(Bloomberg) — The lawyer who helped devise Donald Trump’s elaborate plan to stay in power after losing the 2020 presidential election claims his mobile phone was seized by federal agents outside a New Mexico restaurant last week.
John Eastman, the former dean of Chapman University’s law school, filed a petition for the return of the phone on Monday in federal court in Albuquerque, claiming he was served with a search warrant, frisked and forced to unlock the phone with his biometric data as he left the restaurant on June 22.
The warrant was defective, Eastman claims, because the document “mentions no crime at all, much less any specific crime,” according to the filing.
Eastman, whose name and documents have featured heavily at the House select committee hearings on the Jan. 6 insurrection, also seeks a court order for the destruction of all copies of any information retrieved from the device.
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The Justice Department didn’t immediately respond to a message seeking comment.
The filing is the latest twist in the select committee’s probe into Eastman, who was part of a broad effort to sway state officials to appoint fake electors for Trump and pressure then-Vice President Mike Pence to reject electors for Joe Biden. The false theory ultimately helped trigger the Capitol riot.
In his complaint, Eastman asked the court to prohibit further access to his seized iPhone Pro 12 and block sharing of any information “until he has a full and fair opportunity to assert and protect his constitutional rights and the privileged communications of his numerous clients.”
The lawyer, whose earlier lawsuit in California failed to prevent disclosure of hundreds of documents to the Jan. 6 committee, said in Monday’s filing in New Mexico that the seized phone contains many of the files that are protected by attorney-client privilege.
According to the complaint, the agents who searched Eastman said they were from the Federal Bureau of Investigation but “appeared to be executing a warrant issued at the behest of the Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General.”
(Updates with Eastman seeking destruction of seized data)
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