Indicted Attorney Hopes Removal From Trump Case Will Save His Law License

Jeffrey Clark’s law license should not be suspended now that he has been dropped from Donald Trump’s election-fraud case, his attorney has said.

Clark, a former assistant attorney general, is fighting an order that his law license should be suspended for two years for his part in Trump’s alleged 2020 election fraud. Clark is accused of lobbying his bosses in the Department of Justice to interfere in Georgia’s 2020 presidential election result.

Trump was indicted on four counts of allegedly working to overturn the results of the 2020 election in the run-up to the Jan. 6, 2021 riot at the U.S. Capitol. The Republican presidential nominee has pleaded not guilty and has repeatedly said the case is part of a political witch hunt. Newsweek sought email comment from attorneys for Clark and Trump on Friday.

The D.C. Bar’s Board on Professional Responsibility recommended on July 1 that Clark’s law license should be suspended for two years as a result of his “reckless” behavior.

Since then, special counsel Jack Smith has filed his new superseding indictment in Donald Trump’s election-fraud case, in which he has dropped any reference to Clark’s conversations with the former president about how to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

Smith did so in response to a July 1 Supreme Court decision that gave Trump wide presidential immunity and said that a president’s communications with Department Of Justice officials should be immune from prosecution.

In a two-page letter addressed to the clerk of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia on Wednesday, Clark’s lawyer, Harry MacDougald, wrote that the new Trump indictment removes all references to his client.

“Consistent with the immunity doctrines set forth in Trump v. U.S., the superseding indictment deletes entirely all allegations relating to the President’s official acts, including and especially those with the Department of Justice and Mr. Clark.

“Mr. Clark had been unindicted co-conspirator #4 in the original Special Counsel indictment. The issuance of a new indictment handed down by a new grand jury effectively concedes that Mr. Clark is not just unindicted, but unindictable,” MacDougald wrote.

Clark’s legal team is hoping that a federal court will block the Washington, D.C., bar from suspending Clark’s law license.

The bar’s Board on Professional Responsibility found that Clark had wanted the Justice Department to send a letter to Georgia election officials, pointing out potential fraud by the Biden campaign. The board’s hearing committee said the letter was “reckless.”

“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 committee wrote.

Then-acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue told the committee that they didn’t find evidence of significant fraud in the 2020 election, even as Clark said that there was.

Whether his law license is suspended or not, Clark is facing major legal problems.

He is also one of 19 people, including Trump, who were indicted in Georgia for alleged election fraud.

Fani Willis, District Attorney for Fulton County, Georgia, which covers most of Atlanta city, indicted Trump, Clark, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, and 16 others for alleged fraud in Georgia in the 2020 presidential election. All of the accused pleaded not guilty, but at least four are now cooperating with authorities.