After schools went remote in 2020, Jessica Ramos spent hours that spring and summer sitting on a bench in front of her local Oakland Public Library branch in the vibrant and diverse Dimond District. Ms. Ramos would connect to the library’s Wi-Fi – sometimes on her cellphone, sometimes using her family’s only laptop – to complete assignments and submit essays or tests for her classes at Skyline High School.

Ms. Ramos, used to texting quickly, was able to do simple assignments online, so at first her schoolwork was very easy. Then came the five-page papers for her two AP classes. “It was a hassle,” she says.

“We have this huge digital divide that’s making it hard for [students] to get their education,” she says.

At the start of the pandemic, only 12% of low-income students, and 25% of all students, in Oakland’s public schools had devices at home and a strong internet connection. David Silver, the director of education for the mayor’s office, says people talked about the digital divide, but there had never been enough energy to tackle it. Once the pandemic hit, suddenly everyone was paying attention, says Mr. Silver, a former Oakland public school teacher and principal.

“You don’t have a computer, you don’t have internet, you can’t even access distance learning,” Mr. Silver says. “The 50,000 kids that are in Oakland public schools cannot actually go to school if they don’t have internet and computers. We need to change that.”

Now, two years into the pandemic, Oakland has been able to connect 98% of all students in the district. As of February, the city had provided nearly 36,000 laptops and more than 11,500 hot spots to low-income public school students. While some students remain unconnected, Oakland’s effort has emerged as an example of how to tackle a citywide digital divide. 

“We were using the crisis as an opportunity to address a moral wrong that needs to be changed forever, not just during the pandemic,” Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf says. “We can’t afford not to.”

Javeria Salman/The Hechinger Report

Jesimiel Merida-Islas, then in fifth grade, works in class at Think College Now elementary school in May 2021. After the #OaklandUndivided initiative launched, Jesimiel received a Chromebook and a hot spot that let her participate more fully in remote learning.

City leaders, including Mayor Schaaf, say a partnership among the district, the mayor’s office, the Oakland Public Education Fund, the nonprofit Tech Exchange, Oakland Promise, and other community-based organizations is behind Oakland’s success. Oakland’s partnership, known as #OaklandUndivided, launched in May 2020. The ambitious goal: close the city’s digital divide for good by providing all K-12 public school students in Oakland with a computer they could keep, a reliable internet connection, and ongoing, multicultural tech support in languages families use.

“We [didn’t] want this to be a band-aid fix,” says Jordan Mickens, a Leadership for Educational Equity public policy fellow who served as #OaklandUndivided’s project manager until August 2021.

While most schools across the country are fully back in person, students continue to struggle to complete homework assignments or participate in remote learning because they lack adequate internet service and access to a computer at home – a phenomenon commonly referred to as the “homework gap.” According to a 2021 report from the think tank New America, 1 in 8 children from low-income families don’t have a computer at home, while 1 in 7 lack access to broadband internet.

“The homework gap isn’t new. It’s just been exacerbated by the pandemic,” says Rebeca Shackleford, the director of federal government relations at All4Ed, an education advocacy nonprofit. “There’s kids who sit in McDonald’s parking lots to be able to do their homework, and that’s pretty tragic.”

Technology as a lifeline

Before the pandemic, the digital divide was often considered a rural problem. But the chaotic effort to get students online during COVID-19 school closures made clear the issue affects Americans living in all kinds of places. A recent study from EducationSuperHighway, a nonprofit that works with school districts to help close the digital divide, found that affordability was the largest contributing factor.

Though only about 40 miles north of Silicon Valley, home to technology giants such as Google and Apple, Oakland was deeply underconnected when the pandemic shuttered its schools. When the Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) shut down, its 83 district-run schools and 33 charter schools served more than 49,000 students. Kyla Johnson-Trammell, Oakland’s superintendent, says the first couple of months of the pandemic were a scramble.

“It was all hands on deck. We piecemealed as much as we could in March and April 2020,” she says. Still, she added, there were “just so many stories of kids using their cellphones to complete assignments, to research, or having to figure out how to get to public libraries in order to access devices.”

The district handed out its existing stockpile of loaner devices and hot spots to as many students as possible, says Preston Thomas, OUSD’s chief systems and services officer.

Javeria Salman/The Hechinger Report

Jen Bender is the data tech lead at Castlemont High School. At the start of the pandemic, only a small part of her job was helping students with technology needs. Once the pandemic hit, that job went full time.

Many of the devices were already four to five years old. Because the district had been under significant financial pressures for the five years prior to the pandemic, “we hadn’t really invested in our infrastructure around technology,” Mr. Thomas says.

