Former federal appellate Judge J. Michael Luttig assailed his former law clerk John Eastman on Thursday for advancing a far-flung legal theory that the vice president had unilateral authority to determine the victor of a presidential election.

Luttig, a respected conservative jurist who served on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, told the House Jan. 6 select committee that Eastman’s theory, which he pressed in the weeks before Congress’ formal certification of the 2020 election, would have been “tantamount to a revolution within a constitutional crisis in America.”