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March 8, 2023 - Viva & Barnes

01:31:40

Sidebar with Jeff Clark! Former US DOJ Double Ass't AG - Viva & Barnes LIVE!

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	Remember when I said, um, we're gonna come back to the concept of every fear hiding a wish?
	Beschloss.
	NBC News!
	Well, there you have it.
	Okay.
	Presidential historian.
	What we're about to witness with Trump is something unprecedented.
	He's still facing multiple investigations as this 2024 race gets underway.
	All of this legal baggage hanging over his head.
	We haven't seen anything like this in history before.
	It's amazing.
	We've never seen anybody subjected to such a political witch hunt before.
	It's unprecedented.
	This is meta, people.
	Every fear hides a wish, and the process is the punishment.
	Three principles of life to bear in mind.
	Who's this crazy guy over here?
	Illustrate them all.
	Perfect.
	No, we have not.
	We haven't seen a president potentially indicted like this and maybe dealing with serious multiple indictments from various places, various judicial agencies.
	It's almost like the witch hunt has its own incidental benefits.
	Guys, this is something we haven't seen before.
	And even Donald Trump, who has the survival abilities of a cockroach.
	Stop.
	I'm old enough to remember.
	I'll stop this.
	Everyone watched the stream yesterday.
	Let me bring this out of the screen.
	Everyone watched the live stream yesterday.
	The reality is that I didn't have a new video to actually post as the intro video for today's stream.
	But this is apropos because we're going to be talking tonight with Jeff Clark, Assistant Attorney General, former Assistant Attorney General.
	Former Attorney General Assistant.
	I forget how the lettering works.
	For Donald Trump.
	And as I always do, I look up and do my homework on guests to see what's going on with him.
	And interesting stuff is going on with Jeff.
	Jeffrey.
	Mr. Clark.
	I'm sorry.
	I should actually have to show more deference to the Attorney General.
	Okay.
	I got to know what assistant attorney generals do, what it was like to work under the Trump White House, what it's like to work in Washington.
	We're going to do it.
	We're going to do it all.
	So now, I see Jeff in the backdrop.
	I see Robert there.
	We're going to drop off YouTube at some point sooner than later, go exclusively to Rumble and Locals.
	The link to Rumble is in the pinned comment.
	We are simultaneously streaming on Rum Locals, vivabarneslaw.locals.com.
	And I'm going to fix my lighting once...
	Mr. Clark and Mr. Barnes come in the house.
	Okay, I'm going to start with...
	I'm going to start with Barnes.
	Robert, coming in 3-2-1.
	All right.
	Jeff, coming in in 3-2-1.
	And I'm going to go down to the bottom so that when I bring up a comment...
	How confusing was that intro?
	Watching me watch me watch Beschloss.
	Okay, Jeffrey, before we get into...
	First of all, is it Jeffrey, Jeff, or Mr. Clark?
	Well, those names are all used around the household, especially if my wife is mad at me sometimes.
	But I go by Jeff, generally.
	Okay, Jeff.
	30,000-foot overview.
	We won't spend too much time on childhood, but we do need to know upbringing, how you got to where you're going.
	But 30,000-foot overview for people watching who may not know who you are.
	Sure.
	So, I was born in Philadelphia.
	I thought to a...
	Middle class family, but as I would find out when I went off to college to a lower middle class family, my dad was a truck driver who never graduated from high school.
	And I went to 12 years of Catholic school.
	I did a lot of debate in high school and speech, went off to college and continued doing debating.
	And, you know, I had...
	Offers to go to Princeton to be a physics major or to Harvard to be an economics major.
	So I went off to Harvard and took the economics and Russian history pass.
	So I did a lot of studying about the Soviet Union and the rise of Bolshevism, things that have come in handy throughout the course of my career and in strange ways.
	Went to Delaware, where I was a kind of quasi-economist, as much as you can be one when you have an undergraduate degree in economics.
	For the state of Delaware, I did a lot of tax policy analysis, like figuring out how much bills would cost that went through the Delaware legislature, doing economic modeling, writing studies about tax policy.
	And then while I was there, I was enterprising, so I picked up a master's degree at night at the...
	Public Policy School at the University of Delaware, which is actually now called the Biden School.
	So it wasn't at the time, but now is.
	And also, I taught economics at a local college there.
	And then I went to law school in 92, graduated in 95. I was kind of the best administrative law student in Judge Silberman from the D.C. Circuit's administrative law class.
	After my federal clerkship on the Sixth Circuit brought me to Kirkland-Ellis, as did Ken Starr, who was there.
	So, you know, worked at Kirkland until I was just about to become partner, and then President Bush 43 got elected, and then I entered the Justice Department for the first time.
	So that's kind of the early years.
	Quick overview.
	I'll pause there, or I can keep going with it.
	Thank you very much.
	Robert, take it from here.
	Why law school?
	Why the practice of law?
	So I thought about doing three or four different things.
	That's an interesting question.
	So I had it down to becoming, getting a PhD in economics.
	Getting a PhD in history, going to business school, doing some of those things jointly, going to law school, or becoming a Sovietologist because I had done so much work in that area.
	But while I was working for the state of Delaware, the Soviet Union collapsed.
	So I figured that was not the best.
	Career path.
	Although given all the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax stuff, you know, I probably would have had a productive career there, trying to blunt that if I'd gone down that path.
	So, you know, I don't know.
	I just always felt that I've been cut out for the law and I really enjoy the intellectual nature of it.
	I entered the joint JD-MBA program.
	At Georgetown.
	But I love the first year of law school so much that I just, you know, you would have done the second year in that four-year program at the business school.
	So I just, I called up the business school and said, no, I'm just going to go straight through law school.
	Did you, I'm just trying to see, did you practice in, did you practice law or go straight from law school to the attorney general?
	I mean, what was the progression from law school to politics?
	Yeah, so the progression was I went to work, you know, first I clerked for a federal judge, a judge named Danny Boggs on the Sixth Circuit, and he was talked about for the Supreme Court for a while because his mother was Cuban, actually, so they were in part thinking of him as maybe he'd be the first Hispanic justice on the Supreme Court.
	But if he'd had his parents reversed, maybe the surname might have helped him.
	He didn't wind up getting tapped for what became Justice Kennedy's seat.
	But he had a very competitive clerkship.
	He's famous for giving a quiz to his clerks that involved showing him that you have knowledge outside the field of the law.
	After that one-year clerkship, I went to work for the law firm of Kirkland Ellis, which...
	It's a tremendous law firm, like a lot of big law, so to speak.
	It's moved farther and farther left, let's put it that way.
	So I spent five years there, and then I entered the Bush administration as a very young deputy assistant attorney general at age 34. I spent four years in the Bush administration, and then I went back to Kirkland.
	As a partner, and then I was there until I was nominated by President Trump to become the Assistant Attorney General of that same division, the Environment and Natural Resources Division, in 2017.
	In 2018, the Democrats, you know, blocked my nomination, blocked my confirmation, I should say, for a kind of record 14 months.
	But eventually, at the end of 2018, I took office.
	So that was the path first.
	Practice, you know, what is that?
	Five years, four, and then after that, 13 years.
	So like 18 years in private practice and a total of about, in two different administrations, six, six and a half years in the Justice Department.
	How much influence do you think, from what you witnessed, but also more today, do you think law clerks have on courts in the sense that it seems like...
	These days, that depending on the judge in the courtroom, but there's more and more judges where I'm often wondering what the clerk thinks because I think the clerk's going to write the opinion in a sense that will often deviate dramatically from where the judge seemed to be.
	What was your experience and how much today do you think clerks have more influence than they used to?
	Well, I think that they can have a lot of influence.
	It depends on the judges, right?
	Let's just, you know, and I'm sure you see this, you know, Robert, when you read Supreme Court decisions, right?
	Some justices are clearly doing their own work because you can hear their voice come through in the opinions.
	I think others of the justices kind of produce a more kind of corporatized work product.
	And the same thing is true, I think, at the Court of Appeals level and at the district court level.
	So it varies.
	With the judge.
	So I have a kind of funny story for you about that.
	So when I was clerking, you know that obviously federal appeals are heard before three judge panels initially, and then there's the prospect that they could go on bonk before the entire court.
	So there was a particular case during the time span I was clerking that went on bonk.
	We weren't involved at the panel level.
	But the issues were really interesting.
	Ultimately, the case went to the Supreme Court.
	And I wanted to have my judge get the assignment to write that so that I could work on it.