Jen Bender is an instructional teacher leader and technology coordinator at Castlemont High School in a historically underresourced neighborhood in East Oakland. Helping the school with its technology needs had been only a small part of her job. Starting in April 2020, Ms. Bender stepped in as the school’s distance learning lead, and finding devices for students became her full-time role.

In the beginning, schools asked students to come get a device if they didn’t have one. But public transportation was disrupted as the state began to shelter in place, and some students and parents had no way to get to school. Other students’ family members were essential workers who couldn’t make it to school during the school day. The newcomers who didn’t speak English were the hardest to reach.

“We realized we had to start really targeting families,” Ms. Bender says. The district pulled in community workers who spoke Spanish and Mam, a Mayan language, and, she says, “had them make individual phone calls to families to get them to come in and pick up those devices.”

As May arrived, district administrators realized that relying on distance learning leads in each school to understand what was happening on the ground was insufficient, Mr. Thomas says. “We didn’t have a centralized way to track devices for students,” he says. “Like, we had no idea. Every school had their individual Google spreadsheet, and there wasn’t a unifying place where any of us could look.”

Meantime, Dr. Johnson-Trammell, the superintendent, and Mayor Schaaf had several conversations about how to tackle technology access and connectivity. As the pandemic unfolded, city officials also saw how deeply the lack of technology access impacted all of Oakland. Almost every resource and piece of information about COVID-19, including where to get food and how to apply for unemployment benefits, was being provided digitally.

“All the information was on the internet. And I imagined, for a minute, what a mother must feel like who didn’t have an internet connection or a computer,” Mayor Schaaf says. “It was so much bigger than just education. It was literally survival for Oakland families. Technology was the lifeline to information.”

“I think I got it! I think I got the computer.”

Mr. Mickens, who spent his first year as a teacher at Castlemont High School in 2014, jumped at the opportunity in June 2020 to run the new #OaklandUndivided initiative to close the digital divide.

The first thing the group did, Mr. Mickens says, was to start tracking the number of public school students who already had a device and internet service, and those who didn’t. By May 2021, the group had accounted for roughly 70% of all Oakland public school students through its Tech Check survey. Going in, the #OaklandUndivided team had anticipated about 25,000 students would need devices, internet, or both, based on the earlier school surveys and census data. The Tech Check survey “opened our eyes,” Mr. Mickens says.

Javeria Salman/The Hechinger Report

At elementary school Think College Now, Maria G. Islas stands with her daughter, Jesimiel Merida-Islas, who received a laptop and hot spot after months of sharing a computer with her mother.

Based on the survey results, #OaklandUndivided estimated that 75% of K-12 public school students, or almost 40,000, were either disconnected or underconnected, with inadequate internet access.

Meanwhile, the #OaklandUndivided leadership team, made up of staff employed by multiple agencies in the partnership, met weekly and launched a fundraising campaign with a goal of $12.5 million to provide the initial devices and hot spots. The campaign was able to bring in big donors like Twitter co-founder and then-CEO Jack Dorsey, who pledged $10 million to help meet the goal.

The campaign relied on Tech Exchange, an Oakland-based nonprofit that has been working on closing the city’s digital divide for more than two decades, to purchase devices and hot spots.

By March 16, 2021 – a year after school closures in Oakland – the partnership had handed out 25,000 Chromebooks to low-income students.

Mr. Mickens says distributing the devices – which students could keep permanently – was an experience he will never forget. When he taught at Castlemont in 2014, the school had only one Chromebook cart. “To go from that, to now giving every student their own computer … was incredible to be a part of,” he says.

The Oakland Reach, a parent-led advocacy group that works with underserved communities, joined the partnership along with several other community-based groups to reach more families.

Early in the pandemic, Bernadette Fenceroy, who has four children in Oakland public schools, relied on one loaner device and a hot spot that worked sporadically. No one got much learning done, she says.

“It is hard when you have some kids that are on the phone and you can’t get all your information,” Ms. Fenceroy says. When a child has a tutoring session, she notes, “You can’t do it on your phone and have to do it on a laptop or a desktop.”

Ms. Fenceroy took the Tech Check survey to see if her family qualified for free devices after hearing about it from Oakland Reach.

When she finally got the call in May 2021 saying her kids’ permanent laptops were ready to be picked up, she almost couldn’t believe it. She took a picture of the device and called her Oakland Reach contact: “I think I got it! I think I got the computer.”

Although her kids have devices now, Ms. Fenceroy hopes the district and #OaklandUndivided’s members don’t “just drop the ball,” she says. She wants them to stay in touch, make sure the devices are working, and let parents know who to call for help if they’re not.

