Jeffrey Clark, the Trump-era Justice Department official who advocated for the department to contact Georgia and cast doubt on Donald Trump’s 2020 election loss, should face a two-year suspension from practicing law, a disciplinary committee in Washington, DC, said Thursday.
As an environmental lawyer at the Justice Department, Clark tried to push through an official letter to officials in Georgia after the 2020 election, urging the state to interfere with the election results. His superiors at the Justice Department told him no.
The disciplinary committee found Clark included false and misleading information in the letter.
“What Mr. Clark did was objectively reckless, but subjectively, the evidence indicated that he thought he had been chosen for a historic cause, to which he applied all of his energies,” the three-person hearing committee wrote in its findings.
Clark maintained he believed he could send the letter to Georgia, and even took the stand in his own defense at the disciplinary trial. Then-acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and Deputy Attorney General Richard Donohue also testified in Clark’s proceeding, saying the Justice Department didn’t find significant fraud in the elections even while Clark insisted it might.
“His sincerity of belief does not make him less reckless,” the committee wrote in its findings. “To the contrary, we conclude that his personal beliefs blinded him from objectively assessing the facts and the reality of his proposed course of action, and caused him to rationalize a broader role for the Department of Justice, failing to distinguish President Trump from candidate Trump.”
The disciplinary counsel that brought the case against Clark sought for him to face a severe sanction like disbarment, while Clark’s team wanted him to avoid being disciplined.
The recommendation — laid out in a 213-page report after a quasi-trial proceeding — is an early step in the process of attorney discipline.
If the recommendation is adopted, Clark would face less fallout than two other attorneys who may be disbarred for their work for Trump: John Eastman and Rudy Giuliani. The hearing committee wrote in its report that it doesn’t believe there was “clear and convincing evidence that Mr. Clark was as culpable” as those two, who worked privately for Trump after the election.
“We cannot recommend sanctioning Mr. Clark from what might be true or what evidence was presented in other cases. We can only recommend sanctioning him for what has been proven in this case by clear and convincing evidence,” the report said.