	And so I wound up writing not just a memo about my own advice about how to resolve the case, but I wrote up both a kind of centrist position and then a You know, kind of the best set of arguments on the other side.
	And the judge wound up sharing that memo with all the judges on the en banc court.
	And, you know, not only did the stuff that I worked on wound up in the majority opinion for the en banc court, but in a separate concurrence.
	And then there were elements of it drawn on by the dissent.
	So, yeah, I mean, if you're especially if you're a good clerk, you're an enterprising clerk, you can wind up having a big influence.
	So, you know, if you can.
	Sometimes watch the clerks as they watch the arguments.
	You can pick up how they're receiving things, and they might be receiving them in different ways than the judges that they clerk for.
	I didn't realize quite how big Kirkland Ellis was.
	Wikipedia now says the largest law firm in terms of revenue.
	What's it like for people who are aspiring to work and think that working at...
	Big, firm, private practice is like the pinnacle, the holy grail of the practice of law.
	What was it like working there on the one hand as a young lawyer and then coming back as a partner later on?
	Do you have fond memories of it or are your memories more like mine where it was drudgery for 18 years of your life?
	Fond memories of it, and it's definitely changed over time.
	And certainly my experiences in the Trump administration have resulted in a kind of personal cancellation of me, at least for the moment, in big law circles.
	But as I look back on it before that whole controversy, I have very fond thoughts about it.
	And I'll tell you a story about that, which is that, look, I...
	I was very fortunate in my career.
	I mostly did appellate litigation or focus on crunch legal issues that could get cases dismissed, even if they were at the trial courts or in complicated agency proceedings and the like.
	So I never really had to do any of the drudge stuff.
	I didn't have to do discovery.
	I kind of quickly got slotted in as a brief writer.
	And then especially once I came back from my stint in the Bush administration where You know, I argued several of my own cases, right?
	Then I eventually started getting the nod to regularly appear and to argue appeals in courts of appeals.
	So I just, I had a blast doing that.
	At Kirkland, you know, they're kind of different practices, right?
	So there's a whole transactional side.
	And I decided when I was a summer associate, I didn't want to do transactional law.
	There's a bankruptcy side.
	I did do some work in bankruptcy.
	Litigation.
	And then there's litigation.
	And for the litigators, you know, they kind of pride themselves on being able to do trials.
	And so they had a, you know, each year a long training program.
	There's the National Institute of Trial Advocacy, NIDA.
	So Kirkland's, you know, version of that, and they would use a lot of the NIDA problems, was called KIDA.
	So I did, you know, all five required years of KIDA.
	I remember one year in particular, I had a partner, because there would usually be trilateral problems, like, you know, a team of two lawyers representing maybe one defendant, and then another defendant, and then the plaintiffs, and they were all kind of, you know, potentially cross-claiming against each other.
	And, you know, my partner that one particular year, a woman, was like a real gunner, right?
	She really wanted to be a trial lawyer.
	And I, you know, I was not kind of slotting myself to be a trial lawyer.
	I really was interested in the appellate stuff.
	And I remember she was asking me, you know, just to get to know me, what I had done, right, to meet certain milestones, like what discovery I had done, you know, how many depositions I'd taken and all those kinds of things.
	And, you know, I was just answering, you know, to say, look, you know, no, I haven't been doing those things.
	And she finally exasperated, said to me, you know, what is it that you do?
	And I would say, you know, look, basically, I get given a complicated problem, I head into my office, I think about it for several weeks, and then I write up sort of the path to solve the problem legally.
	And, you know, she just kind of shook her head, like, you know, like, why are we paying you to do that?
	But, you know, fast forward a decade, and the Deepwater Horizon spill happens, and Kirkland becomes the main litigation firm for BP.
	And, you know, I managed to get dismissed on a kind of combination of legal theories involving the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, the Clean Water Act, and maritime law, you know, billions of dollars of liability against BP.
	And she was, you know, like the third chair trial lawyer for several trials that were held in that.
	But she called to congratulate me after I got the multi-billion dollar case dismissed.
	And she said, you know, Jeff, after all these years.
	I finally understand what you do.
	So that was funny.
	Hold on.
	Let me just predict what the chat's going to say.
	So you got, this was a lawsuit against BP.
	You're representing BP and you get it dismissed.
	I won't say on a technicality, but you get the claim, a multi-billion dollar claim dismissed.
	Do people get angry with you for being successful for a party that they might not think believes should be successful?
	Right.
	I don't know how to say that politely.
	No, I understand, right?
	And it did not result in VP having no liability for this bill, right?
	I mean, VP spent billions paying claims, and I would work on two class action settlements that VP agreed to do that set up a whole claims process.
	But the claims that I got dismissed were basically, let's call them duplicative claims, claims that...
	States and localities could extract money from BP and not just the federal government.
	The argument was the Outer Continental Shelf lands are submerged lands, and the drilling was occurring on those submerged lands was like, you know, 40 miles off the coast of Louisiana, and it's not something for a state or locality to be regulated.
	In the entire environmental space, how has that changed in terms of the way environmental activism, like, I have to describe there was the early Robert Kennedy version of environmental law, which was about local private companies, local spills, cleaning things up for your own playgrounds, for your own land, your own water, etc.
	And somewhere along the way, it shifted into a lot of climate change, apocalyptic politics, using environmental law as a guise to restructure society in a neo-Marxist way.
	I mean, we see it with AOC's Green Bill, etc.
	How much did you witness that while you were involved in that energy and environmental legal space?
	Sure, Robert.
	And I know that, look, Robert F. Kennedy has come a long way.
	You know, I was actually going to debate him about climate change issues, you know, when I was in the Bush administration at the Justice Department and, you know, I wound up falling through.
	I think I really would have enjoyed that about, you know, climate change, which is an issue I think is overblown at best and at worst is really sort of a way to try to...
	You know, impose control, much like, you know, all the vaccine stuff and all the COVID hysteria are a different way to impose control.
	So I think you're right that the kind of classic environmentalism has given way to these kind of grandiose schemes of control.
	And indeed, I, you know, just a week and a half ago, I was at the Heartland Institute and they're sort of famous, you know, climate skeptics.
	They hold conferences.
	I spoke to them and, you know, one of the founders of Greenpeace also spoke and he was, you know, complaining about the same sort of, you know, changes over time that you're observing.
	So, yeah, the institutionalization of it and sort of the rise of these like mega citizen suit type things that are brought is not a good development.
	And I'd actually claim...
	You know, victories on two major things in that area while I was at the Trump administration.
	So one case that came up was the so-called climate kids case.
	60 Minutes did a big story about it.
	You know, it's hard to believe that, you know, some kids get together, they decide to file a major lawsuit against, you know, several components of the executive office of the president and, you know, about a half dozen cabinet agencies.
	So the law professors, you know, who did that case sort of went out.
	They got some kids who were the face people.
	And they sued to try to force a plan to be formulated and then overseen and approved by one federal judge in Oregon against, like I said, elements of the White House and five or six cabinet agencies.
	And it's just a total perversion.
	Of, you know, the process of our republic, right?
	Like one judge doesn't get to decide all those important policy questions.
	For one thing, Congress should be deciding those kinds of questions.
	But if they're going to punt in big statutes to regulatory decisions by, you know, federal departments or agencies, right, they have the legitimacy at least of reporting to a president who gets elected every four years.
	It's not just one judge in Oregon who sits for life.
	So I managed to get...
	After, you know, loss on several threshold issues in the district court to get that reversed by the Ninth Circuit.
	So I thought that was a big feather in my cap.
	And then I also, I ended this practice, although until Attorney General Garland revived it, of so-called supplemental environmental projects.
	Basically the, you know, without any statutory or regulatory authorization.
	Several administrations kind of ginned up this idea of if they bring an enforcement action against a company for pollution, say, you know, they'll give them a break where we won't collect these penalties if you agree to send money to these, you know, environmental groups or to other, you know, kind of community projects.
	And I think that's just a flat violation of the U.S. Constitution's requirement that Congress hold the purse strings.
	So, you know, what you're observing, you know, Robert, over the changes in the environmental movement and how that's impacted the law is definitely accurate.
	The kids' lawsuit, was it the Juliana versus United States?
	Yes, that was Juliana.
	And it finally got tossed.
	I mean, not that I've gotten blackpilled, but I'm getting very close.
	When you see, when you talk about, you know, lawyers looking for, you know, client shopping so they can file the suit against the government.
	And the government might not fight too hard because the government might want court orders to compel them to implement the change.
	And then you get judges who might be involved in this incestuous relationship with the government.
	What do you say to people who are very skeptical of the very functioning of the system?