Javeria Salman/The Hechinger Report

Kemish Rosales is the Tech Hub coordinator for the nonprofit Tech Exchange. Since the launch of the #OaklandUndivided partnership, he and his colleagues have answered over 10,000 tech support calls from parents, teachers, and students.

An evolving approach

The #OaklandUndivided project has evolved since its inception. With an influx of federal funding available to schools in response to the pandemic, Oakland is using the opportunity to strengthen the program. The district received nearly $130 million from the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) Fund, in addition to money from the Emergency Connectivity Fund (ECF), a federal program that has helped schools and libraries provide internet access and connected devices to students and educators during the pandemic.

But those federal funds come with parameters. All the #OaklandUndivided devices handed out in the early days of the pandemic were permanent gifts to families; officials say this was important because a district-managed device has restrictions on its use. A permanent device could be useful to parents trying to access online resources or pursuing their own educations, or it could follow a student on to college.

The federal ESSER and ECF programs require that any device purchased be owned by the school or the district. So, since Aug. 1, 2021, all the #OaklandUndivided devices going out have been loaners. While the district-lent devices will stay with the student for up to five years, the #OaklandUndivided initiative is still trying to keep its promise of providing permanent devices.

“Recognizing the importance of students owning a computer, we are working with Tech Exchange this year to distribute 4,800 refurbished computers to families who have no owned computer,” says Patrick Messac, the current #OaklandUndivided project manager.

The federal funding itself isn’t permanent. The ECF funding, which was originally set to expire this June, has recently been extended until June 30, 2023. The ESSER funds expire in 2024. Kyleigh Nevis, the devices and operations lead for #OaklandUndivided and OUSD, says the Oakland program is planning for the future and may, for example, switch students on hot-spot plans over to T-Mobile’s Project 10Million, a national program providing free internet to underserved student households.

As of January, the #OaklandUndivided team says, 35,960 families of public school students had received a Chromebook or hot spot or both. Two percent of low-income students remain unconnected. 

For those still “missing,” the district has made a push this year to focus on what it calls high-priority students: those most at risk and with the greatest need, and whom the program still hasn’t been able to reach.

“We’re just trying to find creative solutions to reach these hardest-to-reach students,” Mr. Messac says. As of December, the district had surveyed 6,953 students and handed out an additional 5,835 Chromebooks.

Truancy remains one of the main barriers in reaching out to those missing students, Mr. Messac says. The Oakland district is also facing a financial crisis, and John Sasaki, director of communications for OUSD, says it plans to close two schools. Although #OaklandUndivided is a separate program run in partnership with the city that doesn’t rely entirely on funding from the district, the closings could complicate efforts down the road to reach out to students who aren’t connected yet. Mr. Messac says the program is working with the district to ensure that if students at the impacted school sites need digital access, those resources will be provided.

Ms. Ramos – now a freshman at the University of California, Berkeley, which provided her with a new laptop – sits on the #OaklandUndivided leadership committee. She wants other cities to use #OaklandUndivided’s model and expand on it to tackle the homework gap. The pandemic brought “a light to all these problems that need to be solved,” she says.

In November, EducationSuperHighway announced that Oakland was the inaugural pilot city for its nationwide initiative to close the affordability gap. In partnership with #OaklandUndivided, EducationSuperHighway is deploying free Wi-Fi in low-income apartment buildings.

“Oakland has done a terrific job creating a public-private partnership to connect their unconnected,” says Evan Marwell, EducationSuperHighway’s CEO. “That was really an effective thing for a lot of students. It hasn’t been a perfect solution, but was a best-in-class effort [from] around the country.”

This story about closing the digital divide was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.

Murad Sezer/Reuters

Hatice Cengiz, fiancée of slain Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, talks to reporters in Istanbul on April 7, 2022, after attending a trial of suspects in his killing at the Saudi Consulate. The Turkish government has since passed the case to Saudi authorities.

The surprise decision by a Turkish court to let Saudi Arabia take over the case against 26 Saudi citizens for the 2018 killing of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi speaks to more than the uncertain strength of Turkey’s commitment to justice.

By abandoning the investigation into the Saudi dissident’s death on Turkish soil, it seems to many observers, Ankara is dropping its pursuit of justice in order to resolve a cost-of-living crisis and help secure President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s political future.

“Now that Turkey is in a major economic crisis and an election is nearing, there is a rebalance in priorities favoring economic relations and de-escalation over ideals,” says Galip Dalay, a Turkish analyst at the SWP Berlin research institute.

“Turkey is trying to minimize the tensions with Saudi Arabia over the murder of Khashoggi to improve its economy,” Mr. Dalay adds.

