(Picture by Yuri Gripas-Pool/Getty Photographs)
Jeff Clark is again, and he’s crazier than ever.
The previous assistant legal professional common’s efforts to steal swing state electors for Donald Trump netted him a prison RICO cost in Georgia and the sobriquet “Co-Conspirator 4” within the Trump election interference indictment. It additionally earned him a bar investigation in DC, which he managed to delay by difficult it in federal court docket — however not for lengthy since his argument was primarily based on the declare that DC isn’t a state, and thus its bar couldn’t self-discipline him as a “state bar.”
He’s at present petitioning the DC Court docket of Appeals to rehear his case en banc after the primary panel of non-state judges rejected his effort to fend off the non-state bar.
All these items got here to a head final week, when Donald Trump intervened to ensure that Clark wouldn’t say something to the bar investigators that may jeopardize their collective hides. The intervention got here within the type of a letter from his legal professional Todd Blanche to Clark’s counsel Harry McDougald purporting to invoke govt privilege as to his communications with the then-president.
The letter, reported by Politico, harkened again to an especially humorous episode from 2021 the place Trump agreed to not invoke govt privilege with respect to Clark and several other different high DOJ officers if and provided that the January 6 Committee agreed to not situation any extra subpoenas. But when the committee continued to analyze, Trump’s privilege waiver could be routinely revoked.
Reps. Thompson and Cheney had a superb lengthy snort at this silly stratagem, and, after reminding the witnesses that the sitting president had declined to invoke privilege, subpoenaed principally your complete Trump White Home. Many witnesses, together with White Home Counsel Pat Cipollone and several other DOJ officers invoked govt privilege in response to particular committee questions. However none of Trump’s post-presidential privilege invocations have survived in court docket, regardless of Trump’s fixed repetition of dicta from Justice Kavanaugh’s concurring assertion within the denial of cert for Trump’s try to dam launch of his presidential data by the Nationwide Archives.
Right here on Planet Earth, the DC Circuit compelled Cipollone and the remainder of the DOJ officers to testify earlier than the particular counsel’s grand jury within the election interference case. Even Mike Pence needed to spill the beans, though his place as president of the Senate gave him marginal cowl.
However all this, Trump now instructs Clark to “preserve President Trump’s govt privilege and different associated privileges, together with legislation enforcement privilege, legal professional shopper privilege, and deliberative course of privilege.” He even goes as far as to indicate that he’ll sue to dam Cipollone and the opposite DOJ officers from testifying as witnesses within the bar investigation, citing the snapback waiver within the 2021 letter.
All of which is mighty handy for all events, notably Trump himself. As a result of if Clark “can’t” testify on the bar listening to, then he received’t need to take the Fifth and settle for the damaging inference that comes with it. And naturally Clark must take the Fifth, due to the pending Georgia expenses. However with a bit of help from his former boss, he’s now escaped all that unpleasantness!
And perhaps that can stiffen Clark’s backbone so he received’t go gentle and take a plea deal from Georgia prosecutors like fellow attorneys Ken Chesebro, Sidney Powell, and Jenna Ellis. Not that Trump would search to affect the conduct of a co-defendant, perish the very thought!
And within the meantime, Clark has been making an attempt desperately to get out of Fulton County Superior Court docket and into the Southern District of Georgia. After the district decide rejected his removing petition (primarily based on the hilarious idea that the RICO case was one way or the other a civil-criminal hybrid), Clark appealed to the Eleventh Circuit. However Mark Meadows received there first, and he’s already been rejected and petitioned for en banc evaluation. Now Clark seeks to leap the road and be a part of Meadows’s en banc panel with out going to the difficulty of arguing his case within the first place.
“If the Court docket grants Mr. Meadows’ petition for rehearing en banc, it might want—even when only for the sake of effectivity—to listen to Mr. Clark’s attraction en banc on the similar time,” his legal professionals assert confidently, citing precisely zero precedent for such a process.
Swing for the fences, weirdo.
Liz Dye lives in Baltimore the place she writes about legislation and politics and seems on the Opening Arguments podcast.
