The Colorado Republican in charge of a lawsuit aimed at preventing unaffiliated voters from casting ballots in state primaries told Colorado Politics that the state GOP’s lead attorney in the case is “the right man for the job,” despite the lawyer’s appearance this week as a co-conspirator in a federal felony indictment, which alleged that former President Donald Trump tried to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

Former top Trump legal advisor John Eastman has the experience and know-how to represent Colorado Republicans in the legal action, said former state Sen. Kevin Lundberg, R-Berthoud, the head of a party committee overseeing the lawsuit.

“I don’t have any qualms about it,” Lundberg said Friday in an interview. “He’s competent and qualified and the right man for the job, I believe.”

He added that he wasn’t bothered by Eastman’s appearance in the four-count criminal indictment handed down by a federal grand jury in Washington on Tuesday.

“it’s all politics,” Lundberg said. “It’s just absurd what they’re doing.”

The indictment charges Trump with waging a months-long campaign with six unnamed co-conspirators to block the transfer of power to President Joe Biden, culminating in the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol. Trump pleaded not guilty to the charges on Thursday in federal court in Washington.

Eastman, who hasn’t been charged, is identified in the indictment as “Co-Conspirator 2,” his attorney confirmed this week to news outlets.

A former visiting scholar of conservative thought and policy at the University of Colorado in Boulder, Eastman has been involved in conservative Colorado political circles for years.

Eastman and local attorney Randy Corporon, one of Colorado’s two elected members of the Republican National Committee, are representing the state Republicans in a federal lawsuit filed Monday in Denver that seeks to overturn Proposition 108, a 2016 ballot measure that opened state primaries to unaffiliated voters, on constitutional grounds.

The lawsuit argues that forcing Colorado’s major political parties to let unaffiliated voters have a say in their nominees violates the GOP’s rights to freedom of association and free speech under the First and 14th amendments.

If the lawsuit succeeds, it would stop registered voters who don’t belong to a political party from voting in either Republican or Democratic primaries, as they’ve been able to do since 2018.

Unaffiliated voters make up nearly half of the state’s electorate.

Eastman and Corporon represented a group of Republican candidates and party officials in a similar lawsuit filed a year ago. That lawsuit was dismissed by a federal judge, who ruled the plaintiffs lacked standing, in part because the state GOP wasn’t a party to the complaint.

Lundberg said it’s no coincidence Eastman has helped spearhead the Colorado lawsuits. The lawyer, a constitutional scholar, “participated to a degree” in a decades-old case that led to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2000 ruling in California Democratic Party v. Jones, Lundberg noted.

That decision struck down a 1996 California primary election law that let all voters, regardless of their affiliation, vote for candidates from any party in each primary race – pick between Republicans for governor and Democrats for state senator, for example.

”In no area is the political association’s right to exclude more important than in the process of selecting its nominee,” wrote Justice Antonin Scalia for the 7-2 majority, describing what Colorado Republicans characterize as a First Amendment right to freedom of association for political parties.

Lundberg said Eastman’s familiarity with the California case makes him an ideal attorney to argue the Colorado one, though some of the particulars are different.

Backers of the Colorado ballot initiative, for instance, said they included a mechanism for parties to opt out of the semi-open primaries if three-quarters of their central committees approve in order to align with the high court’s ruling in the Jones case.

The Colorado GOP’s lawsuit maintains that it’s an impossibly high requirement to meet, rendering it not a valid option. State Republicans have attempted to withdraw from the primary three times but each time fell far short of the threshold. The party is slated to consider the question again next month.

Eastman, Lundberg said, “has much more knowledge about it than most, and I am very confident in his ability and his knowledge.”

Lundberg added that Eastman “has been busy trying to defend himself, but he’s a smart guy who’s been around the block a few times.”

Efforts to reach Eastman were unsuccessful.

Said Lundberg: “I know a lot of people kind of roll their eyes. It’s the political world and, unfortunately, a lot of people are playing very much hardball in that arena, but I don’t try to get sucked into it, I try to stay in my lane.”