WASHINGTON – An environmental lawyer who Donald Trump who sought to take over the Justice Department in the days before the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, repeatedly asserted his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination during a suspension hearing Wednesday.
Jeffrey Clark, a former Justice Department civil attorney with no experience in criminal law, wanted to investigate a conspiracy theory that the 2020 election was stolen, including through smart thermostats. Just hours before the attack on January 6, 2021, Trump almost appointed Clark as acting attorney general, but withdrew when Justice Department leadership threatened to resign en masse.
Federal authorities searched Clark’s home in June 2022, and he now faces criminal charges in Georgia in the state’s racketeering case against Trump and others. Clark surrendered to authorities in August and pleaded not guilty. He is also unindicted co-conspirator No. 4 in the federal election interference case brought against Trump by special counsel Jack Smith.
Clark testified briefly during a disciplinary hearing held this week before the DC Board on Professional Responsibility’s Ad Hoc Hearing Committee, which is deciding whether he should lose his bar license for his involvement in efforts to overturn Trump’s 2020 election loss. The case was filed in 2022 by the DC Bar’s Office of Disciplinary Counsel and has been in litigation for nearly two years.
Before Clark’s testimony, his attorney talked about wanting to avoid having to repeatedly assert his Fifth Amendment rights and “avoid being on MSNBC for no good reason.”
Once his testimony got underway, Clark repeatedly exercised his Fifth Amendment rights, as well as his law enforcement, deliberative, and attorney-client privilege.
Patricia Matthews, a member of the three-judge panel that heard the case, asked Clark who his client was in connection with his invocation of attorney-client privilege: “Who were you the attorney for?” she asked.
“For President Trump, the head of the executive branch, the sole head, the centralized head of Article Two, the executive branch of the United States government,” Clark said. (Justice Department officials typically say their client is the United States of America, not any particular president.)
Clark’s attorney intervened when Matthews asked a follow-up question.
Earlier in the morning, the panel heard testimony from former acting Attorney General Jeff Rosen, whom Trump had proposed replacing with Clark. Rosen testified that he remembered telling Donald Trump he could get the leadership of the Justice Department he wanted, “but that won’t change the facts” about the election.
Rosen testified that Clark tried to investigate issues that were “nowhere up his alley” and that, looking back, “Mr. Clark was less than cooperative in the period leading up to the January 6 attack. Rosen testified that Clark had been “reading things on the Internet.” Rosen said that for a while he thought that giving Clark some information about the Justice Department’s efforts to investigate some of the conspiracy theories Clark believed in might help Clark “come back from the brink, if you will.” ‘.
Richard Donoghue, then the Justice Department’s No. 2 official, said Clark was “way out of bounds, way out of line.” Testifying before the House Committee on January 6, Donoghue highlighted Clark’s lack of criminal or election experience during an hours-long standoff in the Oval Office on January 3, 2021, telling Clark: “You are an environmental lawyer. How about you go back to your office and we’ll call you if there’s an oil spill.”
Rosen testified about the Jan. 3 meeting at Wednesday’s hearing, saying that he and other attorneys in the room had “indicated to everyone that they would feel obligated in some way to resign” if Trump were to appoint Clark as acting attorney general.
The threat of mass resignations at the Justice Department ultimately contributed to Trump abandoning his plan to appoint Clark, several lawyers in the room testified.
Clark’s defense team on Wednesday called Suzi Voyles, a Republican politician and Trump representative whose claims of voter fraud in Georgia in 2020 were investigated and dismissed by state authorities. Voyles testified that she still suspected voter fraud in Georgia and talked about how she believed voting machines work, adding, “I’m not very technical.”
A DC Bar Association disciplinary board previously recommended that Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani lose his law license, writing that Giuliani’s “attempt to undermine the integrity of the 2020 presidential election helped destabilize our democracy” and that his “malicious and meritless claims have done lasting damage.”
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
