“I've decided I should be on the pardon list, if that is still in the works.”

-- attorney John Eastman, the so-called legal architect behind the Jan. 6 insurrection, in an email to Rudy Giuliani after Jan. 6., as revealed during the Jan. 6 hearings

Of course it quickly became a meme. (The above is my favorite example so far.) And it deserves to be a meme. It's an astonishing sentence. Both the casualness of it and the sense of privilege. I've decided? How nice when one gets ownership over one's own absolution. And the whole “if that's still in the works,” indicating they'd all already talked about it, indicating they all knew they were involved in activities that needed presidential pardoning in the first place. Which they did. From The New York Times: 

Mr. Eastman also admitted in a private conversation with Mr. Pence's top lawyer, Greg Jacob, that if the Supreme Court ever had to rule on the legality of a vice president deciding the results of an election on his own, the court would unanimously vote to toss the matter, Mr. Jacob testified. But more important, Mr. Jacob told the committee in a videotaped deposition — snippets of which were played during the hearing — that Mr. Eastman had admitted in Mr. Trump's presence that the plan to pressure Mr. Pence violated an 1887 law known as the Electoral Count Act. According to Mr. Jacob, Mr. Eastman acknowledged the illegality of the scheme in front of Mr. Trump on Jan. 4, 2021, just two days before Mr. Pence was to oversee the certification of the election.

What fucking assholes. At least he never got the pardon. I guess it's still in the works.