The FBI on Wednesday seized the cell phone of John Eastman the attorney who helped President Donald investigate allegations of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 Presidential election, according to a court filing.
In the lawsuit, Eastman’s attorney said the agents took his iPhone as he left a restaurant last Wednesday evening.
The suit, filed in U.S. District Court in New Mexico, seeks to have the phone returned to Eastman.
Eastman said the agents who approached him identified themselves as from the FBI but appeared to be serving a warrant on behalf of the Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General, which he contends has no jurisdiction to investigate him since he has never worked for the department. He said the cell phone that was seized contains emails that have been the subject of a months-long dispute between him and the House panel.
“That litigation has received extensive media attention, so it is hard to imagine that the Department of Justice, which apparently submitted the application for the warrant at issue here, was not aware of it,” wrote his lawyers, Charles Burnham and Joseph Gribble.
The action was disclosed in a filing in federal court in New Mexico in which Eastman challenges the legitimacy of the warrant, calling it overly broad, and asks that a court force the federal government to return his phone. He says the warrant does not specify any particular crime for which evidence from the phone might be relevant.
The filing does not specify where exactly agents seized his phone, though the warrant was signed by a federal magistrate judge in New Mexico and footage of the seizure aired Monday night indicating it occurred in the city of Santa Fe.
Eastman, who last year resigned his position as a law professor at Chapman University, has been a central figure in the ongoing hearings by the House committee investigating the protest at the Capitol, though he has not been among the witnesses to testify.