	In this case, it got dismissed and the judge said, reluctantly, it's not the way to do it.
	Go to the legislative branches of government.
	But what do you say to people who fear that you have litigation working in tandem with partisan plaintiffs, with a government that might not object to a favorable plaintiff's decision, and we are left relying on good judges to administer good law?
	That's right.
	Well, I mean, obviously, good judges who adhere to their oath of office and have been, you know, properly vetted, you know, that whatever their background had been, right, they're not going to skew in favor of industry or they're not going to skew in favor of...
	People who are injured, they're going to apply the law as it's written in a fair manner.
	That's what you're looking for.
	Look, there's a whole political economy of this.
	One of the aspects of economics that I'm particularly fond of is called public choice economics, which is really about how there's kind of a market inside government, and that leads to a lot of perversion.
	And, you know, I built actually a lot of public choice economic concepts into why I got rid of the boondoggle of these supplemental environmental projects.
	There had been legislation pending before.
	It hasn't passed.
	And I think it's been reintroduced in the Senate.
	You know, they're calling it like the Stop Slush Fund Settlement Act or something like that.
	But in reality, you don't need new legislation to ban that kind of collusive.
	You just need to apply the laws as they're currently existing.
	There's a statute called the Anti-Deficiency Act, for instance, so that in my memos I explained how that statute bans this practice.
	And the practice has no authorization in law.
	It's just something that's grown up because people thought it was a good policy idea.
	Now, when you were deciding to go back into the government and join the Trump administration, what was your thought process?
	How much were you aware that, okay, this might be gambling my career just by being in the Trump administration, by following through on Trump policies?
	How much was that part of it, and how did you think through that process?
	Well, I didn't expect that it would be as bad.
	As it turned out to be, right?
	So obviously, I wound up touching a kind of third rail of the election.
	And that's not something that I would have thought that I would have been wound up being involved in.
	So I certainly didn't think down that path.
	And, you know, I've been accused of being opportunistic and the like, but, you know, certainly I've paid a high economic price for doing what I thought was right.
	So part of it, I think, was kind of not anticipatable at the start.
	But I think the way the law firms have reacted to, you know, Trump appointees, you know, I also would not have fully predicted that.
	So, you know, I certainly the path to fame and especially fortune in big law, especially if you're practicing in D.C. like I did, you know, for close to 20 years in terms of private practice.
	It's to be a Democrat, right?
	Everything sort of lines up with that.
	So, you know, I knew that I was never going to compromise on my principles and become a Democrat in order just to get ahead.
	So that I saw kind of, you know, going into it, Robert.
	Also, I've been surprised that, well, I should say somewhat surprised, but it's still kind of shocking to witness.
	Twofold.
	One is the big law cancellation.
	That's happening in mass.
	And they use the vaccine to do it, too.
	A lot of big corporate law firms were imposing vaccine mandates on some of their most productive lawyers.
	I represented some of those people in that context.
	There were some big law firms that lost exceptionally high-quality people over just cancel culture.
	big law adopting cancel culture, which is...
	The theory of the capitalist system working is that the money motive will balance out contaminating political motives.
	But it appears, as we've seen in Hollywood, as we've seen in other cultural institutions, as we've seen in the academy, big law seems to prefer political unity.
	Or am I missing something?
	I mean, maybe they're monetarily being rewarded for this cancel culture.
	What's your thoughts on that?
	And also the open, overt political weaponization of the bar process.
	I've been a long-standing critic of the bar.
	Not a big fan.
	I've seen it used, but usually it happened on a smaller scale, right?
	It was your criminal defense lawyer, your personal injury lawyer, your family lawyer, tend to get hit because...
	They happen to be in a field where clients are more likely to complain than in other areas of law, not because they're less ethical, but it seems that way from the bar, things like that.
	But now we're seeing Eastman in California, Sidney Powell in Texas, Rudy Giuliani in both D.C. and New York.
	You've had to go through it.
	This open, overt political weaponization where they're actually bringing bar complaints.
	Where no client is complaining, where there's been, in many cases, no judicial finding of any ethical misconduct at all.
	Are you surprised by both of those, that big laws joined cancel culture and that now the bar is joining cancel culture?
	Sure.
	Well, those are, you know, Robert, those are two big questions, and I'll try to squeeze in a third to, you know, maybe salvage myself with David and pulling more into my camp in terms of my practice, given my past work for BP.
	So, all right, on your first question about...
	The law firms, yes.
	I think that they are acting contrary to their economic interests, right?
	So Kirkland and Ellis really created a kind of embarrassment of riches, right?
	You know, Barr had been affiliated with Kirkland.
	He was an of counsel there before he was AG.
	The Deputy Attorney General, Jeff Rosen, was from Kirkland, and I did a lot of work with him over my years at Kirkland.
	I was an Assistant Attorney General from Kirkland in the Environment Division, and then I later became the Acting as well, running two divisions for the Civil Division.
	One of my partners from Kirkland also became the Assistant Attorney General of the Criminal Division.
	We had the Assistant Attorney General of the Office of Legal Policy.
	We had the White House Counsel.
	We had the Deputy White House Counsel.
	We had, you know, he was former at the time, but had been at Kirkland earlier in his career, the Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel.
	They were all Kirkland.
	And yet, only one of them is back at Kirkland.
	So it's amazing to imagine the law firm was so dominant, and then the firm seems not to sort of want to try to capitalize on that.
	And when I studied law and economics for the first time in college, actually, in senior year, I remember...
	An interesting paper about how to try to measure altruism, right?
	And the suggestion was you measure altruism by doing something that's against your financial interests, right?
	And so if you were to apply that test, I think the big law is kind of proceeding against its interests.
	It's losing a big talent pool of people who just happen to be conservatives because that's not where the ideology is of the managing partner or the managing structure.
	The thing I wanted to squeeze in is one reason why the Democrats tried to block me, David, was because Senator Whitehouse put it this way.
	If you get in, the oil companies will have captured the crown jewel of the Justice Department, the Environment Division, that protects our pristine environment.
	And I tried to assuage his concerns.
	And then what I would offer to you is, look, I was an advocate.
	I was an advocate for BP when I was in private practice.
	But I secured hundreds of millions of dollars in excess of a billion total from two auto companies for cheating.
	When I was working for Trump as the assistant attorney general of the environment, they were monkeying with their computer code in order to detect when they were being tested and then changing what their missions were.
	And that's just not tolerable conduct, right?
	So I threw the book at them for that and I think extracted very generous settlements.
	So then, Robert, your last sort of topic was about the weaponization of the bar.
	And yes, I mean, that's just, you know, it's really amazing to see this happen in America.
	It's not America, you know, the D.C. Bar had long had an informal rule, I wish they would actually codify it, that they would only process complaints from someone who had personal knowledge, right, which would basically be, you know, a client or a percipient judge or, you know, maybe a percipient opposing counsel, right?
	But, you know, the bar complaint that's still pending against me was filed by Senator Durbin, right, who has no idea, you know, personally.
	I wasn't advising him.
	I've never worked for the Senate.
	You know, legal advice that I gave inside the executive branch to the President of the United States and legal positions I took with my superiors at the Justice Department, right?
	I just, I don't think that's the fodder and that's not what the ethical system is designed to do.
	And, you know, several groups like this 65 project, you know, and another group called, it's called LDAD.
	I forget exactly what the, it's lawyers defending something, exactly what the acronym is.
	But, you know, those kinds of groups have nosed around, and some of them have filed, and crew, the Citizens for Ethics or something in Washington, they had filed complaints against me in D.C., and they were dismissed because they didn't have any personal knowledge, right?
	But, you know, my argument, which has yet to be successful, but also hasn't proven unsuccessful, one threshold argument is Senator Durbin doesn't have personal knowledge either, and the President of the United States isn't complaining about the advice I gave.
	Why are we really here?
	Jeff, first of all, we're going to go to rumble.
	It won't change anything on our end.
	I'm just going to end the YouTube stream.
	But I just want to make sure I wasn't attacking.
	I wasn't needling.
	I'm the youngest of five, and four of us are lawyers.
	My dad's a lawyer.
	Someone in our family was actually involved in the 9-11 lawsuits to determine whether or not each plane counted as one insurable claim versus whether or not it was part of one act and therefore...
	Whether or not they were two separate claims, insurable claims, versus one act and therefore one claim.
	So the law is the law.
	And I'm also from Quebec where we had the Megantic disaster.
	And I'm also a moral person where, you know, it's sometimes better to make your own energy than buy it from murderous dictators abroad.