The state prosecutor asked the court to transfer the trial in absentia of suspects in the killing of Mr. Khashoggi at the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul. The move, which effectively ends the case, appears to dial back President Erdoğan’s long-standing rivalry for regional influence with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

Presidential Press Service/AP/File

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan gestures as he talks in 2019 about the killing of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul in 2018. Apparently hoping for Saudi economic assistance, the Turkish government has now transferred the murder case to Riyadh.

President Erdoğan described the assassination, widely believed to have been ordered by the crown prince, as a “serious threat to the international order,” likening the incident to the 9/11 attacks as a 21st-century turning point.

“President Erdoğan’s advocacy of the Khashoggi case on the global stage has drastically impaired Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s endeavours to achieve international legitimacy, popularity, and credibility,” Eyüp Ersoy, lecturer at Ahi Evran University, writes in an email.

This zealous push for justice was due to more than the fact that the late Mr. Khashoggi was a friend of the Turkish president.

Although Turkey has not been a champion of free speech – police have arrested more than 200 journalists since a 2016 coup attempt – the Khashoggi incident struck at the heart of Turkey’s sovereignty and the country’s standing as a haven for Arab dissident activists and writers.

The killing was seen as an issue of Turkey’s national security.

Saudi salvation?

Yet in the intervening years, a new threat to Turkey’s national security has emerged: an economic crisis.

The Turkish currency, the lira, has lost more than 60% of its value against the U.S. dollar in the last six months. Food prices are up 70% since a year ago, and annual inflation reached 61% in March, its highest level for 20 years.

Adding to the currency woes is the havoc the Russian invasion of Ukraine is wreaking on global food prices; Russia provides Turkey with 70% of its wheat and 45% of its natural gas, while Ukraine supplies 15% of Turkey’s wheat.

Umit Bektas/Reuters

A woman displays her utility bills during a protest against high energy prices in Istanbul, Feb. 9, 2022. An economic crisis has prompted the government to seek assistance from Gulf countries, muting its criticism of their policies.

With this perfect storm of currency woes and global energy and food crises striking just a year away from presidential and parliamentary elections, the increasingly vulnerable Mr. Erdoğan has made attracting cash and investments his top priority, even if that requires reversing key Mideast policies and suffering embarrassing about-faces with wealthy Arab Gulf states.

Ankara believes improved ties with Saudi Arabia could boost Turkish exports to the kingdom, which plunged from $3 billion in 2019 to $200 million in 2021 amid tensions. Riyadh could inject instant cash into Turkish projects.

“This is a political calculation: Erdoğan is trying to do everything he can to win the election, and that means reducing prices and improving the economy within a few months,” says Mr. Dalay.

Dropping the Khashoggi case has earned Mr. Erdoğan a state visit to Saudi Arabia, whose final details and dates have yet to be confirmed.

“The president has made a clear choice of his political future over his loudly announced principles,” says one Turkish economic analyst who prefers to remain anonymous.

A regional shift

Turkey’s rapprochement with Riyadh is part of a broader reconciliation with Arab Gulf countries.

That effort ends a decade of bitter competition for influence across the Arab world that saw Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia back rival groups, factions, and militias in the region.   

In recent months, Turkey has backed away from policies that irked the UAE and its allies, curbing the Muslim Brotherhood, discouraging media criticism of Egypt and the UAE, and winding down its interference in Libya.

That has helped secure much needed investment: Last November, Turkey and the UAE signed a $10 billion Emirati investment agreement, and on a state visit to Abu Dhabi in February – his first since 2013 – President Erdoğan signed hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of investment and trade agreements.

Yet there is one fly in the ointment. Saudi Arabia has reportedly demanded that Mr. Erdoğan ensure that Mr. Khashoggi’s fiancée, a Turkish national, drop her lawsuit in the United States against Saudi leaders.

That recalls a similar request that the Saudi leadership allegedly made of President Joe Biden – that the crown prince be guaranteed legal immunity from prosecution in the United States in return for pumping more oil to ease Western dependence on Russian energy.

The Biden administration, which has vowed to champion American values of justice and human rights in its foreign policy, turned Riyadh down, diplomatic sources say. But the vulnerable Mr. Erdoğan, feeling the pressures of inflation and fighting for his political life, may not feel able to rebuff Riyadh.

The end result, writes Mr. Ersoy, the Turkish political analyst, is another “deplorable demonstration of the supremacy of material prosperity over principled morality in Middle Eastern geopolitics.”

