In this explosive interview, Michael Knowles sits down with former Trump DOJ official Jeff Clark to discuss the shocking tactics being used to try and jail members of Trump's inner circle, revealing the intense pressure and legal battles they face. Clark, who has been at the center of these attacks, provides firsthand insights into the political warfare being waged and what it means for the future of American justice.
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| I am joined now by Jeff Clark, who is Senior Fellow at the Center for Renewing America, who was a Senate-confirmed Assistant Attorney General under President Trump, and who is being targeted and persecuted by the left. | |
| The left wants to remove Mr. Clark's law license, or at least revoke his ability to practice as a lawyer for some number of years, all because he had the temerity to represent his clients, all because he had the temerity to raise objections to what he felt were improper election activities, all because he, I don't know, all because he was a good lawyer? | |
| A conservative good lawyer? | |
| Yeah, I guess that's a crime today. | |
| Jeff, thank you so much for coming on the show. | |
| Well, Michael, thanks for having me. | |
| So, Jeff, if you could, I'm sure you've recounted this a billion times, but, you know, there's a media blackout on a lot of the lawfare and political persecution surrounding President Trump's associates. | |
| What are they doing to you? | |
| Sure. | |
| Well, look, I'm a target in Jack Smith's January 6th case, so-called, in D.C., where I'm an unindicted co-conspirator. | |
| I'm one of the indicted Uh, RICO co-conspirators under Georgia RICO by Fannie Willis down in Atlanta, and the DC Bar is trying to suspend my license for two years at this point. | |
| So, it's been, uh, you know, a constant legal battle across multiple fronts, especially because I removed the Fannie Willis case to federal court. | |
| Still fighting about that. | |
| Still haven't gotten an oral argument in that appeal in front of the 11th Circuit. | |
| I removed the, uh, the Bar case against me, too. | |
| That's reached the stage where I'm gonna be filing an en banc petition. | |
| So I have more legal proceedings than you can shake a stick at, Michael. - So they're accusing you, though not quite indicting you, of being a co-conspirator in this federal case. | |
| Then, they're lumping you in with Al Capone in a RICO case that they're implausibly waging against Trump. | |
| And, amid all of this, they're going after you because you had the temerity to be a lawyer for Trump. | |
| Amid all of this, they're trying to stop you from being a lawyer. | |
| So, it's three different attacks. | |
| One, how are you fighting back? | |
| And two, regardless of any individual aspect of any of these cases, I think most reasonable people would agree it's not good to prosecute people for being good lawyers or for representing the President of the United States or for working at the Department of Justice and just doing your job. | |
| How do we solve the meta-political problem here? | |
| The problem that's not just about one side or the other, but that seems to threaten the whole political system. | |
| Well, I think it is a problem, Michael, that threatens the entire political system. | |
| It's one that goes after lawyers because lawyers are the ones who joust on behalf of clients in the courts of law in order that we, you know, have our adversary system function. | |
| If one side is targeted and destroyed, then you get You know, UNA results, right? | |
| You get a UNA party, you get a UNA state, you get, you know, a UNA bar. | |
| And if you have that, right, you're not able to use the legal system to hash things out, either as a matter of factual conflicts or legal conflicts. | |
| And, you know, you just wind up with the powers that be solidifying their power further. | |
| So, you know, the way they painted it, they're trying to save democracy, but in reality, What they're really doing is that they have an aristocracy, and that aristocracy is what they're desperate to want to try to preserve. | |
| And you ask, well, how can we fight against that? | |
| You know, I've talked to several individuals who realize that we need to have a series of projects on the right that are like this thing the left started called the 65 Project that is going after lawyers to try to destroy them in their communities, render their names toxic, You know, we need to have similar things that are going to push back from the conservative direction against Democrats and their allies. | |
| And if we don't have that kind of thing, they're not going to stop. | |
| They're going to just keep trying to strip people of their licenses and they file complaint after complaint after complaint. | |
| It's it's it's really a republic ending Process if we don't nip it in the bud and stop it soon. | |
| What are these specific? | |
| Charges that they're making against you in all of these cases in DC in Georgia And then even with with the bar trying to boot you out from being a lawyer for some years So the the bar has two charges one of which recently a hearing committee which consists of three volunteers two lawyers and a layperson Which I contend is an unconstitutional process. | |
| I don't understand how they can wield government power when they're not even taking oaths of office, when they haven't been appointed in accord with the Appointments Clause. | |
| But in any event, they recommended that my license be suspended for two years. | |
| There were two charges before them, one of which they rejected. | |
| That's the charge that essentially what I had proposed inside the Justice Department would have created profound Uh, damage to the legal system. | |
| And that's the, you know, despite the fact that, uh, what I proposed actually never left the Justice Department. | |
| It never left the White House Oval Office. | |