	So it was a tongue-in-cheek question.
	But hold on.
	Before we go on, I'm going to end it on YouTube, people.
	The link to Rumble is in the chat.
	So we can...
	What did I just do?
	So we can carry on there.
	Give me one second.
	And then I've got some questions, Jeff.
	And I'll ask and you answer what you can answer.
	Ending on YouTube now.
	Have I done anything wrong?
	Jeez, I get nervous every time I do this.
	Okay.
	So now we're exclusive on Rumble.
	It won't change anything from the content.
	My question is, you get tapped to join the Trump administration.
	You've lived through different administrations.
	My recollection back in the day, they called Bush Jr.
	They called him Hitler as well, or racist.
	All the names they call Trump now.
	It's just that it's 20 some odd years ago.
	It's a new generation who didn't live through it, so they don't have the knowledge of it.
	And the older generation forgot it, and then he becomes like the savior of the Democrats when he starts running those COVID ads.
	You've lived through this and you have memory of it.
	Is my recollection or understanding wrong, or did they call...
	Bush Jr., the same names they called Trump.
	And the subsidiary question is, how much worse is it now than it was under Bush Jr., GWB?
	Sure.
	So, you know, yes, there was a lot of attacks and name calling on President Bush and the administration.
	So you're not forgetting that.
	It's just other people have forgotten about it or they're younger and they came along afterward.
	And so they just don't know.
	How much, you know, Bush the Younger was vilified.
	But I'll compare the two administrations like this, right?
	And obviously I saw them, you know, from the perch of being at the Justice Department.
	But, you know, also I spent a lot of time, given that, you know, I had worked in the environmental space for a while at the White House, because you have to go over there to deal with this part of the White House called the Council on Environmental Quality, which was very active in Bush, less powerful in Trump.
	Also with OMB, which is always looking at the price tag for these regulations, right?
	And what's the cost-benefit analysis show?
	And then other folks from things like the Domestic Policy Council.
	So I spent a lot of time at the White House, so I got a view of the White House.
	But mostly, obviously, my experience was inside Maine Justice and then dealing with some of the satellite offices, really, which are the U.S. Attorney's offices, the 90-plus of those.
	Around the country.
	So I would say if I compare the two administrations, you know, Bush to Trump, that there was a lot more fear of the press in the Bush administration than there was in the Trump administration.
	You know, I would suggest various things.
	Hey, we can do this.
	We can do that.
	And, you know, some of those ideas in Bush would get shot down because, you know, it would be argued, well, that's going to be perceived by the Washington Post as a rollback of environmental regulation.
	And we don't want that bad story.
	We can't do that.
	So they did make some really tough calls, you know, sometimes.
	Like, for instance, they did agree to deny this petition from this entity called the International Center for Technology Assessment, something like that, ICTA.
	And they petitioned to try to regulate greenhouse gases from cars.
	And that led to this famous Supreme Court case called Massachusetts v.
	EPA.
	So I argued that case in the D.C. Circuit, and I won two to one.
	But then the Supreme Court wound up reversing that 5-4.
	So it's not like the Bush administration didn't do some tough, hard-edged things back then.
	I also argued a case that...
	You know, that Vice President Cheney was particularly interested in involving coal mining in West Virginia and won that case.
	But in general, there was a lot more willingness in the Trump administration to, you know, in my view, do the right thing, right?
	Sort of do things like let me go after a cheating auto company, but by the same token, try to right the regulatory ship and, you know, not just, you know, impoverish the national economy with, you know, things that That get praise and look good, but that aren't actually doing any good.
	One story I have from the Bush administration is I remember I was in a meeting about wetlands regulation at the White House, and I started talking about how it was unconstitutional to do some of these things because it violated the Commerce Clause and the clean water official who was selected in Bush.
	I don't think this would have happened in Trump, you know, told me that I was being tendentious and I should stop talking about the Constitution.
	And I kind of laughed and scratched my head and said, you know, like, I'm from the Justice Department.
	I can't help it.
	I've taken an oath to the Constitution and I'm here to give you legal advice.
	So, yeah, just, you know, there was a lot more willingness to do innovative things and to take, you know, legal positions that, you know, would be viewed as.
	That's harder edged in the Trump administration than there was in my time in the Bush administration.
	How bad has the administrative state got in the sense that, like, even as an example, the Justice Department, that I increasingly deal with so-called career prosecutors, career professionals.
	In my view, they tend to have...
	Very distinct political bias.
	They're anything but neutral or the rest.
	And I think the lack of diverse life experience back and forth between the private sector and the governmental sector is detrimental to their ability to see the world through multiple perspectives.
	Most of them, that I deal with at least, have never been on the defense side of the equation, so they can't even really see it.
	And when I was explaining where Trump policy would run into her...
	Early on, I was talking to people in D.C. At the deplorable, actually, in some other places.
	But the biggest hurdle for Trump was going to be the administrative bureaucracy.
	That a lot of them are ideologically opposed to him.
	A lot of people in that town hate him.
	And that they have more power than maybe they've ever had.
	And that even with the Republican House and Senate at the time, Trump was going to have great difficulty implementing large parts of his agenda because of this administrative state that had almost taken over the function of Trump.
	I've witnessed that a lot.
	Let me start, though, by saying, look, there are many officials who are willing to do what, if you're going to have a career civil service, kind of the English tradition and the U.S. tradition as it's imagined on paper and in political science.
	Textbooks who will behave that way, right?
	They will accept orders.
	They will try to be at least somewhat creative.
	And, you know, we could do more by doing more in terms of reviewing them to give them You know, better bonuses at the end of the year, etc.
	But there are other people who are definitely just resistors.
	You know, I'll tell you a story that's not from the Justice Department, but it's from the, for me, adjacent agency of EPA, right?
	There was a young woman who had come from Texas, and she had entered the general counsel's office, and she was getting acquainted with the career staff who were going to work with her.
	You know, this guy invited her.
	She thought, I think, he was being, you know, hospitable.
	And, you know, she's, you know, married and has several kids out to, you know, have like a drink on the weekend or something.
	Like in the afternoon, like a lunch, you know, slash, you know, at a kind of bar at DuPont Circle.
	And, you know, this guy sort of, I think, deliberately set her up to meet at a gay bar.
	And then he sat with a resistance T-shirt on.
	While he talked to her about what her aims were for the administration, but he was clearly doing that to send a message of where he was.
	It wasn't so subtle.
	I didn't experience anything that weird, but going back to Bush 43, it wasn't like it was a non-problem then.
	I had a lawyer who, first time I went to a Solicitor General's office meeting, and Robert, I don't know if you've been involved in these from prior practice, sometimes folks will come in to make presentations, and the federal family will gather, which is the Solicitor General's office person will preside.
	The affected components, like if it's a civil division case or an environment division case or tax division case or whatever are there, and then any impacted federal agencies and then the private.
	Party kind of makes their pitch.
	So the first one of those I ever went to back in like 2001, late 2001, there was a woman, a career woman who worked for me, reported to me.
	And the next day, all of the contents of what had happened in the meeting, like who said what, et cetera, were blasted over her personal blog.
	So, you know, I called for her to be fired.
	And if I had been in charge, I would have fired her.
	Later, maybe around 2004, there was a woman who worked for me.
	We talked about a particular brief and what it was going to say.
	And she proposed two arguments in particular I thought were entirely wrong and unlawful.
	And I said, "Thou shalt not put those arguments in the brief." And she put them in the brief anyway.
	And when I saw the actual brief, I was like, "This person clearly has to be disciplined." They weren't disciplined.
	So I vowed that if I did make a return as the actual assistant attorney general, which is what I did in the Trump administration, that that kind of thing I would not tolerate.
	And no one tested me on that in my second tour back at DOJ.
	I'm going to ask a question that's going to segue into the more recent news.
	You get tapped.
	Trump comes into power.
	He gets elected.
	Everyone sees what goes down in terms of the Mueller report, accusations of Russia, collusion, crossfire hurricane.
	We found out the details later on, but I suspect a lot of people internally knew exactly what was going on well earlier.
	When you get asked to join the administration, is there a part of you that understands that if Trump ever...
	Is outed after a term one that your future professional prospects are going to be severely compromised or impacted by the backlash from having joined the administration of the devil himself?
	I think there, you know, I thought about it.
	There might have been some, you know, consequences, right?
	Like, you know, maybe...
	I would, you know, there would have been different kinds of law firms that I would have interviewed with on the end of my government service.
	But I didn't really think it was a problem, right?