Jacquelyn Martin/AP/File

John Eastman (left) shares the stage with former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani at the "Save America Rally" on Jan. 6, 2021. The constitutional scholar argued that Vice President Mike Pence should reject or delay the certification of Joe Biden's victory while cases of alleged fraud or illegality were further investigated, despite the fact that numerous courts had already rejected those claims. Dr. Eastman has continued in recent months to press for the 2020 election results to be decertified in certain states.

It was a civil court battle over subpoenaed documents, not a criminal trial. But when federal Judge David Carter ruled last month that President Donald Trump had conspired to overturn a democratic election on Jan. 6, 2021, he didn’t mince words. He called it “a coup in search of a legal theory.” 

That theory was provided by John Eastman, the plaintiff in the case – and Mr. Trump’s co-conspirator.  

Dr. Eastman was the author of controversial memos arguing that Vice President Mike Pence had the authority to reject or delay the counting of electoral votes during the Jan. 6 joint session of Congress. The conservative legal scholar even spoke at the president’s rally that day, telling the crowd that the vice president must intervene to prevent the certification of Joe Biden’s victory.

“Anybody that is not willing to stand up to do it does not deserve to be in the office,” Dr. Eastman said. After the rally, some Trump supporters went on to storm the U.S. Capitol, stunning the nation.   

His legal strategy did not persuade Mr. Pence or prevent the certification of the results. But had it worked, wrote Judge Carter, “it would have permanently ended the peaceful transition of power, undermining American democracy and the Constitution.”  

Dr. Eastman has emerged as a key figure for the House select committee investigating the Capitol attack, which filed the suit in California to force him to turn over thousands of emails. Judge Carter, a Clinton appointee, ruled that since federal crimes had “likely” been committed, the attorney-client privilege that Dr. Eastman was claiming could be waived for certain documents. 

The former law professor’s efforts weren’t limited to his memos about the vice president’s role on Jan. 6 – and they didn’t end on that day. Just last month, Dr. Eastman – who was forced to resign from his position at Chapman University in Orange, California, and is currently under investigation by the California state bar association – was reported to have met privately in Wisconsin with Assembly Speaker Robin Vos to urge the state Legislature to overturn the 2020 results. An adviser to GOP gubernatorial candidate and Wisconsin state lawmaker Timothy Ramthun, Dr. Eastman wrote a memo in December laying out the Legislature’s “authority to decertify previously certified electoral votes” in cases of fraud or illegality. Likewise in February, Dr. Eastman was a featured speaker at an “emergency town hall” meeting organized by a conservative group in Colorado focused on “election integrity,” where another speaker called for the hanging of Colorado’s secretary of state. 

Susan Walsh/AP/File

Former Chapman University Law School Dean John Eastman is shown testifying on Capitol Hill in Washington on March 16, 2017, at a hearing on restructuring the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit. The State Bar of California is currently investigating Dr. Eastman for possibly breaking legal and ethical rules relating to the 2020 election.

To many, Dr. Eastman’s case raises thorny questions about what lawyers can and should do in proffering legal advice that may break ethics rules or democratic norms – and how much responsibility they bear for how that advice is acted upon. As the government ramps up its prosecutions of those who violently attacked the Capitol, it remains unclear whether the political leaders and strategists who were trying to halt the transfer of power that day will be held accountable to the same extent.

In an article published last September, Dr. Eastman rejected the notion that he was urging the vice president to overturn the election. He said he had presented the Trump campaign with a range of potential scenarios “grounded in constitutional text,” which were meant to serve “as the basis of a full discussion of all the options available to our elected leaders, premised on the assumption of proven electoral fraud or illegality.”

Randall Miller, an attorney who is representing Dr. Eastman in the California bar case, said that his client expected to be exonerated. “As was his duty as an attorney, Dr. Eastman zealously represented his client, comprehensively exploring legal and constitutional means to advance his client’s interests,” he said in a statement.

Dr. Eastman’s critics, however, say that some of the options he laid out for the Trump campaign were unethical and even illegal – and that he should face consequences. “What Eastman was proposing was a subversion of the Constitution, was illegal, [and] may very well have been criminal,” says Richard Painter, a law professor who served as President George W. Bush’s chief ethics lawyer.  

Claims of fraud rejected by courts

At the heart of Dr. Eastman’s legal strategy was his claim that an 1887 law on how Congress should tally and certify electoral votes was unconstitutional – and that therefore the vice president could assert unilateral authority over the process.

In his six-page memo entitled “January 6 scenario,” he wrote that the vice president was “the ultimate arbiter” in certifying electors. That opened the door for Mr. Pence to reject electoral votes cast in key swing states like Wisconsin and Michigan, where Dr. Eastman claimed “state election laws were altered” in the run-up to the election.

