When taking stock of the troubled lawyers from Donald Trump’s orbit, it’s genuinely difficult to know where to start. Certainly, Rudy Giuliani belongs near the top of the list, given his suspended law license and ruinous defamation case, but he has plenty of company.
Indeed, the names of the Trump-affiliated attorneys who’ve run into serious trouble in recent months are likely familiar. Several have even faced criminal charges, including Ken Chesebro, Sidney Powell, Jenna Ellis, and Stefanie Lambert.
Meanwhile, just last week, a judge formally recommended that John Eastman lose his law license, and this week, as NBC News reported, Jeffrey Clark took a step in the same direction.
The disciplinary panel of the D.C. Bar reached a preliminary conclusion that former Trump Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark committed an ethical violation when he pushed conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election, including the allegation that the election was stolen via smart thermostats.
The developments come a week after the controversial lawyer repeatedly asserted his Fifth Amendment rights during a disbarment hearing.
I’m mindful of the fact that Trump world is filled with assorted figures, and there may be some readers asking right now, “Wait, which one is Jeffrey Clark?” So let’s revisit our recent coverage and review why he’s significant.
Shortly after Donald Trump’s 2020 election defeat, the then-outgoing president considered a ridiculous plan in which he’d fire acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and replace him with Clark, a relatively low-profile environmental lawyer within the administration. The motivation for the change was obvious: Clark, unlike Rosen, was telling Trump what he wanted to hear about keeping him in power, despite his defeat.
In fact, Clark sketched out a map for Republican legislators to follow as part of a partisan plot, even as he quietly pressed Trump to put him in charge of the Justice Department.
Ultimately, that didn’t happen. The then-president ultimately backed away from the plan to make Clark the acting A.G., not because the plan was stark raving mad — though it certainly was — but because the Justice Department’s senior leadership team threatened to resign en masse if Rosen was ousted.
It was around the same time when there was a high-level meeting at which a White House lawyer said that if Trump remained in office despite his defeat, there would be riots nationwide. According to a federal criminal indictment, Clark allegedly responded, “Well … that’s why there’s an Insurrection Act.”
In other words, if Trump claimed illegitimate power and Americans took to the streets, the Republican White House, from Clark’s perspective, could use the Insurrection Act to deploy the U.S. military against American civilians.
In the years that followed, the lawyer did not fade into obscurity. On the contrary, he became “a rising legal star” in Republican circles — even after Clark’s indictment in Fulton County, Georgia — and when Trump headlined a fundraiser for Jan. 6 criminal defendants, Clark appeared alongside the former president. The attorney is also directly involved in the Project 2025 initiative, and recently attended a Mar-a-Lago screening of a conspiratorial movie about the “persecution” of Jan. 6 rioters. It’s against this backdrop that a disciplinary panel in D.C. concluded that Clark did, in fact, violate professional ethics rules, and the findings might soon lead to his disbarment. Whether such an outcome would affect his role on Team Trump or within the larger conservative movement is unclear. This post updates our related earlier coverage.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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