Jeffrey Clark, a former Justice Department official who worked closely with Trump in a bid to subvert the 2020 election, should face professional consequences — including the potential loss of his license to practice law — for his effort to throw the nation into chaos, D.C. bar disciplinary authorities argued Tuesday.
A three-member panel of the D.C. Bar’s Board of Professional Responsibility is hearing the case after Clark has spent two years fighting to have his case scrapped, contending that the D.C. Bar has no jurisdiction over the conduct of federal government lawyers.
A federal court disagreed, and so did an appeals court.
Investigators charged Clark with violating professional rules of conduct in late 2020 by attempting to coerce his bosses to send a letter to Georgia lawmakers encouraging them to reconsider the outcome of the election there based on “significant concerns” about the integrity of the vote.
Clark was on Trump’s radar to replace Jeffrey Rosen as Attorney General, who Trump felt hadn’t done enough to back up his Big Lie of election fraud.
D.C. investigators say that Clark’s efforts amounted to a “coup” within the DOJ in order to activate the plan to throw the 2020 election into disarray. Clark held unauthorized meetings with Trump to overrun Rosen and his Deputy AG Richard Donoghue, and eventually led to an Oval Office confrontation on Jan. 3, 2021, in which Trump ultimately backed down from his plans to elevate Clark amid a mass resignation threat by top DOJ and White House officials.
Clark’s attorneys said he intends to argue, using witnesses from Georgia and statistical experts that Trump has relied on in the past, that his concerns about the election were well-founded, that DOJ officials rebuffed them and the entire dispute amounts to an internal disagreement about what DOJ’s official position should have been.
Clark is unlikely to testify in his trial, as lawyers are indicating he intends to plead his Fifth Amendment rights.