Former Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and other senior Justice Department officials spent New Year’s Eve berating Jeffrey Clark, the interim head of the DOJ civil division, for repeatedly pressuring them to help former President Donald Trump to reverse their clear electoral loss and secretly meet with Trump, The New York Times reports, citing six people with knowledge of the meeting. Rosen thought the matter was settled that night, the Times reports, but Clark continued to secretly plan with Trump to intervene in Georgia, including a conspiracy where Trump would fire Rosen and put Clark in his place.
Clark said the report from the Times, Wall Street Newspaperand The Washington Post about his role in an effort to replace Rosen and interfere in Georgia to undo the loss of Trump is inaccurate, and he says his discussions with Trump are protected by “legal privileges”. Only the intervention of Justice Department officials and Trump’s attorney in the White House, Pat Cipollone, plus the threat of mass layoffs, prevented Trump from firing Rosen and elevating Clark, the three newspapers report.
Even before “Clark’s machinations surfaced” in the new year, it was clear from “his willingness to entertain conspiracy theories about polling station hacking and electoral fraud” that Clark “was not the established lawyer they thought he was” , O Times reports. “Some senior department leaders considered him to be quiet, hardworking and detail-oriented. Others said they knew nothing about him, so low was his profile. He impressed neither his fans in the department nor his detractors for being part of the party’s Trumpist faction.”
Clark’s friends and critics, the Times reports, described him as “nerdy” and “thoughtful,” a Republican lawyer and a member of the Federalist Society with the usual skeptical view of regulations, not an operator. Now Clark, 53, is “notorious” and unlikely to be hired back at the Kirkland & Ellis law firm, where he spent his career outside his stints under the Trump and George W. Bush governments, the Times reports. Read more about Clark – a former student at Harvard, Georgetown Law and the Biden School of Public Policy at the University of Delaware – at The New York Times.
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