Through a spokesman, Mr. Eastman declined to comment.
The liberal activist Lauren Windsor recently recorded Mr. Eastman calling Mr. Pence an “establishment guy” and standing by the contents of his memo. “These guys are spineless,” he said of lawmakers who refused to join his plan to overturn the election based on false claims of widespread voter fraud.
Trump’s Bid to Subvert the Election
Card 1 of 6A monthslong campaign. During his last days in office, President Donald J. Trump and his allies undertook an increasingly urgent effort to undermine the election results. That wide-ranging campaign included perpetuating false and thoroughly debunked claims of election fraud as well as pressing government officials for help.
Baseless claims of voter fraud. Although Mr. Trump’s allegations of a stolen election have died in the courts and election officials of both parties from every state have said there is no evidence of fraud, Republicans across the country continued to spread conspiracy theories. Those include 147 House Republicans who voted against certifying the election.
Intervention at the Justice Department. Rebuffed by ranking Republicans and cabinet officials like Attorney General William P. Barr, who stepped down weeks before his tenure was to end, Mr. Trump sought other avenues to peddle his unfounded claims. In a bid to advance his personal agenda, Mr. Trump plotted to oust the acting attorney general and pressed top officials to declare that the election was corrupt. His chief of staff pushed the department to investigate an array of outlandish and unfounded conspiracy theories that held that Mr. Trump had been the victor.
Pressuring state officials to “find votes.” In a taped call, Mr. Trump urged Georgia’s secretary of state to “find 11,780 votes” to overturn the presidential election and vaguely warned of a “criminal offense.” And he twice tried to talk with a leader of Arizona’s Republican party in a bid to reverse Joseph R. Biden’s narrow victory there.
Contesting Congress’s electoral tally on Jan. 6. As the president continued to refuse to concede the election, his most loyal backers proclaimed Jan. 6, when Congress convened to formalize Mr. Biden's electoral victory, as a day of reckoning. On that day, Mr. Trump delivered an incendiary speech to thousands of his supporters hours before a mob of loyalists violently stormed the Capitol.
Partisan election reviews. Since leaving office, Mr. Trump and his loyalists have embraced partisan reviews of the 2020 election. In Arizona, a criticized Republican review of the results in the state’s largest county failed to support Mr. Trump’s false claims of fraud. Despite that, the so-called Stop the Steal movement appears to be racing forward as more G.O.P. politicians announce Arizona-style reviews in other states.
In the Oval Office the day before Congress’s electoral vote certification, Mr. Trump pushed Mr. Pence to join the plot in a string of encounters, including one meeting that lasted at least an hour. Mr. Eastman was in the office and argued to Mr. Pence that he had the power to act.
Just before Mr. Pence headed to the Capitol on Jan. 6, Mr. Trump called the vice president’s residence to push one last time.
“You can either go down in history as a patriot,” Mr. Trump told him, according to two people briefed on the conversation, “or you can go down in history as a pussy.”
Mr. Eastman spoke at the rally that preceded the Capitol assault and pushed baseless claims of widespread voter fraud. As outrage grew in the days after the riot, he abruptly retired from his job as an endowed professor and constitutional law scholar at Chapman University.
The House committee investigating the attack has demanded that the White House turn over documents and communications concerning Mr. Eastman. Investigators also plan to ask him, potentially under subpoena, to sit for an interview as they scrutinize the circumstances surrounding the largest assault on the Capitol since the War of 1812. About 140 officers were injured in the violence, which claimed several lives.
Maggie Haberman and Michael S. Schmidt contributed reporting.