	Because while I was always regarded as a kind of hard-edged conservative, I think everyone kind of thought of me as a reasonable person, right?
	You know, I had awards when I was at the Justice Department from several of my client agencies.
	You know, I managed to get on the governing council of the American bar associations, administrative law section.
	And, you know, I, I did a lot of speaking.
	People knew that I was in the Federalist Society.
	In that sense, a number of Democrats would think I'm not going to be simpatico with them on a lot of different issues.
	But I think my reputation was such that I would have been fine.
	I don't think that...
	The Russia stuff, even if that had gone in a different direction, probably would have had all that much of an impact on me because I wasn't working right in that area.
	For me, what's had the adverse consequences have been the fact that at the tail end of the Trump administration, I managed to get pulled into looking at election issues from the 2020 election.
	I was just going to say, the fact that you won awards is probably as relevant as Trump having won the Ellis Island, or been attributed to the Ellis Island Award.
	Once you're an enemy, nobody cares about your awards anymore.
	Sorry, Robert, you were going to say something.
	Yeah, speaking of just a sort of random question, when you're studying the Soviet Union, what was sort of twofold?
	One, what might have been surprising that you discover that most people still don't understand about the nature of the Soviet Union, maybe today even, or maybe particularly today?
	And then secondly, how did you know that the Russiagate story was always gibberish?
	So first, on the studying history part, I think that knowledge of this is increasing.
	There's a movie I hear that's out that's supposed to be excellent about the New York Times involvement in covering up the Ukrainian famine.
	But certainly when I was studying it, it still seemed to me that there was virtually no one.
	Who knew that, you know, millions of people were deliberately starved to death by Stalin, you know, the so-called kulaks in Ukraine.
	You know, there was really a mass genocide there.
	And that, you know, worse than that, there was this character, Walter Durante for The New York Times, who, you know, knew better and yet, you know, painted the Soviet Union as this utopia and covered up what was happening with the famine.
	So that's, you know, useful just as, you know, knowing that that history about the, you know, I mean, communism just results in death, whether we're talking about Mao, whether we're talking about, you know, Stalin, whether we're, you know, talking about Pol Pot, like whatever it is, at the end of the day, you know, blood runs through the streets.
	And, you know, so I see things like the rise of Antifa.
	As, you know, similar to the rise of the student intelligentsia and so on that eventually, you know, led to the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia.
	And, you know, it makes me fearful for that development and, you know, think we need to counteract that.
	The other thing is it shows how complicit with left-wing ideology, you know, our so-called, you know, mainstream, you know, or elite press can be.
	And, you know, that should be a stain.
	Forever on the New York Times.
	I mean, after it came out that Durante had done what he'd done, you know, the New York Times should have, like, been detonated as an institution, never to be trusted again.
	In terms of the Russia stuff, you know, I followed the news stories carefully, and I think if you read between the lines, you know, you realized that, you know, these stories were bogus, and that...
	You know, this idea of P-Gate in the hotel was ridiculous.
	And just, you know, at the level of President Trump, right?
	I mean, President Trump was being attacked because he was a genuine American patriot who, just as he said, wanted America first.
	So the idea that he was some kind of like Russian sleeper agent was ridiculous.
	You know, I think the things that came out about...
	You know, how they sort of twisted Carter Page and then, you know, the information that led to the FISA process being corrupted so that, you know, Trump administration or campaign could be spied upon.
	I mean, all these things, you know, were just, I mean, you know, it's a fascinating story.
	And so even though I had a day job.
	It kept me very busy on these environmental issues, which are really kind of like a rocket science of the law, right?
	I mean, there aren't a lot of people I know, especially who've never done it before, who could pick up the Clean Air Act or the Clean Air Act regulations and kind of understand, like, what they're actually doing.
	But, you know, even though I was doing those kinds of things, like, it just was impossible to avoid that story in Washington.
	And my BS detector told me it was BS.
	Jeff, if we can get...
	First of all, we actually had Ashley Rinsberg on the channel at one point.
	He wrote the book The Grey Lady Winked, which covered all...
	The New York Times had the Durante scandal, it had the Hiroshima scandal, it had the Vietnam scandal, the Second Intifada.
	It got things wrong in a very convenient manner every time.
	I'll just ask the question and then you'll disclose what you can.
	I know that you've done some public interviews.
	Some people watching might not know the shit that hit the fan eight months ago.
	And I'm just reading some headlines.
	I'm not going to bring them up, but there's an article from October 2021 from the New Republic.
	I don't know.
	But the headline that says, who is Jeff Clark and how did he try to destroy democracy?
	Not did he.
	How did he try to destroy democracy?
	There's one from the New York Times that says, Jeffrey Clark was considered unassuming.
	He then plotted with Trump.
	There might be a lot of people who don't actually know what happened to you recently, and without getting into more than you feel comfortable getting into, let people know what happened to you eight months ago.
	Sure.
	So, look, I'll try to shorthand a little bit of the lead-in before, you know, kind of, as you say, the excrement hits the fan.
	So, you know, it's after the election, and I was very suspicious of its outcome.
	I think statistically, you know, if you have some, you know...
	Numbers literacy, like I do, and statistics and econometrics and the like, you know, things that don't make any sense.
	And then there were also obviously lots of funky rule changes that I think were unconstitutional because they didn't go through the state legislatures.
	So anyway, for a constellation of reasons I was suspicious, I started to look at what I could do because by that time I was running not just the Environment Division.
	There are seven lineating divisions of the Justice Department, right?
	Civil, criminal, tax, antitrust, etc.
	So I had the Environment Division and then the Civil Division.
	So I was looking at, you know, what could I do within my span of authority?
	I was looking at that.
	I won't go into detail about what I concluded, but ultimately...
	You know, I wound up, you know, meeting with President Trump and talking about whether more energetic actions could be taken to investigate.
	And that's what I wanted to do.
	I wanted to investigate because I think there were all kinds of red flags around that election.
	So all of this occurred within the, you know, four confidential walls of Maine Justice, the Robert F. Kennedy building on 9th and Pennsylvania in D.C. or At the White House, including at a big Oval Office kind of showdown meeting on January 3rd of 2021.
	But all of the folks in that meeting in the Oval Office were lawyers.
	So it was six other lawyers and myself and President Trump.
	And so I know I didn't leak anything about that meeting to the press.
	I also know none of the bars seem to have investigated whether any of the lawyers there leaked it.
	You know, one or more of them must have.
	And I know President Trump didn't go to the New York Times.
	So at the end of January, I resigned a few days before the 20th when the Biden inauguration happened on January 14th.
	But by something like January 21st, 22nd, the New York Times had a big leak story, which, you know, had that headline, David, that you read about, you know, he was unassuming, blah, blah, blah.
	Turned my life upside down.
	And I remember leaving a meeting with a family friend.
	We prayed after we had burgers at Five Guys, and I went to my car because I didn't want to be rude while we were having a lunch.
	And I just had an explosion of emails and text messages and phone calls, all from Katie Benner, who wrote that first story at the New York Times.
	So then there were just, you know, a whole series of kind of follow-on, like everybody and his brother wanted to write a story.
	The environmental press was particularly unkind because they'd been looking for a way to get me for many years, and so they decided this was the time to plunge the dagger in.
	And then I was actually interviewing for a new job up in New York City, and the night before, this was like right around Memorial Day of 2021, A LinkedIn message from a staffer for Senator Durbin on the Judiciary Committee saying that they wanted me to come in, and they didn't have subpoena power, so I didn't agree to go in.
	They wound up writing a report against me in roughly October, so I think that's probably why, of 2021, I think that's why you found those stories.
	You know, the night that that broke, I remember being in an Italian restaurant with my wife and another couple, and I came out to my car, and same thing, I was greeted by an explosion of voicemails, emails, and text messages because, you know, Chris Hayes had decided that I was public enemy number one at that point.
	You know, that led to a lot of threats by voicemail, including a death threat I wound up describing to the January 6th committee.
	For where I was told that I should meet this guy in New Jersey, he knew I was from Philadelphia, that we would drive up to the Pine Barrens and then I would be chopped up into pieces and put in buckets and that my children wouldn't recognize any of the pieces.
	So some really chilling stuff as a result of what the press...
	I had a number of congressional committees to deal with.
	Senate Judiciary, House Oversight wanted me to come in.
	But then in September-ish of 2021, they let us know.
	They said, oh, you know, we've been ordered not to work anymore on your case.
	We've handed it off to the January 6th committee.
	And then that led to my interactions with the January 6th committee.
	They called me in for a deposition and went in to do that in November, I believe, of 2021.
