Government

Did Epstein's Mother Get Former DOJ Lawyer Jeffery Clark Out Of Testifying To Jan. 6 Committee?

No, no, we're sure he's totally, really sick, no foolin'.

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Former Justice Department Lawyer Jeffrey Clark has once again managed to avoid testifying to the House Select Committee about allegations that he attempted to weaponize the DOJ to overturn the election. Citing an unspecified illness, he failed to appear for scheduled testimony on Saturday, although the Committee says he will have to appear on December 16 when he will presumably have recuperated.

Clark’s colleagues in the Trump Justice Department immediately trotted down to the Select Committee and also the Senate Judiciary Committee after Trump’s lawyers sent a letter saying he had he wasn’t going to sue to block their testimony as long as the Committees didn’t subpoena any other witnesses. But Clark, who tried to get acting AG Jeffrey Rosen to announce investigations into non-existent swing state electoral fraud as a pretext for their legislatures to claw back electoral college votes and recast them for Trump, has stonewalled for months.

On November 5, Clark and his lawyer, Harry McDougald, a Kraken alumnus, showed up for scheduled testimony with a 12-page letter ranting about various privileges and refusing to respond to any questions. The Committee then voted to hold him in contempt and set up a Congressional vote on referral to the DOJ for possible prosecution as they did with Bannon, but they gave him one more last chance to come in Saturday to cooperate.

Clark had been threatening to plead the Fifth, but in the event it didn’t happen, thank to his highly convenient medical problem.

Rep. Adam Schiff assured MSNBC’s Chris Hayes that Clark isn’t faking.

“The Committee is satisfied that it is genuine, that there is ample documentation, that this not yet another ruse,” he said Friday.

But if he was credulous about Clark’s medical issues, Schiff’s seemed quite skeptical about the former Kirkland & Ellis attorney’s legal strategy of asserting his Fifth Amendment right against self incrimination.

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“Then on the eve of holding him in contempt, a new claim, this time that he’s going to invoke his Fifth Amendment right,” said the California Democrat. “Among the many disparate claims that he made, when he showed up for the deposition, he never suggested at that time that he believed what he said would incriminate him. So that’s a new defense, if you will, and we don’t know yet what to make of it.”

And he was similarly dubious regarding Coups for Dummies lawyer John Eastman’s threat to invoke his Fifth Amendment rights:

We have a great many questions for him. Some of those may implicate no Fifth Amendment concern, no factual basis for that. So we will have to see when he comes in whether there is a good faith basis to assert the Fifth, or whether he makes it clear as to questions in which there is no potential Fifth Amendment privilege that he still intends to refuse to answer questions. So with each of these witnesses we will have to evaluate them when they come in.

Committee Chair Bennie Thompson is also fed up with Clark and his antics.

“I can’t anticipate what he’ll say,” he told CNN. “I just know his lawyer has represented the fact that his client plans to take [the Fifth Amendment]. If he plans to take it, he’ll have to take it each and every time we ask him a question.”

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Feel better, Jeffrey Clark! Because the Committee is about to make you feel much, much worse.

Jeffrey Clark’s deposition postponed until December 16 [CNN]
Schiff: Jeffrey Clark has ‘genuine’ medical reason for postponing deposition [MSNBC]

Elizabeth Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.

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