On Tuesday, ABC News reported that Jeffrey Bossert Clark—the Justice Department official who spearheaded an effort to overturn the 2020 election—sought to convince the Georgia General Assembly to throw out the actual results of the race and award its electoral votes to Donald Trump instead. In a draft letter, sent last December, Clark alleged that mass voter fraud had compromised the legitimacy of Georgia’s election, in which Joe Biden narrowly prevailed. As a remedy, Clark, speaking on behalf of the Justice Department, advised the state legislature to call itself into a special session, investigate the alleged fraud, and appoint “a separate slate of electors” who would cast their votes for Trump. Clark’s superiors ultimately quashed this attempt to nullify millions of valid votes.
This scheme marked just one of Clark’s several desperate, last-minute maneuvers to overturn the election. But none of these well-documented, corrupt, anti-democratic plots seems to have hurt his career prospects. To the contrary, after leaving the Justice Department, Clark landed a position as Chief of Litigation and Director of Strategy at the New Civil Liberties Alliance, a conservative-libertarian law firm that battles “the administrative state.” (Its latest actions: supporting a law professor who refuses to get the COVID vaccine and opposing the federal eviction moratorium.) Clark’s transition back into the conservative legal movement illustrates once again that there have been virtually no professional consequences for the many Republican attorneys who tried to steal the election for Trump.ADVERTISEMENT
Until he launched a direct assault on American democracy, Clark’s résumé looked much like that of countless conservative lawyers. He clerked for Judge Danny Boggs, a hard-right Ronald Reagan nominee, and worked at the big law firm Kirkland & Ellis. Naturally, he joined the Federalist Society, frequently participating in the organization’s events and serving as chair of its environmental law and property rights practice group for seven years. Clark also taught at George Mason University School of Law (now Antonin Scalia Law School), a hub of conservative-libertarian legal studies lavishly funded by the Koch brothers. When he entered Trump’s Justice Department in 2018, he served as assistant Attorney General of the Environment and Natural Resources Division; in that position, he sought to weaken federal environmental protections, freeing polluters to disregard long-standing regulations.
So far, par for the course. But Clark took a turn in the final months of the Trump administration, when he ascended to acting Assistant Attorney General of DOJ’s Civil Division. In the wake of the 2020 election, Clark latched onto the lie that mass voter fraud had tainted the results, and that Trump was the true victor. He scrambled to throw the Justice Department behind Trump’s machinations to toss out millions of votes and seize an unearned second term. Documents obtained by the House Committee on Oversight and Reform show Clark urging the Justice Department to investigate conspiracy theories about voter fraud in Georgia. (In one email, Clark noted that he was on the phone with a pro-Trump activist who claimed to have filmed proof of voter fraud in Atlanta. The alleged video evidence never materialized.) He also pressured U.S. Attorney BJay Pak to probe these nonsensical allegations, leading Pak to resign abruptly.
Moreover, Clark appears to have been involved in the campaign for the Justice Department to sue Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, Arizona, Nevada, and Wisconsin. The lawsuit would’ve asked the Supreme Court to nullify the election results in each state and award their electors to Trump rather than Biden. It included claims—made infamous by Sidney Powell’s “Kraken” litigation—that Dominion Voting Systems somehow facilitated voter fraud.Until he launched a direct assault on American democracy, Clark’s résumé looked much like that of countless conservative lawyers.
When these efforts failed, Clark launched a conspiracy to oust acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, who declined to facilitate his various plots. Trump and Clark devised a plan: The president would fire Rosen and elevate Clark as acting attorney general; Clark would then inject the Justice Department into Trump’s mad dash to overturn the election. (Recently released contemporaneous notes confirm that the president considered putting Clark in charge of the entire agency.) This coup only failed when DOJ officials threatened to resign en masse upon Rosen’s termination.
He is, quite simply, a traitor. There’s really no other way to describe him. And yet he’s a member in good standing of the Republican establishment, even as some of the Trump stalwarts like Bill Barr checked out when Trump’s shenanigans became too much for them. There is no accountability for people like Clarke and that is a very serious problem. He will be there the next time. And there will be a next time.