He added, “If, after investigation, proven fraud and illegality is insufficient to alter the results of the election,” then the original slate of electors would be valid, and Mr. Biden would be the winner.

But at that point, multiple courts in several states had already rejected electoral fraud cases filed by Mr. Trump’s campaign after the November election. By repeating those disproven claims, Dr. Eastman was contravening the “reasonable belief” that lawyers are obliged to apply, says Professor Painter, who teaches law at the University of Minnesota.  

“The lawyer has to operate on the basis of real facts,” he says. “This is not a philosophy class.” 

Several of the Trump attorneys who brought the various fraud cases – including former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell – have since been disciplined by state courts for filing frivolous lawsuits; Mr. Giuliani’s license to practice law in New York has been suspended.

“The kinds of claims that these folks were making, the kinds of lies that they were spreading, they really are outside the bounds of what we should expect as professionals,” says Joanna Lydgate, co-founder and chief executive of States United Democracy Center, a nonprofit that advocates for free and fair elections. The group filed a complaint asking the California bar to investigate Dr. Eastman for his role in trying to overturn the 2020 election. 

And some see Dr. Eastman’s role as far more significant than that of other Trump lawyers. “This is somebody who is more than just a lackey lawyer offering crazy advice to Trump,” says George Thomas, a professor of American political institutions at Claremont McKenna College in California. “He was trying to offer the constitutional architecture to pull off a coup.”  

Abstract theory vs. legal reality

A former clerk for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Dr. Eastman joined Chapman University in 1999 and became the dean of its law school in 2007. In 2010 he ran for attorney general in California but lost in the Republican primary. 

The eventual winner in that race was Kamala Harris. After Mr. Biden selected her as his running mate in August 2020, Dr. Eastman published an opinion piece in Newsweek questioning whether she was eligible to serve because neither her Jamaican father nor Indian mother were U.S. citizens when she was born in Oakland, California. The U.S. Constitution says natural-born citizens over the age of 35 are eligible for the presidency. Newsweek subsequently disavowed the article and apologized.

Mr. Trump praised the article, describing its author as a “very talented lawyer.” 

Within weeks, Dr. Eastman was advising the Trump campaign, although he had no contractual role until after the election, according to court filings. And his novel interpretation of the powers of the vice president in a hitherto ceremonial process – the certification of Electoral College votes – made him a central player in Mr. Trump’s rearguard efforts to stay in office. 

Dr. Eastman described the options he laid out in his memo as “BOLD, certainly. But this Election was Stolen by a strategic Democrat plan to systematically flout existing election laws for partisan advantage,” he wrote, adding, “we’re no longer playing by Queensbury Rules, therefore.” 

Yet it’s unclear how convinced Dr. Eastman was by his own legal reasoning. In his deposition to the House Jan. 6 panel, Greg Jacobs, former chief counsel to Mr. Pence, said that Dr. Eastman admitted to him in early January 2021 that his plan wouldn’t stand up to scrutiny by the Supreme Court and would likely lose 9-0. 

“John Eastman knew that what he was advising Trump to do, and Pence to do, was illegal and didn’t have any basis in the Constitution or historical practices or statutory law,” says Marjorie Cohn, a professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego. 

Professor Cohn, a former president of the National Lawyers Guild, compares Dr. Eastman’s legal memos with the “torture memos” written by John Yoo for the Department of Justice under Mr. Bush. The memos interpreted wartime executive powers to justify warrantless surveillance and the use of “harsh interrogation techniques” on detainees held overseas. 

The DOJ’s internal watchdog later found that Mr. Yoo, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley; and Jay Bybee, a federal judge, had both committed “intentional professional misconduct” and violated legal ethics in writing the memos. In 2010, the finding was reduced to exercising “poor judgment.” 

That Mr. Yoo, who still teaches law at Berkeley, and Dr. Eastman were both tenured law professors isn’t a coincidence, says Professor Painter. Scholars are trained to debate creative theories and hypotheticals. “The problem is the detachment from facts and the law,” he says. 

Mr. Jacobs, the former vice president’s legal counsel, made this point in a testy email exchange with Dr. Eastman on Jan. 6. Even after the Capitol came under siege, Dr. Eastman continued to press for his plan, infuriating Mr. Jacobs, who was with Mr. Pence that day. 

“Advising the President of the United States, in an incredibly constitutionally fraught moment, requires a seriousness of purpose, an understanding of the difference between abstract theory and legal reality, and an appreciation of the power of both the office and the bully pulpit that, in my judgment, was entirely absent here,” Mr. Jacobs wrote. 

