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.
The attorney also became directly involved in the Project 2025 initiative, and even attended a Mar-a-Lago screening of a conspiratorial movie about the “persecution” of Jan. 6 rioters. As the AP report noted, after Trump returned to power, Clark returned to the executive branch, serving as the acting head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, a part of the Office of Management and Budget that is responsible for reviewing executive branch regulations. It’s against this backdrop that the D.C. Board of Professional Responsibility concluded that Clark should be disbarred, a recommendation that will now go to the D.C. Court of Appeals for a final decision. A Politico report added that Clark is not without company: “Rudy Giuliani was similarly sanctioned by the D.C. Bar, as well as bar authorities in New York, and ultimately disbarred. Conservative attorney John Eastman has been suspended from practicing law while he fights a disbarment recommendation made by a California judge. Trump campaign attorney Jenna Ellis agreed to a three-year suspension of her law license in Colorado after acknowledging she made false claims about the 2020 election — and after pleading guilty to her role in the effort in a criminal case in Georgia. And Kenneth Chesebro, an architect of Trump’s last-ditch bid to remain in power, lost his law license in New York.” For his part, Clark responded to the latest developments with a social media message that read, “The fight continues.” Watch this space. 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."
Latest Post
Recommended