| It never went to Georgia. | |
| So it is an unsent letter. | |
| And as far as we can determine, no one has ever been disciplined for an unsent letter. | |
| Jeff, I got to pause you there. | |
| I'm sorry. | |
| I have to play because I don't know. | |
| I'm not sure people listening might not appreciate what you just said. | |
| You drafted a letter articulating your legal view on behalf of your client. | |
| You drafted a letter. | |
| Might as well have just put it in a drawer and locked it up. | |
| And because of a letter you drafted, because, I don't know, I could make a note on my iPhone in my Notes app. | |
| They want to revoke your law license for drafting a letter? | |
| Yes, and it's absurd. | |
| Sorry for laughing. | |
| Yeah, no, I understand. | |
| We've been doing the equivalent of laughing in hundreds. | |
| We've reached more than a thousand pages of briefing that I've worked on personally as well in this case. | |
| There are no cases where a theory like this has ever been tried for an unsent letter. | |
| And as you point out, it does become equivalent to a thought crime, right? | |
| So, you know, you propose a letter, it's debated internally, and then the letter is not sent. | |
| You know, how can that possibly be either criminal or a disciplinable offense? | |
| It's not. | |
| It's ridiculous. | |
| So that's the one charge. | |
| And to their credit, they decided not to pursue that one. | |
| But 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, he 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. | |
| And so at least the hearing committee said that that was hyperbole and they rejected that theory. | |
| So what is the other theory? | |
| The 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. | |
| And 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. | |
| Sorry, Jeff. | |
| What is attempted dishonesty? | |
| What are they even referring to? | |
| So they're saying that the letter represented that the Justice Department had concerns about the 2020 election. | |
| And 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, and therefore, by attempting to send the letter, which again was only debated and never sent, I was attempting to lie. | |
| Now, this ignores several things, including the fact that, you know, for a portion of the day, a good portion of the day on January 3rd, 2021, I actually was the acting Attorney General, as named by President Trump. | |
| And so at that point, you know, I was the views of the Justice Department, right? | |
| So I'm not attempting to lie. | |
| All 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. | |
| Obviously, as you just say, especially if you are the acting attorney, the actual 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. | |
| However, put that aside for a second. | |
| Let's say that you were doing something dishonest, which again, zero evidence that you did anything dishonest whatsoever. | |
| But even the phrase attempted dishonesty, it would be like a little kid goes in, reaches into the cookie jar, takes a cookie, and then mommy comes in and says, Did you take a cookie from the cookie jar? | |
| And the kid thinks about saying no, but then says, yes, I did take a cookie from the cookie jar. | |
| The kid could be accused of attempting to potentially be dishonest, though ultimately he was honest. | |
| So, 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, but furthermore, the very thing they're accusing you of is... | |
| a logical impossibility. | |
| Either you're going to be dishonest or you're not going to be dishonest. | |
| The success or failure of aforementioned dishonesty actually has nothing, nothing to do with it. | |
| Jeff, I'm, 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. | |
| So I'm going to leave it there. | |
| Just for the audience, where does it all stand? | |
| I 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? | |
| Sure. | |
| Well, look, they brought a new indictment recently in Arizona. | |
| And 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. | |
| He's also in that Arizona case. | |
| John Eastman is in that case. | |
| John Eastman's license at the moment is revoked. | |
| He's trying to get that reversed on appeal. | |
| And the Georgia case, I think, is largely stalled. | |
| We have an appeal going on to try to get Fannie Willis disqualified. | |
| And that's in briefing. | |
| We're about to file our reply brief in that next week and then it'll be argued probably in December. | |
| The bar situation is the one that's most troubling to me. | |
| I obviously do not want to lose my bar license even for two years. | |
| And so I have mounted an interlocutory appeal of that because there's an entire section of the Trump v. U.S. | |
| immunity decision from the Supreme Court that came out on July 1st that's about my work inside the Justice Department concerning the election. | |
| And the Supreme Court held, you know, six to three, that that entire episode creates absolute immunity. | |
| So 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 DC bar can go after the other side of the conversation and try to disbar lawyers, the president's not going to get any answers. | |
| And so the whole decision would make no sense if it didn't apply to me as well as to President Trump. | |
| There are other immunity arguments I have as well that we think are well taken. | |
| So we're trying to see if we can stop that. | |
| But 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. | |
| So it's all about election interference at some level too, Michael. | |
| Of course, election interference, because 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. | |
| That's a disturbing conclusion, and unfortunately, I think you're totally right. | |
| Jeff, we're going to continue to follow this, and of course, wish you the best in the meantime. | |
| Thank you so much for coming on the show. | |
| Thanks for having me, Michael. |