Trump lawyer John Eastman is refusing to hand over 37,000 pages of emails to the Capitol-riot committee, report says

• John Eastman is refusing to hand over 37,000 pages of email to the Jan 6 committee.
• He says they're shielded by attorney-client privilege. A federal judge is now weighing his argument.

The conservative attorney John Eastman is defying a request from the House January 6 committee to hand over 37,000 pages of email relating to his work with former President Donald Trump, citing attorney-client privilege, Politico reported.

John Eastman, who wrote a memo outlining how Trump could overturn his 2020 defeat, had been ordered by US District Judge David Carter in January to review 90,000 pages of email requested by the House committee investigating the attack on the Capitol.

Eastman had been reviewing hundreds of pages of emails a day since January, Politico reported.

He is now claiming that the 37,000 pages should be shielded from the House committee under laws allowing attorneys and their clients to discuss issues confidentially, Politico reported.

Eastman represented Trump in the months after the November 2020 election, as the president sought to overturn his defeat.

But the House committee is objecting to the confidentiality claim, and referred the issue to Carter for adjudication, who will review all of the 37,000 emails.

Last month Carter said that Eastman and Trump were "more likely than not" engaged in a criminal conspiracy to obstruct Congress, and called their activities ahead of the riot "a coup in search of a legal theory."