MacIver Asks U.S. Supreme Court to Stop States From Trying Federal Crimes Through the Bar

MADISON — The John K. MacIver Institute for Public Policy today filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the U.S. Supreme Court urging the justices to take up Eastman v. State Bar of California and reaffirm that a state should not be able to strip a lawyer of his license by finding he violated a federal law when he engaged in certain actions in a federal tribunal.

John Eastman, President Trump’s lawyer after the 2020 election, is at the center of this issue. Federal prosecutors never charged Eastman with any crime, and in November 2025, President Trump granted him a full pardon for offenses against the United States arising from his legal advocacy about that election. But California’s state bar later took his law license, finding that he had violated federal law by conspiring to interfere with Congress as it counted the electoral votes on January 6, 2021.

“Federalism cuts both ways, and the state and the federal government have separate roles in our country,” said MacIver CEO Annette Olson. “California engaged in lawfare against someone it didn’t like, even though it had no jurisdiction to do so. If that stands, any state can do the same thing to the next lawyer who gives advice the other side hates.”

Eastman has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to review the disbarment. His lawyers, Jay Sekulow and the American Center for Law and Justice, filed that request on September 11. The California Supreme Court had refused to take the case on April 15. MacIver is not a party. It filed as a friend of the court, in support of Eastman, and it is asking the justices to hear the case.

This is not an abstract fight for Wisconsin. In December 2024, the Madison group Law Forward asked the office that disciplines Wisconsin lawyers to investigate James Troupis, the attorney who advised that an alternate slate of presidential slate of electors be prepared in the event that the 2020 Wisconsin presidential result was overturned. The tool is the same: a professional grievance, coordinated by an attorney’s or client’s political opponents, aimed at legal advice given about a federal election. MacIver has already gone to the Wisconsin Supreme Court in Troupis’s criminal case arising from this same legal representation.

NOTE: This press release was submitted to Urban Milwaukee and was not written by an Urban Milwaukee writer. While it is believed to be reliable, Urban Milwaukee does not guarantee its accuracy or completeness.

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