While the House panel continues its investigation, a federal grand jury has begun issuing subpoenas to witnesses for possible criminal proceedings. One subpoena seeks information about members of the executive and legislative branches who may have tried to “obstruct, influence, impede, or delay” congressional certification on Jan. 6, according to The New York Times. 

But while Judge Carter found that Mr. Trump and Dr. Eastman had “more likely than not” conspired to obstruct the certification, any criminal trial would require proof “beyond a reasonable doubt,” a higher bar. And many are skeptical that Mr. Trump as a former president could actually be prosecuted for his role on Jan. 6. 

It’s unclear whether the same will hold true for Dr. Eastman, the legal architect. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board recently wrote that Dr. Eastman gave Mr. Trump “awful legal guidance.” But it nonetheless argued that public officials are entitled to solicit a range of options from legal counsel, adding, “If it’s criminal to advise a public official to stretch his powers in dubious ways, then half of Washington should be in jail.”

Ms. Lydgate, a former state prosecutor, disagrees. “I think this was all part of an extremely coordinated effort,” she says. “There has to be consequences for all of those who participated. It was an assault – and it continues to be an assault – on our democracy.” 

A former African president living in gilded exile, a notorious hit man on the run, and an army general serving time for his role in a failed coup. 

These were among the 11 men found guilty last week of assassinating President Thomas Sankara, a firebrand Marxist revolutionary whose brutal murder sent shock waves across Africa, and had remained unsolved for 35 years. 

Now, activists believe the rare trial – and successful prosecution – over the assassination of an African president could pave the way for accountability in a region where coups are making a comeback, with three in the past year. 

“This is a strong message to all those dictators across Africa who kill with impunity,” says Fatie Souratié, an activist in Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso. “This trial is very important for the history of our nation and for future generations. From now on, when we talk about our hero, we can finally say that the executioners have been punished.”

Mr. Sankara’s name has become synonymous with Pan-Africanism, after the charismatic officer took power in August 1983 and instituted sweeping policies that transformed the landlocked West African nation of Burkina Faso.

His fiercely anti-colonialist and anti-corruption rhetoric was backed by policies aimed at lifting his people out of poverty, and fueled Pan-African pride. But Mr. Sankara’s four-year tenure ended in a hail of bullets outside his office, as a hit squad gunned him down along with 12 of his colleagues.  

On April 6, a military tribunal in Ouagadougou handed down life sentences to three of the key players among the 14 men accused of planning, covering up, and carrying out the assassination of the man known as Africa’s Che Guevara, as well as undermining state security. 

An important example

Those convicted included Blaise Compaoré, who seized power following the murder of Mr. Sankara, once his close friend. Mr. Compaoré then ruled for 27 years before fleeing to neighboring Ivory Coast after he himself was overthrown in a popular uprising in October 2014. He was sentenced in absentia, and his lawyers have called the trial “illegitimate.”

The case, which gripped the nation of 20 million citizens over six months, raked over much of Burkina Faso’s recent history. One of the main defendants, Hyacinthe Kafando, a notorious former security aide who is believed have led the hit squad, has been on the run since 2015.

Sophie Garcia/AP

Mariam Sankara, wife of President Thomas Sankara, who was assassinated in 1987 in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, leaves the military court after the verdict in the trial for his murder, April 6, 2022.

Gilbert Diendéré, the former head of Mr. Compaoré’s presidential guard, was already serving a 20-year prison sentence for a failed coup in 2015. And in January, proceedings were suspended as Burkina Faso was convulsed by a military takeover – its sixth since gaining independence from France in 1960.

The implications of the verdict could reverberate across a continent where political violence is still far from unusual. Few high-ranking African officials have faced trials for their most egregious crimes, and the rare convictions that have been meted out have typically come from internationally backed special courts at home, or courts abroad. More often, though, perpetrators have benefited from their use of political violence.

In neighboring Liberia, the presence of former rebel warlords in the Legislature is a lingering reminder of the conflict that gripped the nation for 14 years until a peace accord in 2003. 

“If Burkina Faso can look back and address a wrong, it’s an important example for Liberia that is yet to hold anyone accountable for ... killings committed in the past,” says Aaron Weah, a Liberian Ph.D. researcher based at the Transitional Justice Institute at Ulster University in Northern Ireland.

Former Liberian President Charles Taylor was found guilty of crimes against humanity and war crimes by a special United Nations court in The Hague in 2011, and sentenced to 50 years in jail. But there is so little political will to hold a trial on home ground that justice advocates have instead reached out to prosecutors in Europe and the United States to pursue cases. 