	And I told them that this was all executive privilege, law enforcement privilege, kind of privileged in numerous dimensions, backwards and forwards.
	You know, Benny Thompson then purported to rule on my objections and said, oh, no, none of this is privileged.
	You know, you must testify.
	And then, you know, they basically made clear that they were going to ring me up for criminal contempt, much like happened with Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro, etc.
	And so, you know, right before that, so they...
	They had written an entire report and we sent them a letter before they released the report.
	We didn't know the report was forthcoming, you know, saying that, look, all right, well, you know, you're not accepting these privileges.
	We disagree with you.
	We'll preserve that potentially for future litigation.
	But now I'm just I'm going to take the fifth because this is a giant witch hunt.
	And so, you know, that's that's what I'm going to do.
	And they then released the report anyway, recommending me for criminal contempt.
	And then Benny Thompson held like a Wednesday evening hearing.
	And he said, we think he's in contempt, but we're going to give him one last chance because the Fifth Amendment's a very serious matter, David.
	And so he has to come in and testify this Saturday.
	So they ordered me to testify, but it wound up that actually I got...
	Very serious COVID.
	And so my second deposition was postponed until February of 2022.
	And then I went in and, you know, they insisted on going question by question and making me assert the fifth and my other privileges.
	At one point, what's his name?
	Adam Schiff.
	You know, started raising his voice to me and saying, you can't claim any other privileges than the fifth.
	And the record has to be clear.
	And so, you know, depending on the question, I would take other privileges, invoke other privileges, because I had a letter from the president to invoke executive privilege, for instance.
	So if the deposer asked me a question about my conversations with the president, I would say it's executive privileged and I'd take the fifth.
	So he eventually stood down, and I never wound up being referred to the Justice Department for criminal contempt.
	I've got to bring it up just because it's classic from Adam Kinzinger, hashtag fella.
	I don't understand the hashtag fella, but quick reminder from Adam Kinzinger, the bipartisan element of the January 6th committee.
	Quick reminder, pleading the Fifth is because you don't want to incriminate yourself.
	We respect the Fifth Amendment, but pleading the Fifth says a lot.
	So we respect your right to not incriminate yourself.
	But when you plead it, you're incriminating yourself.
	This is the constitutionalist.
	All of this stems, Jeff, all of this stems from discussions you might have had with the president as relates to potential legal challenges to the results or process surrounding the 2020 election.
	That's what this persecution is based on?
	Yes.
	And in particular, there's a concept about...
	Whether to send a letter to the Georgia legislature that they're particularly exercised about.
	But, David, it's worse than that.
	Like, your Kinzinger example is great, but the really classic example is Benny Thompson, the chair of the January 6th committee himself.
	After I took the fifth, he went on Rachel Maddow, and he said that if you take the fifth, it's part and parcel of you're guilty.
	Which obviously is the most profound misunderstanding of the Constitution possible.
	I think it's clear to read the Fifth Amendment and realize that's not what it said, but the Supreme Court has specifically said that the Fifth Amendment can be invoked by the innocent as well as the guilty.
	What's extraordinary is that challenging Having alternate slate of electors and having presented that to Congress, something that happened at the very beginning of our American history.
	John Adams was debating it.
	Alexander Hamilton was debating it.
	Thomas Jefferson was debating and deciding it.
	Then again, of course, in 1876, quite famously.
	And then there have been various challenges.
	I think Democrats have challenged every single Republican that's been elected in the contemporary era.
	There's some reason why they don't think he couldn't have won.
	And so the idea that this was somehow illegal or criminal is just unsettling.
	But the other thing, when I was talking, Robert Kennedy challenged the 2004 election, for example, Robert Kennedy Jr.
	It was part of that legal side of it.
	But the other aspect of this that is...
	To me, what I've argued to people on the left and other places is that we want a robust system of challenges because it increases public confidence in the outcome.
	Why do we want to suppress and censor investigation?
	Why do we want to suppress and censor debate?
	If the Trump Justice Department had done a meaningful investigation, and let's say they concluded...
	We may not like it, but there's nothing illegal that took place here.
	Maybe there's some constitutional issues, but that's for the courts or for Congress to deal with.
	I think it would have tremendously boosted public confidence in the election outcome.
	What I always tell people is if you're really confident the election was on the up and up, welcome.
	An investigation by someone who has a motivation, in particular, to try to see if there's something wrong there.
	Are you surprised that there's now this, that now it's illegal, now it's criminal, now it's destroying democracy to make sure democracy actually works?
	That the people's choice was actually reflected in the votes that were recorded and reported, especially given our long history of having robust debate.
	I mean, it was a debate in 1812, again in 1824.
	I mean, this is not some, like, radical deviation from our constitutional history.
	It's a continued expression of it.
	I think that's well said, Robert.
	I agree with that.
	And to put a finer point on it, in 2004, if I'm remembering correctly, Senator Barbara Boxer was the senator who, under the Electoral Count Act, backed up the Congressional Black Caucus and others who were objecting to President...
	Bush's win over John Kerry.
	You have the constitutional law professor, Jamie Raskin, who was obviously very influential on the January 6th committee himself, having objected to certifying the 2016 election for President Trump.
	So it's really curious, where are the...
	The Barr complaints against, you know, Democrat lawyers who complained about Republican wins.
	You know, it's not even-handed.
	It's not fair.
	And it's, as you said, a weaponization of the Barr process.
	So I am surprised at some level that it's happening, right?
	But, you know, at some level, you know, it may be a little bit surprising that they haven't...
	Gone in this kind of direction before, right?
	I've been asked many times by people why, you know, whenever there's a controversial Supreme Court justice nomination, which is pretty much every one that a Republican president puts forward, you know, I trace the fact that that process has become hyper-politicized since especially the Bork nomination.
	You know, all the way back to, like, legal realism.
	If you think that judges are just doing another form of politics and they're not actually doing something different, which is interpreting the law and trying to do that in a neutral, oath-bound fashion, then, you know, of course, you want to have a rigorous, you know, intensive, you know, like biting, acidic process politically to try to drive out, you know, people who are going to be judges or justices that you disagree with.
	Yet it took, you know, what, a hundred years from kind of the rise of progressivism until, you know, the Bork nomination for that to really come home to roost.
	And so now we're just, you know, someone came up with the idea of why don't we just make the, you know, conservatives'lives difficult by bringing bar challenges against them.
	And, you know, hopefully, um, I hope that's true.
	And I say that not just out of, you know, of self-interest, but out of interest really for the country.
	It's not something that should be done to Democrat lawyers either.
	And yet, if it's upheld, if it does result in people, you know, being disciplined, then, you know, the Democrats are going to see that happen to them.
	And they're also going to see, you know, that there are more Republicans who will start to go into some of these ethical bodies in the states and localities.
	I've My operating theory is that the only way this actually comes to an end is...
	If these bar societies or licensure bodies just get flooded with endless complaints from people who were never clients, never patients, never had anything to do, just flood them so they get actually just totally incapacitated to do their own work.
	And then maybe they're going to say, yeah, maybe anonymous complaints or complaints from non-clients for clearly political reasons are things we shouldn't entertain, let alone persecute or prosecute.
	But hold on one second.
	There was something else.
	So all of this January 6th stuff is born out of...
	Let's investigate or let's look into whether or not there's ways to challenge this.
	How does it culminate, if I may, and if you don't want to answer this, don't answer it, but how does it culminate in you getting raided?
	By federal investigators.
	I think I did see an interview that you gave on this, so I know you could say something about it, but I'm not sure that people know this.
	How does this culminate to the January 6th investigation to being painted as nothing less than a traitor by mainstream media that weaponizes its own reach to propagate disinformation?
	How does it culminate in you getting raided by, I guess, the very agency that you sort of were part of at one point?
	So, David, the short answer to that question is, I don't know.
	But let me take a step back and explain to you why.
	So after that Katie Banner New York Times story came out at the end of January 2021.
	Shortly after that, the Inspector General of the Justice Department announced that he was going to engage in an investigation of how election issues were handled inside the Justice Department.
	But it clearly bore a kind of intimation that that related to the New York Times story.
	Fast forward.
	However many months, but it's more than a year, you know, like a year and a half, right?
	Because we're talking about June of last year is when the raid happened.
	I don't hear from the inspector general.
	No one from them, you know, writes to me or one of my lawyers or, you know, calls us or, you know, sends anyone to interview us.
	Just, you know, radio silence.
	Then, you know, there's the raid.
	And the raid was conducted by agents from the inspector general's office.
