From the Politico piece:

“The panel released its findings as part of a legal push to force John Eastman, an attorney who was a key driver of Trump’s strategy to subvert the 2020 election, to produce crucial emails tying together elements of the scheme they described. The panel revealed testimony that offered a detailed account of Eastman’s efforts to provide a legal strategy that would justify ordering Pence to overturn the election single-handedly when he presided over Congress’ electoral-vote-counting session on Jan. 6, 2021.”

In The Hill article, you can almost sense authors Rebecca Beitsch and Harper Neidig quivering in excitement as they pounded out the idea that maybe… maybe this will be the ticket!

“Had this effort succeeded, the electoral count would have been obstructed, impeded, influenced, and (at the very least) delayed, all without any genuine legal justification and based on the false pretense that the election had been stolen. There is no genuine question that the President and Plaintiff attempted to accomplish this specific illegal result,” the committee wrote in its filing.

The problem with this entire thing rests in a heated email between Trump’s lawyer, Eastman, and Pence’s lawyer Greg Jacob.  Jacob’s email to Eastman lays waste to the entire conspiracy on it’s face.  Kyle Cheney doesn’t seem to grasp that he’s provided cover for Eastman with his tweet.  Don’t just skim over the tweet, open up the email he points to.

READ Pence counsel Greg JACOB's full response to John Eastman amid the attack on the Capitol, after things had gotten heated between the two of them. https://t.co/94NuXZF2JU pic.twitter.com/l26FP49nS3

— Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney) March 3, 2022

Yes, you can absolutely see that Jacob blames Eastman for functioning “as a serpent in the ear of the President of the United States…”  but he goes on to state what most rational people could see as Eastman’s real “crime” – musing hypothetically.  From Jacob’s email:

“I do not begrudge academics debating the most far-flung theories.  I love doing it myself, and I view the ferment of ideas as a good and helpful thing.  But advising the President of the States, in an incredibly constitutionally fraught moment, requires a seriousness of purpose, an understanding of the differences between abstract theory and legal reality, and an appreciation of the power both the office and the bully pulpit that, in my judgment, was entirely absent here.”

Jacob clearly acknowledges in his own email that HE does not think it was intentional, even if it was unadvisable, to stoke Trump’s fantasies of decertifying the election.

In The Washington Post write-up, the authors acknowledge that the Committee authority to “initiate criminal proceedings.” In fact, these recent charges are just another punishment directed at anyone with ties to Donald Trump.  As I wrote in December of last year, the process IS the punishment. 

“…and the fact that potential criminal law violations were mentioned in a court filing by the panel does not provide any indication that the Justice Department will consider any prosecutions. Nor does it mean that the lawyer-client protection asserted by Eastman will not be upheld.

I hope that in the end (pun intended) the court tells the Jan 6 Committee to stick it where the sun don’t shine.  I know, I know, delusional thinking.  This California judge has ruled against Eastman multiple times, Politico states:

“Carter, who is based in California, has rejected Eastman’s attempts to shield his records, citing the urgency and significance of the select committee’s work. Instead, Carter has ordered Eastman to quickly review 90,000 pages of emails and attachments and to itemize any he thinks should be withheld because of attorney-client privilege. He has repeatedly sided with the committee’s demands, such as requiring Eastman to prioritize emails sent between Jan. 4 and Jan. 7, 2021, and to force him to disclose his legal relationship with Trump, which had never been publicly revealed.”

According to The Hill, the Court has ordered Eastman, like a child at a blackboard, to “review 1,500 of his emails a day for content that might be covered by executive privilege.”

Additionally, new information keeps cropping up that Trump’s belief in a conspiracy to rig the election isn’t all that delusional.  Just over the last 24 hours, Wisconsin’s former Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman suggested the unlikely idea of ‘decertifying’ the 2020 election based on highly unusual voter participation at nursing homes.

Wisconsin special counsel bombshell: 91 nursing homes had 95-100% voter turnout in 2020 | Just The News https://t.co/rtNBMypeps

— John Solomon (@jsolomonReports) March 2, 2022

What I find most amusing, in the bitter way, not the funny way, is that this comes just as Durham digs deeper into the far more likely conspiracy that Hillary Rodham Clinton engaged in the real conspiracy of spying on a sitting President not just at home, but in the freaking Oval Office!

I leave to you which is the more likely conspiracy.  Epstein didn’t kill himself.  Nor Epstein’s “pimp.”  Just sayin’…

Jeffrey Epstein was Epsteined and now Jean-Luc Brunel Jeffery's 'p*mp' has been Epsteined too. Both in jail with cameras mysteriously not working. Is Ghislaine Maxwell next? pic.twitter.com/EBymkd7lZM

— Marion Alice (@marion1_alice) February 21, 2022

Welcome Instapundit readers!

Feature Photo Credit: Tyler Merbler from USA, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons, cropped and modified