Last week, Rachel Maddow covered John Eastman's apparent reversal on his so-called "coup memo."
"So I took it as a sign of good news that John Eastman tried to run away from his memo. I took it as a sign of good news when it comes to this ongoing story of the Republican Party and whether they`re going to evolve out of this new role they`re in as the party that no longer believe else election results are real and should be corrected.
"When criminals try to profess, 'It wasn`t me,' they acknowledge it was a crime and they don`t want to be associated with it. On Friday, it seems like that`s where the legal architect of the attempted insurrection of the capital had landed."
Then she talked about activist and communications strategist Lauren Windsor, who hosts a YouTube channel called The Undercurrent.
"The liberal activist who targets Republicans with a MAGA masquerade", pretending to be like-minded. Lauren Windsor has generated headlines by coaxing conservatives into making revealing statements about their views. Lauren Windsor is the person who before January 6th actually published the first evidence that Republican senators were going to be part of this plan to try to get the electoral votes rejected.
"It is one thing for that to happen in the house. It is a much more serious thing constitutionally for it to happen in both the House and the Senate. It was Lauren Windsor who first showed us the evidence it was going to happen in the Senate, too when she got Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville to admit that Republican senators were going to object to electoral votes just like the Republican members of the House were going to as well."
"Lauren Windsor got that admission from Senator Tommy Tuberville in December and then indeed on January 6th he and other Republicans in the Senate did exactly what he said this. They tried to reject electoral votes from other states.
"Her tape of him previewing that strategy was the first anybody knew that Republicans were going to do that from the Senate side as well.
"More recently, she got the Republican candidate for governor in Virginia, Glenn Youngkin, to admit that although, yes, he was very, very, very, very against abortion rights in Virginia and he had plans to act on that if he, in fact, gets elected, he nevertheless planned to keep quiet about his real views during the campaign in the hopes basically that people would vote for him without knowing what his plans were.
"She keeps getting these admissions. And she talked about how she does it, when she spoke at the New York Times about her method. She turns up her Southern accent a few notches. She waits on the rope line or she waits to get a book signed. She waits to speak with these people at public events. She only goes to public events.
"She then tells them flattering things they want to hear, says she agrees with them and they have a tendency to confide in her things they would not want the public to know. Again, her name is Lauren Windsor. Her organization is called The Undercurrent".
Maddow played her latest, which is Windsor talking to John Eastman.
JOHN EASTMAN, TRUMP LAWYER: Oh, yeah.
WINDSOR: We saw your speech.
EASTMAN: Did I incite you to go down to the Capitol and riot?
WINDSOR: You actually incited us to become supporters of Claremont.
EASTMAN: Oh, good.
WINDSOR: And the work that you are doing is so critical to saving our democracy, and it`s like --
EASTMAN: Thank you.
WINDSOR: -- we couldn`t not support your work after that.
EASTMAN: Okay. Well, thank you very much. That`s very kind of you.
WINDSOR: So, thank you. You are really doing the Lord`s work.
EASTMAN: Well, and I, you know, that`s why, you heard me say it, my old professor said, if you are not catching incoming flak, you`re not over the target. And my God, I must be directly over it because -- yeah. I don`t think there is anybody with as much incoming flak maybe than other Trump himself than I have had in the last six months. I mean, it`s amazing.
WINDSOR: I read your memo and I thought it was solid in all of its legal arguments.
EASTMAN: Yeah.
WINDSOR: I was floored that Mike Pence didn`t do anything. I mean, why didn`t he act on it? Because you gave him the legal reason to do that.
EASTMAN: I know. I know. No, it`s -- and now, in a piece in "The Atlantic" two days ago, they`re already anticipating Trump winning in 2024, and they`re using my arguments in that memo they said had no credibility to argue that Kamala Harris can block Trump`s electoral votes.
I mean, it`s like, you know, it`s like, I mean, come on, people, you can`t --
WINDSOR: Basically everyone is going to say, you`re being proven right.
EASTMAN: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Except they`re not saying that, right?
WINDSOR: But that`s what they mean.
EASTMAN: Exactly. Exactly.
WINDSOR: All your legal reasoning is totally solid.
EASTMAN: Yeah. There is no question.
WINDSOR: Maybe like, you know, just supporting the supporter. Why do you think that Mike Pence didn`t do it?
EASTMAN: Well, because Mike Pence is an establishment guy at the end of the day. And all of the establishment Republicans in DC bought into this very myopic view that Trump was destroying the Republican Party. What Trump is doing is destroying inside the beltway of the Republican Party and reviving the Republican Party in the hinterland, right? What they consider to be deplorable flyover country.
And this uprising that Trump got ahead of, he didn`t create the movement. The movement was there. And he saw it and got ahead of it. But, no, they can`t tolerate that because they have nice, cushy livings inside the Beltway.
As Maddow notes, "I was wrong to see that as some kind of good sign that at least the insurrection guys felt bad and knew it was wrong. He apparently just decided they didn`t have the right guy in as vice president or the whole thing would have worked."