	And then the same day or shortly thereafter, even though he's never worked at the Justice Department, John Eastman, his phone was seized by the inspector general investigation as well.
	And so I'll just back up and tell a quick story about how that happened.
	My family was in...
	Atlanta visiting my wife's side of the family, so luckily I was the only one home.
	You know, I'd kind of woken up around 6:30 or something, but I hit the snooze button a couple times, and I was just about to get up, and then I heard, like, loud, you know, banging at the door, like, boom, boom, boom.
	And, you know...
	And it was insistent, right?
	You know, because I was first thinking, maybe I'm having a dream or something.
	But, you know, the only thing I could think of is, I don't know, maybe one of the neighbors has an emergency or something.
	It was a fire.
	I don't know.
	So I threw on a dress shirt I had from the prior day.
	And, you know, fateful decision decided, you know, kind of like I didn't have time given how much the banging was coming and not stopping.
	And there was, you know, indistinct shouting.
	To not throw my pants on.
	And I just like ran and opened the door a crack.
	And I was like, what's this all about?
	I see, you know, like a dozen federal agents in bulletproof vests, you know, clearly with weapons and cars all over the place.
	And then there were also, you know, two Fairfax County, Virginia, two or three detectives with them.
	And, you know, they insisted that I come out of my house and I said, you know, hey, can I put my pants on?
	You know, I'm the colleague of most of them in the Justice Department at a far higher rank, you know, like 18 months earlier or whatever.
	No, I can't.
	I have to come out.
	So, you know, then using the Fairfax County police, they body cammed me and then the CNN strategically found a picture.
	Where I had my hands behind my back while I was kind of pacing, waiting to be able to go back into my house.
	Eventually, they let me put my pants on in the house.
	And, you know, my face was like downturned looking at my own driveway.
	In that moment, they pulled from the tape.
	And that's become sort of an iconic picture, which, you know, they selected deliberately, I think, to convey the impression that I was arrested, even though I wasn't.
	I went back in the house.
	You know, I said, hey, I want to see the warrant.
	They tried not to give it to me.
	And I heard that something very similar happened with the Mar-a-Lago raid, which would happen, you know, a few months later.
	And eventually, you know, I gave them a little Fourth Amendment.
	You know, lecture.
	And then they did give me the warrant.
	You know, I read it.
	And then I asked for the affidavit.
	And they didn't give me the supporting affidavit.
	And to this day, I don't have it.
	So there is no reasoning in the warrant itself.
	The affidavit contains the reasoning.
	And I haven't seen it.
	So that's why the answer, David, is I don't know why they did the raid.
	First of all...
	Someone in the Rumble chat said, always a good idea to answer the door in your room with pants on.
	Hardy heart.
	How do you feel?
	How do the people, they know you.
	It's not like they didn't know who you were.
	They know that you were, a year and a half earlier, colleagues, but colleagues of a hierarchy.
	Are they apologetic or are they gleeful and gloating that this is how justice is doled out in America now?
	So, look, they did not, other than the kind of, you know, some shenanigans about not giving me the warrant, other than giving me a hard time about trying to take down some of the names of the agents who were there, you know, executing the warrant.
	There's also, here's an interesting facet, right?
	So, they gave me...
	You know, since they'd taken my phone, right, and I couldn't use my phone, I don't know what my lawyer's number is off the top of my head, right?
	These days, it's just stored in my phone.
	So, you know, they did loan one of the, I think it was from the Fairfax County Police, not from the federal agents, you know, loaned me a cell phone so I could Google the phone number of my lawyer.
	It turned out he was actually with his wife on an appointment because she'd had a complicated...
	Pregnancy at the Georgetown Hospital that day, so that meant he couldn't show up for hours.
	But in any event, I tried.
	And, you know, I wanted to write down the number, so they gave me some paper to write it on.
	But I think they gave me some things that gave me some information about the statutes involved and so on that they didn't, you know, actually really want me to have at the end of the day.
	But on the back of it, I wrote the phone numbers.
	Okay, so fast forward, the search takes place for many hours.
	And then finally my lawyer arrives, maybe about 15 minutes before they're done, and they won't let him come into the house to meet me and speak with me.
	So I have to go outside and meet with him, like, off to the side of my house.
	When I come back, that paper that they had, I think, inadvertently given me is gone.
	And, you know, we tried to get it back, but they refused.
	And, you know, my view is that that paper was not described in the warrant beforehand, and so therefore that's a Fourth Amendment violation.
	And it also was not described in the inventory of papers that, you know, of things that they took from my house, including all my electronics.
	So I think it's a kind of double Fourth Amendment procedural problem.
	But, okay, that was all a way of saying those were the problematic aspects of what happened.
	While I was at the House...
	You know, the officers, especially from Fairfax County, were kind.
	They, you know, they asked me if I needed anything to drink from my own refrigerator.
	You know, they brought me some breakfast cereal.
	You know, they kind of were chatty about, you know, small-gauge stuff.
	So, you know, I wasn't manhandled or anything.
	I wasn't placed under arrest.
	I was told I could leave my house at any time and come back.
	But, of course, you know, you got...
	You know, more than a dozen guys in your house and women moving around, including with an electronic sniffing dog.
	You don't really want to leave your house.
	But, you know, they kind of shuttled me from room to room.
	I couldn't leave and move about my house however I wanted to.
	They told me where I needed to be inside my own house.
	In terms of that experience of that process, one of the questions on our locals board was that McCarthy has committed to a committee that's going to investigate this weaponization of the legal process for politicized purposes.
	Mike Davis, who we had on sidebar, has been critical at the lethargy with which that committee is up and going, including what appears to be a lack of funding.
	So far.
	Do you think that committee, well, one, can you tell people just through your lived experience how important that committee is to outing some of these extraordinary political weaponization of the legal process?
	I mean, to such a degree that conventional conservatives are calling for disbanding the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
	So again, five years ago, you would have never heard.
	Well, you're hearing it now because they're seeing agencies that don't seem to be under any form of meaningful legal limit to their activities in terms of political weaponization.
	What do you know about that committee?
	Do you have hope for that committee?
	And what do you think about the idea of the committee?
	So, first on the idea of the committee.
	So, the night of the Mar-a-Lago raid, I was on Fox.
	Tucker Carlson's program, but it was Will Cain guest hosting.
	And in that appearance, toward the end of the hour, I called for the creation of a new church committee.
	And the organization I work for now, the Center for Renewing America, we have been calling for a new church committee for some time.
	And so we've been working with the House to try to do that.
	It's much like...
	My boss, Ross Vogt, the former OMB director.
	You know, his work on the budget and the debt limit.
	So, you know, our organization is small, but I think punching above our weight.
	And so, you know, we have really, you know, really been pushing for getting this committee to work.
	And I think, look, what happened with the warrant at Mar-a-Lago, especially if you compare it to, like, what's happening with this, you know, kid glove treatment for...
	President Biden, whose document problems, as it were, go back not just to when he was vice president, and vice presidents don't typically have declassification authority, but to his time as a senator, even.
	He just gets advance warning, gets to do a negotiated search of multiple locations, etc.
	But no, for President Trump, it was kind of right away.
	Not, you know, an iron fist in a velvet club, just sort of the straight on, like, iron fist.
	You know, no, we're just going to show up and raid Mar-a-Lago.
	So in my own experience, obviously, a couple months before was similar.
	You know, Representative Scott Perry's phone was taken.
	There's a case pending in the D.C. Circuit that was just argued, and part of the argument was allowed to be.
	You know, put up on the website so you can go listen to it about whether speech and debate clause protects, you know, the topics on his phone, etc., in connection with, you know, anything he was thinking about and advocating concerning the 2020 election.
	I mean, it really is unprecedented, you know, Robert and David.
	I think that it's dark times for America and, you know...
	Much like if people use Nazi analogies, these things can become trite and it cheapens the true horrors of Nazism.
	We're not at the point where people are being placed in gulags or where borders are being sealed off and there's no food like with the Ukrainian famine.
	But we're seeing, I think, tactics that are similar to Secret polices in East Germany or the NKVD and KGB, etc., in the Soviet Union.
	It's sad.
	I never would have thought we would see America reach this point.
	So this committee is very important.
	I think that it's obviously a new effort.
	And so, you know, there needs to be some time for them to work through it.
	But I think it's vital that that committee have success.
	And it's being conducted in contrast to the January 6th committee, which was a totally stacked affair, right, where Nancy Pelosi blocked Jim Banks and Jim Jordan from being on that committee.
