Trump likely broke law trying to obstruct Biden win by Congress,

Ex-President Donald Trump likely broke the law by “corruptly” attempting to obstruct the certification by Congress of President Joe Biden‘s Electoral College win on Jan. 6, 2021, a federal judge said in a civil court ruling Monday.

Judge David Carter wrote that Trump with his ally, lawyer John Eastman, “launched a campaign to overturn a democratic election, an action unprecedented in American history.”

“Their campaign was not confined to the ivory tower — it was a coup in search of a legal theory,” Carter wrote in the ruling upholding a subpoena for nearly all of 111 documents from Eastman sought by the select House committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.

If the plan “had worked, it would have permanently ended the peaceful transition of power, undermining American democracy and the Constitution,” wrote Carter in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California ruling.

The decision does not mean that Trump or Eastman will be prosecuted for the suspected crime.

Eastman, while a professor at Chapman University, had written a memo that had detailed how Vice President Mike Pence could reject the certification of Biden’s election wins in seven states by a joint session of Congress on Jan. 6.

If that had happened, Congress could say Trump won the Electoral College, or send the election to the House of Representatives, which could have picked Trump as the winner due to the fact that Republicans controlled a majority of state delegations in that chamber.

Pence did not go along with that plan, saying he did not have such power to reject individual states’ election results. The vice president’s decision infuriated Trump, who with Eastman has falsely claimed that Biden’s victory was a sham enabled by widespread ballot fraud.

Carter noted that Trump and Eastman, according to the select House committee, on Jan. 2, 2021, hosted a briefing that urged several hundred state legislators from states won by Biden “to ‘decertify’ electors” for Biden.

The judge also cited the fact that Trump that same day called Georgia’s secretary of state and urged him to “find” enough votes for Trump to overturn Biden’s election in that state, warning of “public anger and threatened criminal consequences” when that official, Brad Raffensperger, pushed back on the requests.

Two days later, Eastman met with Trump in the Oval Office, along with Pence and the vice president’s chief of staff and counsel, where Eastman “presented only two courses of action for the Vice President on January 6: to reject electors or delay the count.”

On Jan. 5, a day before Congress was due to confirm Biden as the next president, Eastman again met with Pence’s counsel and chief of staff, saying, “I’m here asking you to reject the electors,” the ruling noted.

“Based on the evidence, the Court finds it more likely than not that President Trump corruptly attempted to obstruct the Joint Session of Congress on January 6, 2021,” Carter wrote in his 44-page ruling.

“If the country does not commit…