Back in 2020, Jeffrey Clark was Trump’s top environmental lawyer at DOJ, with exactly zero role in elections. No matter. Clark did his own homework and smelled fraud. His theory: China had hacked voting machines through internet-connected “smart thermostats.”
So Clark joined Trump’s push to overturn the 2020 election. He drafted a letter telling Georgia’s Republican leaders that DOJ had “identified significant concerns” about the vote and that they should consider sending “a separate slate of electors supporting Donald J. Trump.”
Alas, DOJ had found no such thing and acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen refused to sign the letter. (That was still conceivable back in Trump 1.0.) So Clark did an end run, straight to Trump, promising to “uncover widespread fraud.” Trump liked what he heard and, just days before the January 6 “day of love,” he even offered to make Jeffrey Clark the acting attorney general. So much for that wuss Jeffrey Rosen.
That temptation lasted for nearly three hours. Only after the White House counsel called the Georgia letter a “murder-suicide pact” and DOJ’s brass threatened to quit en masse did Trump relent.
That was a bad omen of things to come. So Trump preemptively pardoned Clark for any federal crimes tied to his 2020 election efforts. Too bad a pardon doesn’t make a bar case go away.
Sadly, not only would Clark not be acting AG, the DC Bar’s disciplinary board recommended he be disbarred for “flagrant dishonesty” over the Georgia letter, concluding he’d been “prepared to cause the Justice Department to tell a lie.”
Fast forward to Trump 2.0: As the acting regulatory czar, the White House guy who decides which federal rules live or die, Clark helped kill the EPA’s endangerment finding, the legal backbone of nearly every federal climate rule. The EPA called it “the single largest deregulatory action in US history.” He also told agencies they could trash any rule they didn’t like without the hassle of asking the public.
Democracy is so boring.
Clark decided to hang up a shingle. He now runs a shiny new law firm at the Oversight Project, a group spawned by the Heritage Foundation. It’s devoted to fighting the “perversion of bar discipline processes” and “bogus criminal indictments.”
Ask Clark about either. He’s an expert.
As for his securing his own professional future, Clark’s got backup. Trump’s DOJ sued DC’s disciplinary counsel and its top court for “weaponizing” bar discipline against Clark, denouncing the recourse to professional discipline as “barfare.”
But others less smitten with Clark’s idiosyncratic pursuit of justice deem DOJ’s suit as barf-fare.
