Government

Yet Another Bar Referral For Trumpland Lawyer Jeffrey Clark Who Tried To Overturn Election

Beats a criminal referral. Although that's not out of the question either.

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Jeffrey Clark, call your lawyers.

It’s been a tough week for the former acting head of the Justice Department’s Civil Division. On Tuesday, a coalition of eminent attorneys filed an ethics complaint with the DC Bar against the erstwhile Kirkland & Ellis partner alleging Clark had engaged in “dishonesty, fraud, deceit, or misrepresentation” in violation of ABA Model Rule 8.4. And while the DC Bar has thus far refused to act on a similar complaint filed against former Attorney General Bill Barr, it’s never a good thing when your peers are calling for your head.

And it’s even worse when congress joins in. Which, it just did.

In addition to Rule 8.4, the Judiciary alleges that Clark also violated Rule 1.2 by counseling his client to engage in “conduct the lawyer knows is criminal or fraudulent.”

A report issued today by the Democrats on the Committee outlines Clark’s efforts to weaponize the Justice Department to pressure swing states to switch their electoral votes and overturn the election. The report is 394 pages long, but in broad brush strokes it confirms reporting that Clark had a secret communication channel with the White House and that he tried to get acting AG Jeffrey Rosen and his deputy Richard Donoghue to sign off on a “Proof of Concept” letter to Georgia legislators, alleging that the DOJ had discovered significant fraud sufficient to bring the state’s election into question, and thus the legislature should convene itself and give the state’s electoral votes to Trump. Except that no such fraud had been turned up, which is why Rosen and Donoghue told him to go jump in a lake.

There’s also this extremely disturbing passage about Clark’s December 28, 2020 request to meet with the Director of National Intelligence regarding “foreign election interference issues” so that he could “assess how that relates to activating the IEEPA and 2018 EO powers.”

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IEEPA refers to the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which authorizes the president to declare a national emergency due to “unusual and extraordinary threats” to the United States and to block any transactions and freeze any assets within the jurisdiction of the United States to deal with the threat.” The 2018 EO Clark mentions is Executive Order 13848, which operationalizes IEEPA sanctions in the event of foreign interference in a U.S. election.

As the basis for his “urgent” request, Clark cited evidence, supposedly in the public domain, from “white hat hackers” indicating that a “Dominion machine accessed the Internet through a smart thermostat with a net connecting trail leading back to China.” Clark did not produce or quote any of this purported evidence, but he wrote that he believed the ODNI “may” have additional classified intelligence on this matter.

Which certainly looks like he wanted to explore the possibility that the president might invoke emergency powers to overturn the election based on Chinese thermostat vote rigging.

According to the report, Trump was so taken with Clark and his willingness to use the DOJ for political ends that the president attempted to put him in charge of the entire Justice Department so he could “prove” that concept in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona and Nevada — after he got finished ratfucking Georgia, of course. And we only averted a constitutional crisis because the entire senior leadership of the DOJ threatened to resign en masse, accompanied by White House Counsel Pat Cipollone, who referred to Clark’s letter as a “murder-suicide pact.”

Clark has thus far refused to appear before the Judiciary Committee, despite assurances from the Justice Department that he can feel free to testify about the events leading up to the January 6 insurrection. And because a subpoena would require cooperation from the minority members, he can’t be compelled to appear. But that will not protect him from the House Select Committee investigating the Capitol Insurrection, which does have subpoena power, and has already exercised it with respect to multiple Trump figures, including Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and moldering podcaster Steve Bannon.

So perhaps Mr. Clark has even weightier things on his mind than maintaining his license to practice law.

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Subverting How the Former President and His Allies Pressured DOJ to Overturn the 2020 Election [Senate Judiciary Committee]

Elizabeth Dye (@5DollarFeminist) lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.

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