WHO THE HELL IS: JEFFERY BOSSERT CLARK?

 

                              …This is the conspiracy believing Trump supporter, Jeffrey Clark

 

Clark believed that China had changed some votes in the 2020 election

 

The former U.S. President, Donald Trump, had told his acting Attorney General, Jeffrey Rosen, that, “People tell me Jeff Clark is great, and that I should put him in as the new A.G. because people want me to replace DOJ leadership,”  This was the way Trump talked to the acting A.G., if he didn’t comply with Trump’s demands.  Those demands were: to tell people that the 2020 election was an illegal, corrupt election.”

This information is from the handwritten notes of a call to Jeff Rosen, taken by the Justice Department’s acting No. 2 official, Richard Donoghue, and released recently by the House Oversight Committee.  They underscore the imperative of obtaining testimony from Clark about his efforts, in league with Trump, to overturn the 2020 presidential election results.

Anyone who really knew “Jeffrey Bossert Clark” knew he was particularly insistent on having all three names on his department filings in his role as an assistant attorney general.  He was also the kind of full-blown, conspiracy-chasing Trumpist who emerged in the aftermath of the 2020 election. The documents show Clark, demanding a classified intelligence briefing from the Director of National Intelligence, John Ratcliffe.  This was about Clark’s supposed evidence that a Dominion voting machine “accessed the Internet through a net connection trail leading back to China.”

On the other hand, no one ever took him for a potential Attorney General of the United States.

Clark was an obscure attorney in private practice at a major law firm, Kirkland & Ellis, but a non-equity partner not entitled to share in the firm’s profits, and he was named to a relatively obscure position at the Justice Department.  He was the assistant attorney general for the Environment and Natural Resources Division.  This was, in the last days of the Trump administration, tasked to head the civil division as well.  A graduate of Harvard College and Georgetown Law School, Clark was a real conservative, and a member of the Federalist Society, but not known as a die-hard Trump loyalist.

Then came the election, and with it, Clark’s remarkable new role as an improbable presidential consigliere and an: energetic chaser-after of crackpot rumors of election fraud. Perhaps Clark, looking for the wildest reaches of the Internet, became a true believer in the losing cause of election fraud.  Perhaps he was tempted by Trump’s dangling the attorney general job before him.  (His ambition obviously had a way of distorting his judgment.)  Either way, he became, for a brief time, the most dangerous Trump administration official you never heard of.

Clark was only connected with Trump through Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.), a member of the House Freedom Caucus.  This was a highly irregular backdoor channel for the president to go around more senior officials who were frustrating his efforts to use the Justice Department to contest the 2020 election results.  

In January 2021, when reports of his activities first surfaced, Clark said that “all my official communications were consistent with law.”

Clark’s involvement emerged in the Dec. 27 phone call between Rosen and Trump. The next day, Clark proposed sending an outlandish letter to Georgia officials.  He wanted to assert, incorrectly,  that Justice had “identified significant concerns that may have impacted the outcome of the election in multiple states.”  This included Georgia, and the urging of a special legislative session. “I think we should get it out as soon as possible,” Clark urged Rosen and Donoghue. Responded Donoghue: “There is no chance that I would sign this letter or anything remotely like this.”

On Jan. 1, White House Chief of Staff, Mark Meadows emailed Rosen about “allegations of election signature match anomalies” in Fulton County, Ga. “Can you get Jeff Clark to engage on this issue immediately to determine if there is any truth to this allegation, Rosen to Donoghue: “Can you believe this? I am not going to respond.”

But Clark was off and running in pursuit of fraud. “I spoke to the source and am on with the guy who took the video right now,” Clark reported in a Jan. 2 email to Rosen under the subject line “Atlanta.”

All the while, Clark and Trump were discussing the plan to make him the new A.G..  This was foiled in part, because Clark spilled the beans to Rosen, offering him the chance “to stay on as his No. 2.”    At which point Rosen secured an emergency Oval Office meeting, Sunday, Jan 3, with Trump, Clark and other officials.  At which, Trump was dissuaded from making the switch because of the mass resignations at Justice Trump was told would happen.

This is not normal, this is not proper.  The head of the civil division, acting or not, does not jump on the phone to personally interview witnesses.  He does not do end-runs around his boss.  And none the less, participate in a scheme to topple Rosen with the president.

Most pertinent, lawyers at the Justice Department have a single client: “the United States.”  They represent the president in his role as president, not in his capacity as a political candidate. The president has his own private counsel.  These are lawyers paid by his campaign, not the taxpayers. The Justice Department has a legitimate role in reviewing claims of election fraud, but it doesn’t exercise that authority at the express direction of an aggrieved candidate, even one who is the sitting U.S. president or that president’s underling.

All of which leads to the fundamental point: To understand how close the country came to having the election results overturned, to know whether this activity was merely bone-chilling or rises to the level of a criminal offense. It is important to secure Clark’s testimony, and it’s not entirely clear that’s going to happen.

The Justice Department Inspector General is looking into the action’s going-on at the department, but they may not be able to compel Clark’s testimony.  The same is true of the Senate Judiciary Committee, before which Rosen and Donoghue testified voluntarily. The House Oversight Committee, which has the documents, has ceded authority to the select committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection, which has other matters piled on its plate.

The questions include: “How did Clark connect with Perry, the congressman? Any other members of Congress? What conversations or meetings did Clark have with White House officials? When did he speak with the president, and what was said? Did the president give him any instructions about whether to tell Rosen about the conversations?  The Justice Department has waived any claims of executive privilege, so Clark cannot refuse to answer on these grounds. 

What communications did he have on his private email, on his personal phone or through secure messaging systems? These should be subpoenaed. With whom did he discuss the allegations of election fraud, and with what Trump campaign lawyers or other representatives?

How did he come to draft the letter to Georgia officials? Was this done on his government computer?

You get the point. Someone with subpoena power needs to get Jeffrey Clark under oath, and the sooner the better.

Copyright G. Ater 2021