Tag: disbarment

Election denier who Trump wanted to take over DOJ pleads the 5th in disbarment hearing



WASHINGTON — An environmental lawyer whom Donald Trump wanted 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 disbarment hearing on Wednesday.

Jeffrey Clark, a former Justice Department civil lawyer with no criminal law experience, had wanted to investigate a conspiracy theory that the 2020 election was stolen, including via smart thermostats. Just hours before the Jan. 6 attack, Trump nearly made Clark the acting attorney general of the United States but backed off when Justice Department leadership threatened to resign en mass.

Federal authorities searched Clark’s home in June 2022, and he now faces criminal charges in Georgia in the state racketeering case against Trump and others. Clark surrendered to authorities in August in that case and entered a not-guilty plea. He is also unindicted co-conspirator no. 4 in the federal election interference case brought by special counsel Jack Smith against Trump.

Clark briefly testified during a disciplinary hearing unfolding this week before the Ad Hoc Hearing Committee for the D.C. Board on Professional Responsibility, which is deciding whether Clark should lose his bar license for his involvement in attempts to overturn Trump’s 2020 election loss. The case was initiated in 2022 by the D.C. Bar’s Office of Disciplinary Counsel and has been held up in litigation for nearly two years.

Before Clark’s testimony, his lawyer talked about wanting to prevent Clark from having to repeatedly assert his Fifth Amendment right and “avoid us being on MSNBC for no good reason.”

Once his testimony got underway, Clark repeatedly asserted his Fifth Amendment right, as well as law enforcement privilege, deliberative process and attorney-client privilege.

Patricia Matthews, a member of the three-person panel hearing the case, asked Clark who his client was in connection with his invocation of attorney-client privilege: “For whom were you the attorney?” she asked.

“For President Trump, the head of the executive branch, the sole head, the unitary head of article two, the executive branch of the United States government,” Clark said. (Typically, Justice Department employees say that their client is the United States of America, not one particular president.)

Clark’s lawyer 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 have the DOJ leadership he wanted, “but it’s not going to change the facts” about the election.

Rosen testified that Clark was seeking to investigate issues that were “nowhere in his lane” and that, looking back, “Mr. Clark wasn’t very forthcoming” during the period leading up to the Jan. 6 attack. Clark, Rosen testified, “had read things on the internet.” Rosen said he thought for a time that giving Clark some info about DOJ’s efforts to investigate some of the conspiracy theories Clark believed in might help Clark with “coming off the ledge, if you will.”

Clark and then No. 2 DOJ official Richard Donoghue that Clark was “way out of bounds, way out of his lane.” Donoghue testified to the Jan. 6 Committee that he highlighted Clark’s lack of criminal or election experience during an hours-long standoff in the Oval Office on Jan. 3, 2021, telling Clark: “You’re an environmental lawyer. How about you go back to your office, and we’ll call you when there’s an oil spill.”

Rosen testified about the same Jan. 3 meeting during Wednesday’s hearing, saying that he and other lawyers in the room, “everybody, had indicated they would, in some manner, feel obliged to resign” if Trump named Clark as acting attorney general.

The threat of mass resignations at the Justice Department ultimately helped convince Trump to step back from his plan to appoint Clark, several lawyers in the room have testified.

Clark’s defense team on Wednesday called Suzi Voyles, a Republican politician and Trump delegate 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 spoke about how she believed that voting machines work, adding, “I’m not very technical.”

A disciplinary board for the D.C. Bar Association previously recommended that Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani lose his law license, writing that Giuliani’s “effort to undermine the integrity of the 2020 presidential election has helped destabilize our democracy” and that his “malicious and meritless claims have done lasting damage.”



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Ex-Trump lawyer John Eastman seeks to postpone his disbarment proceedings


John Eastman, the Trump-allied lawyer who created a memo arguing that then-Vice President Mike Pence could overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory, is asking a California judge to postpone disbarment proceedings against him over concerns that he could face criminal charges after the former president’s federal indictment last week.

In his third indictment this year, Trump was criminally charged last week with four counts of trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election and subvert lawful votes, following special counsel Jack Smith’s months-long investigation.

“[R]ecent developments in the investigation have renewed and intensified [Eastman’s] concerns that the federal government might bring charges against him,” Eastman’s attorneys Randall Miller and Zachary Mayer wrote in a filing late last week.

The lawyers noted that Trump’s third indictment refers to six unnamed and unindicted co-conspirators who assisted Trump in his efforts to overturn the results of the election, including one Justice Department official, a political consultant and four attorneys. They mentioned that “numerous media outlets” have speculated that Eastman is one of the co-conspirators. Eastman’s lawyer had confirmed to NBC News that his client was likely “Co-Conspirator 2” in the indictment and said his client was innocent.

If the disbarment proceedings aren’t postponed, Eastman’s lawyers argued that their client “faces the difficult choice of asserting his Fifth Amendment right” — which allows people to refuse to provide testimony — during the proceedings, which could potentially waive “his constitutional right against self-incrimination.”

Eastman “respectfully requests that the Court stay this proceeding pending resolution of the parallel federal criminal investigation and, depending on the outcome of the investigation, any possible resultant criminal trial,” the lawyers wrote, suggesting that “alternatively” they would seek “a three-month stay to allow for further assessment at that time.”

The counsel for the State Bar of California is asking a court to revoke Eastman’s license to practice law in the state. Eastman faces 11 disciplinary charges for allegedly engaging in a plot to push a far-fetched legal strategy for Pence to overturn Joe Biden’s victory as a joint session of Congress counted the Electoral College votes on Jan. 6, 2021. Prosecutors alleged that Eastman made false and misleading statements with his baseless claims of widespread election fraud, including his remarks at the “Stop the Steal” rally on the Ellipse shortly before the Capitol attack.

The disciplinary hearings for Eastman began in June in Los Angeles but were postponed to late August after proceedings went longer than expected.

The hearings came after the State Bar announced an ethics investigation into Eastman’s conduct last year. Eastman faces multiple allegations that he violated the state’s business and professions code by making false and misleading statements that constitute acts of “moral turpitude, dishonesty, and corruption.” Eastman therefore “violated this duty in furtherance of an attempt to usurp the will of the American people and overturn election results for the highest office in the land — an egregious and unprecedented attack on our democracy — for which he must be held accountable,” the State Bar’s chief trial counsel, George Cardona, said in a release in January. 

Eastman was admitted to the California Bar in 1997, according to the State Bar’s portal. He was a law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and is a founding director of the Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence, a law firm affiliated with the Claremont Institute, a conservative California think tank.

Eastman was also the dean of the Chapman University law school in Southern California. He retired last year after more than 160 faculty members signed a letter demanding that the university take action against him.



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