What BS
Former White House counsel Pat Philbin testified at Jeffrey Clark’s disbarment hearing and talked about the chaotic post-election period at the White House:
“I tried to explain to him that it was a bad idea for multiple reasons,” Philbin recalled Tuesday at a long-delayed disbarment hearing for Clark. “He would be starting down a path of assured failure … If by some miracle somehow, it worked, there’d be riots in every major city in the country and it was not an outcome the country would accept.”
It was Philbin’s first public testimony about the chaotic final days of the Trump presidency since he left the White House. Though Philbin has spoken to both the Jan. 6 select committee and the federal grand jury that indicted Trump for his effort to seize a second term, no transcript or recording of his remarks has even been released.
Philbin’s description of his interactions with Clark shed new light on the frenzied effort by Trump to remake the Justice Department into a tool of his bid to cling to power despite losing the election — a remarkable new account more than three years after a mob of pro-Trump rioters stormed the Capitol in his name. His testimony followed Richard Donoghue, a former acting deputy attorney general.
Together, the two men described a White House that had let down all guardrails, with conspiracy theories about election fraud reaching Trump, who was an eager recipient of even implausible claims of fraud. Clark, too, embraced some of those claims, they said.
Philbin described feeling relief in the first days of January 2021 when he heard that Trump had ditched plans to appoint Clark as acting attorney general. But he quickly learned in discussions with his boss, Pat Cipollone, and two top DOJ officials — acting attorney general Jeff Rosen and his deputy Richard Donoghue — that the effort had been revived. The men agreed that Philbin should speak to Clark, owing to their decadeslong relationship, and attempt to discern what was happening.
Philbin, who testified for about two hours on Tuesday, described Clark as wildly misinformed about claims of election fraud — countenancing a theory about “smart thermostats” being used to manipulate voting machines — and not sufficiently cognizant of the havoc it would wreak on the country if his plan succeeded. But he said Clark seemed “100 percent sincere” in his beliefs.
“I believe that he felt that he essentially had a duty,” Philbin said. “I think Jeff’s view was that there was a real crisis in the country and that he was being given an opportunity to do something about it.”
When Philbin warned Clark that there would be riots in every major American city if Trump reversed the outcome of the election, Clark responded, “Well, Pat, that’s what the Insurrection Act is for,” Philbin recalled.
Clark, in Philbin’s telling, was referring to a 19th-century federal law that permits the president to use the military to quell civil unrest, an indication that he recognized the grave implications of his efforts. Though it was Philbin’s first time publicly discussing the exchange, the conversation was captured in special counsel Jack Smith’s indictment of Trump — without naming either Philbin or Clark, though the identities of both speakers were easily discerned. On Tuesday, Philbin was asked to elaborate on this discussion.
“I don’t think I said anything on the phone. I just thought that that showed a lack of judgment,” he said. “Triggering riots in every major city in America, you’ve got to be really sure about what you’re doing and have no alternatives … In my estimation, that was not the sort of situation we were talking about.”
No, no, no. This was not a “lack of judgement.” The election was on the up and up. Courts all over the country looked at it. There were recounts and audits and Republican officials validated the results. These ideas were batshit crazy and they were solely due to the fact that Donald Trump is a malignant narcissist with a psyche so fragile that he could not accept that he had lost. That’s all it was.
The rest of those nutbags like Clark are either brain damaged or cynical opportunists who saw that Trump has a talent for making people believe lies simply by repeating them over and over again. Either way, there was never any merit in any of this and Philbin obviously knows that and yet is still soft-peddling just what a monumental crime these people perpetrated on the American people.