Transcript of the 60 Minutes segment on Eastman, for those of us who don't like to watch.
Nothing new.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/john-eastm ... ranscript/
I've been mulling over the hectic last couple of days of the disbarment hearing (no references in the above transcript; I'm just mulling). Carling (state bar) finally had the chance to deal with some of the idiot theories Eastman had been presenting--all well known, all debunked (though not debunked enough for Eastman's liking).
One item that always irritated me was a bunch of in-house election data from some state (GA? WI? AZ? I can't remember) that summarized in a table the flow of mail-in ballots through the system. One column was labeled something like "Mailing Date." The stats guys hired by MAGA to review the data were shocked to discover that for some category of mail-in ballots, the Mailing Date was the same as the "Date Received" or some such.
A red flag went up. Finally, clear evidence of error, irregularity, or fraud! Publish this far and wide and demand investigation! Use it, and a hundred other similarly discovered red flags to accuse anyone you like of suppression, criminality, and rigging!
Now me, I am not a stats dude, but I am an editor and I've edited perhaps a gazillion tables in my day. And even if you never saw a table before, if you saw something that made no sense, the first thing you would think to do would be to ask whoever made the table what's the what?
It took Carling about three minutes to establish that none of the famous stats guys Eastman had pointed to had ever worked on an election, nor had they bothered to drop a dime to call the BOE of whatever state it was, and ask the obvious question about the meaning of the column headers.
Which, if they had done so, would have turned up the answer that "Mailing Date" did not mean "Date that a mail-in ballot was sent out to a voter," but rather some other step in the highly detailed tracking process. I'll the skip the details, which I don't remember anyway.
My point being: Yes, this is one simple example of exactly how un-serious the stop the steal effort was, for all it's arrogant experts and ninjas. But it is also convincing evidence to me that Eastman is a blatant charlatan whose claims of "just wanting to be confident in our voting system" and "I believe to this day that irregularities occurred" are self-consciously bogus.
A dude of Eastman's academic credentials, faced with a couple of column headers in a table that don't make sense to him, and he skips past the part of the analysis where you ask for clarification? He said repeatedly, deviously, that he "listened to the experts." BS. He sat in that courtroom and listened the to his stats expert claiming the table was evidence of malfeasance, and he sat right in that courtroom and listened to Carling eviscerate his expert. He heard the election officials themselves explain the table.Then he got back on the stand and said that everything he'd heard in that courtroom made him more convinced than ever that the election was rigged.
I suppose it's possible that this is the first time in his life he ever ignored all of his training and experience in an effort to convince others that he was "right." But I doubt it.