In March, Laye Sekou Karama, an accused former Liberian commander, was arrested in New York for allegedly lying on his immigration forms about his involvement in a rebel movement. Mr. Kamara could become the fourth Liberian to be prosecuted in an American court on charges of lying on immigration documents. Meanwhile other cases are underway in France, Belgium, and Finland. 

Budding homegrown justice

But in recent years there has been a concerted effort by some African judicial systems to try the perpetrators of political violence on home soil. 

In Rwanda, special courts known as gacaca – from the Kinyarwanda word meaning “grass,” where communities gather to resolve disputes – were set up to try crimes committed during its devastating genocide. While the main perpetrators were tried in neighboring Tanzania, village elders tried to adjudicate cases in rural areas, where victims and perpetrators still live side by side.

The tribunals left behind a mixed legacy, revealing the enormous challenge of trying to apply Western-style punitive legal systems in states where those aren’t the norm.

Mr. Sankara’s verdict, though, could renew hope for trials that often appear to have little chance of success. “There is an empowering feeling when you see people like [Mr. Sankara’s wife] Mariam Sankara and others succeed,” says Reed Brody, of the International Commission of Jurists. “It shows that justice is possible.”

And the scope of that justice is slowly expanding, too. Mr. Brody himself represented victims of Hissène Habré, the former president of Chad, who was found guilty by an international tribunal in Senegal of rape, sexual slavery, and the execution of 40,000 people. The trial was heralded as “a milestone for justice in Africa” because it was the first that involved the trial of one African leader in another African country. 

The recent prosecutions of ex-presidents could also bolster justice advocates in places like Gambia, where a truth and reconciliation commission is investigating charges against former dictator Yaya Jammeh. Now in exile in Equatorial Guinea, he ruled over the tiny West African state with an iron first for 22 years, before losing elections in 2017. 

Never easy

For now, though, any efforts at justice will face enormous odds.

Mr. Sankara’s trial saw 100 witnesses testify, and was 27 years in the making, according to Ferdinand Nzepa, a France-based lawyer who played a lead role in the team that represented the Sankara family. “We fought hard, and we couldn’t imagine there would be a trial at the end,” Mr. Nzepa said.

A separate investigation is underway into possible foreign involvement in Mr. Sankara’s assassination. He was hostile to U.S. and French Cold War economic policy, and U.S. diplomatic cables have emerged showing that U.S. officials considered overthrowing him.

The verdict is not yet set in stone. Later this month, lawyers for the convicted men are expected to return to the heavily guarded, conference hall-turned-courtroom to appeal last week’s verdicts. 

Paul Sankara, the brother of the assassinated leader, hopes the sentences will stand. “Some would say it was a severe verdict, but no – nothing can make up for his assassination,” he says. “I think it was a just verdict.”

Ukrainian Presidential Press Service/Handout via REUTERS

Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy stands next to destroyed Russian military vehicles outside of Kyiv, April 4.

After seven weeks of war in Ukraine, history books are probably already being written on how the country’s army was able to repel the much-larger Russian forces from taking the capital. Stung by its losses, Russia is now moving the war front to the east where Ukrainian defenses may again be tested. Yet one lesson will go down in history: Ukraine’s victory in the battle for Kyiv was due in no small part to its effort on another critical front – the battle against corruption in its military.

Since 2014, when Russia last invaded and took the Crimean Peninsula, Ukraine has steadily reformed its security establishment. In 2016, civil activists created the Independent Defense Anti-Corruption Committee to push for reforms. Military procurement has become more transparent, in part by digitizing the process. State-run defense industries are being audited. Citizen groups now have a say over who runs those enterprises. Parliament has brought more democratic control over the army.

The military is less hierarchical and more meritocratic, giving local commanders more freedom to act quickly on the battlefield. The changes are far from complete. Yet a recent Rand Corp. study found many of them help account for the military’s “surprisingly tough resistance” in the war against a corruption-riddled Russian military.

The reforms have also made it easier for more than 30 countries to send military aid to Ukraine. This week, the United States announced it will send $800 million in additional weapons, a big vote of confidence in Ukraine’s elected leaders and its Defense Ministry. One former finance minister, Oleksandr Danylyuk, even contends that the drive for a cleaner, more efficient army spurred Russian President Vladimir Putin to order the invasion on Feb. 24.

“The fact of the matter is that, ironically, this war is a result of reforms,” he wrote in The Economist, adding that the Kremlin “detested our reforms to the army.”

Ukraine’s struggle against Russia is also a battle against a regime that thrives on corruption and feels threatened when a neighboring country moves toward democratic equality and transparent government. Cleaning up its own act has helped Ukraine in the war so far. And it may help Russia clean up as well someday.