	And then, you know, we had two ostensible Republicans, the fella, you know, Adam Kinzinger and then Liz Cheney, both of whom are out to kind of destroy Trump and effectively are just Democrat partisans for that reason.
	But, you know, there's a fair process where the minorities represented in the new weaponization subcommittee.
	I'm hopeful that as they work through the kinks, that they're going to investigate a lot of these very alarming things that are happening inside the Justice Department and the FBI.
	Jeff, I don't know what you're doing these days now.
	What are you doing on the one hand to, I presume, continue the battle because you don't look like the type who's going to sit back and take the punches and what's your hope or what's your level of optimism going forward?
	Does it get darker before it gets lighter or is it only going to get darker or are we at the darkest point of dusk right now?
	As your internet glitches, that might not be a good sign.
	This interview is over.
	I don't know.
	Okay, there you go.
	I refocused the camera.
	That's a warning from the gnomes inside the internet on this conversation.
	So, no, I haven't taken this lying down.
	I thought early on that the New York Times would have their fun and they would kind of move on to the next thing, but it's so...
	It's much like the hysterical reaction to Tucker Carlson putting out some of the other side of what the footage shows of what happened at the Capitol on January 6th.
	There are just certain narratives that are too important to them that they cannot surrender and they must hold on to.
	The idea that this was an armed insurrection at the Capitol and police officers died, even though there are various lies baked into that narrative, they cannot surrender it.
	They cannot allow You know, a story that has perspective and shows that, you know, not all of those things are true or true to full extent.
	They can't allow that to happen.
	That's why, you know, Majority Leader Schumer in the Senate is like threatening Fox News and Rupert Murdoch.
	I think similarly for me...
	The narrative that they've created that, you know, I was somehow like Machiavelli Jr. inside the Justice Department is also something that they're not going to surrender willingly.
	And so it has to be fought back on.
	I've, you know, done my best, you know, by resisting the January 6th committee, resisting this Barr process and, you know, pointing out all of its flaws.
	I'm going to keep doing that.
	And then you put in a plug for my organization, the Center for Renewing America.
	We're doing what we can to fight against woke and weaponized government from the macro sort of high levels of funding with Congress's purse string powers down to helping FBI whistleblowers.
	We've just brought on a new fellow, Steve Friend, who's one of the FBI whistleblowers.
	He's the guy who basically was You know, signed up to work in Florida on child porn and other kinds of sex trafficking investigations and so on, and then was going to be repurposed to go after, you know, Jan 6 defendants, because that's, Lord knows, that's the highest priority.
	And then he was told that the work he was hired for in that office basically was just, that's a local matter now.
	It's only a local matter.
	You know, we brought him on board.
	So, you know, we're fighting on every front we can.
	And, you know, we've been expanding, so we're going to keep doing that.
	Well, my final question.
	First, you did excellent work during your time at the Justice Department, and I was one of the few people in the Justice Department who would look into certain issues that a lot of people didn't want to look into, which always baffled me at the time.
	It baffles me now.
	But the people want confidence in elections.
	They need confidence in the process that produces those elections, and part of that has to be transparent, open investigations, not somebody saying, They did an investigation that they kind of didn't.
	I know I was part of the Trump team in Georgia in particular and saw a lot of things happen that should not have happened that have undermined America's confidence in elections.
	So what the media campaign and the political campaign has been has backfired in that sense.
	Their efforts to demonize and destroy anyone who had questions about whether the process was constitutional, whether everything was done in the up and up.
	It has only led to more people believing things were not done on the Up and Up.
	Also, you've had a stellar career in a wide range of places and spaces.
	Thanks for coming on tonight.
	My one question, I have a question that I ask for everybody.
	What's one of your favorite films?
	My favorite movie, without doubt, that I can watch again and again and again is The Godfather.
	I think it's a tremendous movie, and it's about...
	It's about family and not just about the crime, etc.
	It's really, I think, a Shakespearean story at an important level.
	There are two scenes in that movie, Robert, that particularly stick with me.
	One is...
	Michael, the son who's kind of set up to be the golden boy and the war hero, comes back and shortly after he's back, his father, the godfather, there's an assassination attempt and he's at the hospital and he realizes that police corruption has led to his father being without any guards and that he's going to be set up to be assassinated for good a second time.
	And just, you know, how he thinks on his feet and how it's all driven by the fact that, you know, it's his father.
	And then the second scene, that one might be from The Godfather 2, but there's the second scene where the Godfather talks to his son, Michael, after Michael's taking over the mafia family business.
	And, you know, the Godfather says, you know, this isn't what I wanted for you.
	You know, I wanted you to be...
	President Corleone, Senator Corleone, Judge Corleone, and it just didn't work out.
	And the son says, give us some more generations in America and it'll work out.
	So anyway, that movie, I think, is just a masterpiece.
	I was worried you were going to say Shawshank Redemption for a second.
	I'm joking.
	I have nothing against that movie.
	It's a beautiful movie.
	Jeff?
	Well, we've gone longer than I foresaw that we were going to go.
	Thank you.
	I mean, I hope people in the chat, I don't think people really knew what you've gone through, what you're currently going through.
	My one question, my last question.
	What do you do to, not to get motivation, but spiritual, psychological fortitude to continue forging as you're doing despite what's being done to you?
	How do you do it for those out there who are facing adversity and struggle with the motivation to continue struggling?
	Well, thanks for asking me that, David.
	I appreciate that.
	Before I answer your question, though, let me just do something so I don't make sure to forget it because it has been a heavy, not just a burden on the family, an emotional burden, but a financial burden to plug my legal defense fund.
	It's at give, send, go dot com slash Jeff Clark, all one word, just J-E-F-F-C-L-A-R-K.
	And, you know, the people have donated to that, for which I'm very grateful, and that certainly helps in the kind of, you know, intestinal fortitude and keeping going.
	You know, the answer to that is that I'm kind of doing religious double duty at the moment, right?
	So I told you I'd gone through 12 years of Catholic school, so, you know, I go to Mass regularly with my son.
	And then my wife is Protestant, and for many years, actually, I was not going to Mass.
	I was just, I shouldn't say just, but I was going to Protestant service with my wife and the kids.
	So these days, you know, the whole family goes to the Protestant service on Sunday, and then either before or after, my son and I go to Mass.
	The local parish priest and, you know, my Protestant minister have been very helpful and supportive.
	And I think that, you know, they have various, you know, prayer groups and I have friends who've been running prayer groups.
	And so I don't know where sometimes the ability to kind of keep on fighting comes from, but I think it's in the, you know, the quiet.
	Invisible spiritual world.
	It helps me even though I don't know exactly what quarter it comes from.
	Fantastic.
	I shared the link both in Rumble and in our Locals community.
	Everybody, you know where to go if you want to support.
	Center for Renewing America.
	Is it centerforrenewingamerica.com?
	No, it is americarenewing, all one word,.com.
	Thanks for asking for that.
	I'll get the links afterwards and I'll put them in the pinned comments on both YouTube and Rumble and pin them up there so people can find them.
	Do we do a follow-up once there's developments that can be publicly disclosed?
	Well, look, the entire inside story is...
	You know, fascinating and has many, you know, kind of internal twists and turns.
	At the moment, I'm bound by executive privilege.
	I'd mentioned to you that I have a letter from President Trump taking that.
	Actually, that's a letter that was sent also to several other Justice Department officials.
	But somehow, you know, magically, they construed the letter as authorization to testify as opposed to the way I read it, which I think is a textual reading of the letter.
	So at the moment, I consider myself bound by that.
	If that changes, you know, or some other legal development, you know, like a court order or something comes into play, then I can reevaluate that.
	And I've enjoyed being on.
	And so, you know, I have a feeling that at some point, you know, I will tell that story because of a change in kind of the legal status quo.
	But at the moment, it's obviously best if I obey my Fantastic.
	So let's do it.
	Let's agree to do it again later when we can discuss freely and I can ask all my nosy questions without having to worry about getting you in trouble.
	Jeff, Robert, stick around.
	We'll say our proper goodbyes.
	I'll get the links out there for everybody.
	Locals, twice in one day, I'm not going to be able to get to the locals exclusive afterwards.
	Robert, I don't know if you're doing a bourbon with Barnes tonight.
	No, not tonight.
	Tomorrow, Locals, I'll do something and make up for today exclusively on Locals.
	But Jeff, thank you very much.
	We'll keep in touch, and when there's developments, we'll get together and do it again.
	But stick around.
	We'll say our proper goodbyes after we end the broadcast.
	Thank you all for being here.
	Peace.
	Thanks, guys.

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