Jeff Clark is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Renewing America and was a Senate Confirmed Assistant Attorney General under President Donald Trump. He has been targeted by the left for his conservative views, and is fighting back.
00:04:02.440You know, we need to have similar things that are going to push back from the conservative direction against Democrats and their allies.
00:04:12.180And if we don't have that kind of thing, they're not going to stop.
00:04:15.260They're going to just keep trying to strip people of their licenses,
00:04:19.000and they file complaint after complaint after complaint.
00:04:22.020It's really a republic-ending process if we don't nip it in the bud and stop it soon.
00:04:29.500What are the specific charges that they're making against you in all of these cases,
00:04:34.920in D.C., in Georgia, and then even with the bar trying to boot you out from being a lawyer for some years?
00:04:42.180So the bar has two charges, one of which recently a hearing committee,
00:04:47.480which consists of three volunteers, two lawyers, and a layperson, which I contend is an unconstitutional process.
00:04:54.000I don't understand how they can wield government power when they're not even taking oaths of office,
00:04:59.060when they haven't been appointed in accord with the appointments clause.
00:05:02.500But in any event, they recommended that my license be suspended for two years.
00:05:06.500There were two charges before them, one of which they rejected.
00:05:09.300That's the charge that essentially what I had proposed inside the Justice Department would have created profound damage to the legal system.
00:05:20.360And that's the – despite the fact that what I proposed actually never left the Justice Department.
00:05:26.900It never left the White House Oval Office.
00:06:18.500Like, we've been, you know, doing the equivalent of laughing in hundreds – you know, we've reached more than 1,000 pages of briefing that I've worked on personally as well in this case.
00:06:29.620And there are no cases where a theory like this has ever been tried for an unsent letter.
00:06:35.220And as you point out, it does become equivalent to a thought crime, right?
00:06:38.980So, you know, you propose a letter, it's debated internally, and then the letter is not sent.
00:06:44.700You know, how can that possibly be either criminal or a disciplinable offense?
00:06:52.380And to their credit, they decided not to pursue that one.
00:06:55.480But I'll tell you that the bar prosecutor equivalent, his so-called disciplinary counsel, at his closing argument at my trial, which concluded, you know, second week or so of April of this year,
00:07:06.580he said that I was literally – I'm not making this up – I was literally – I am literally the gravest threat to the republic since the Confederacy in the Civil War.
00:07:18.180And so at least the hearing committee said that that was hyperbole, and they rejected that theory.
00:07:25.560The other theory, get this, that theory which they did endorse, and that's the basis of their recommendation that I get suspended for two years, is that I engaged in attempted dishonesty.
00:07:36.580And that's a real head-scratcher, too, because we can't really find cases of people engaging in attempted dishonesty as to letters that were never sent.
00:07:49.080Sorry, Jeff, what is attempted dishonesty?
00:07:55.220So they're saying that the letter represented that the Justice Department had concerns about the 2020 election.
00:08:06.080And they say that because several of my colleagues at the Justice Department disagreed with that and that they did not have concerns, therefore the department did not have concerns.
00:08:15.800And therefore, by attempting to send the letter, which, again, was only debated and never sent, I was attempting to lie.
00:08:24.360Now, this ignores several things, including the fact that for a portion of the day, a good portion of the day on January 3rd, 2021, I actually was the acting attorney general.
00:08:47.740All I was attempting to do was to put forward my view of the fact that Fulton County, Georgia, ran a terrible shot through with legal and factual errors election process in 2020.
00:09:01.780So, obviously, as you just say, especially if you were the acting attorney, the actual, you know, head honcho at the DOJ for some period of time, it is not possible for you to articulate a view and for that view to be dishonest with regard to the views of the Justice Department because you are the Justice Department at that moment.
00:09:24.120Let's say that you were doing something dishonest, which, again, zero evidence that you did anything dishonest whatsoever.
00:09:29.980But even the phrase attempted dishonesty, it would be like a little kid goes in, reaches into the cookie jar, takes a cookie.
00:09:37.720And then mommy comes in and says, hey, did you take a cookie from the cookie jar?
00:09:42.620And the kid thinks about saying no, but then says, yes, I did take a cookie from the cookie jar.
00:09:49.080It would, well, you, the kid could be accused of attempting to potentially be dishonest, though ultimately he was honest.
00:09:58.200So, the whole thing, as I understand it, is absurd because you're articulating a view that not only you believed, but which is obviously correct, and that millions and millions of Americans understand to be obviously correct.
00:10:10.360But furthermore, the very thing they're accusing you of is a logical impossibility.
00:10:18.700Either you're going to be dishonest or you're not going to be dishonest.
00:10:22.100The success or failure of aforementioned dishonesty actually has nothing to do with it.
00:10:28.360Jeff, I'm going to pull my hair out if I keep hearing what they're doing to you, and I'm out of time also.
00:10:37.000Just for the audience, where does it all stand?
00:10:40.680I mean, how precarious is your situation right now, and how precarious is the situation of the other conservatives and Trump associates who are being persecuted?
00:10:50.100Well, look, they brought a new indictment recently in Arizona.
00:10:54.080And so, you know, one of my colleagues in the Trump administration, Mark Meadows, he's not just in the Georgia case alongside President Trump and myself.
00:11:21.420We're about to file our reply brief in that next week, and then it'll be argued probably in December.
00:11:27.040The bar situation is the one that's most troubling to me.
00:11:29.880I obviously do not want to lose my bar license even for two years.
00:11:34.380And so I have mounted an interlocutory appeal of that because there's an entire section of the Trump-US immunity decision from the Supreme Court that came out on July 1st that's about my work inside the Justice Department concerning the election.
00:11:49.180And the Supreme Court held, you know, six to three, that that entire episode creates absolute immunity.
00:11:56.800So I'm arguing that I'm part of that absolute immunity because if the president has absolute immunity for consulting with the Justice Department, if the D.C. bar can go after the other side of the conversation and try to disbar lawyers, the president's not going to get any answers.
00:12:10.720And so the whole decision would make no sense if it didn't apply to me as well as to President Trump.
00:12:17.660There are other immunity arguments I have as well that we think are well taken.
00:12:21.040So we're trying to see if we can stop that.
00:12:23.620But I think the game afoot, and I think they lined up the timing to try to do this, is to try to suspend my license on an interim basis while I go forward with appeals maybe circa October, right before the election, you know, coincidentally.
00:12:38.140So it's all about election interference at some level too, Michael.
00:12:41.920Of course, election interference because if you can, if you can take President Trump's lawyers off the table, if you can take them out of the game, then you're leaving him vulnerable at the time that he'll probably need his lawyers most.