Many of the lawyers who used to work for Donald Trump have been richly rewarded for their service. Pam Bondi, for example, was part of one of the president’s legal teams, and she’s the attorney general. Todd Blanche was one of his criminal defense attorneys, and he’s now also helping lead the Justice Department. D. John Sauer was also a Trump lawyer, and the president tapped him to serve as the solicitor general. Emil Bove represented Trump, and as of a few days ago, he’s a federal appellate judge.
Even Alina Habba, who was serving as counselor to the president, was recently named an acting U.S. attorney in New Jersey.
Some of the other lawyers who grew close to Trump, however, have fared far less well. Take Jeffrey Clark, for example. The Associated Press reported:
Jeffrey Clark, the former Justice Department official who aided President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, should be stripped of his law license, a Washington disciplinary panel ruled on Thursday. Clark, who is now overseeing a federal regulatory office, played a key role in Trump’s efforts to challenge his election loss to Joe Biden and clashed with Justice Department superiors who refused to back his false claims of fraud.
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 earlier coverage and review why he’s significant.
Shortly after 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 president.








