The TRUMP indictment raises the question that Judge Stanley K. Sporkin had concerning the Lincoln S&L case: "Where were the lawyers."
Six unindicted co-conspirators include JEFFEREY CLARK, here profiled in Esquire:
There's Always One Guy in the Office Who Will Act on the Boss's Worst Ideas
Jeffrey Clark was central to Trumpworld's juice-box Machiavelli conniving between the 2020 election and the 2021 insurrection.
By 
It is one of the quirks of American life that, within any corporation, operation, or institution, when the boss comes up with some lunatic, wild-hair notion in which everyone else can see the seeds of utter catastrophe, there will always be that one person who thinks, “Yeah, I can do that. I can get that done!” This person always figures that fulfilling the boss’s crazy vision is a ticket to the executive suite. Usually, in the best case, it is a ticket to the sidewalk. In the worst case, the boss ducks, and the go-getter ends up on Deposition Island for a few years.
In the Department of Justice, during the grifterdammerung days of the previous administration, that person was an environmental lawyer named Jeffrey Clark. He was the lawyer who thought to himself, Yeah, I can turn this whole election around for the president* just the way he wants. I’m That Guy. I am now the A-Team. Instead, he found out on Thursday that having the FBI serve you a search warrant can be the best part of your day. Later, at the public hearing of the House Select Committee investigating the events of January 6, 2021, Jeffrey Clark was served up en brochette by his former colleagues at the Justice Department, most memorably Richard Donoghue, who had been acting deputy attorney general at the time. Donoghue recalled a meeting in which Clark told him about how many complicated civil cases he’d handled in his role as an environmental lawyer.
“Yes,” Donoghue recalled telling Clark, “an environmental lawyer. Go back to your office and we’ll call you if there’s an oil spill.”
Not far behind was former Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, who recalled a moment when Clark came to him and asked him to support the president*’s plan to replace him with Clark. “I was not about to accept being fired by a subordinate,” Rosen said. Clark then assured Rosen that he could stay on as Clark’s deputy.
(Rosen was of cheery mien when relating these details to the committee. He was the living embodiment of that classic Elvis Costello lyric: Rosen used to be disgusted, but now he was just amused.)
It only got worse as the witnesses took a fairly rapt committee room into the tangled, juice-box Machiavelli conniving that went on between the 2020 election and the 2021 insurrection. The ritual slaughter of Clark continued through the account of an Oval Office meeting in which the former president* floated the idea of replacing Rosen with Clark. Donoghue recalled that he “wouldn’t work for one minute under a guy I’d already called incompetent,” and that he told the president* that so many people would quit out of sheer revulsion that Clark would find himself “leading a graveyard.” He may have suggested that Zombie Ramsey Clark would rise from the grave just to resign in protest.
The president* replied, “What have I got to lose?”
Then, as a final lagniappe to tide us over until the public hearings start up again in July, the committee put names to the members of Congress who’d we’d been told were fishing around for pre-emptive presidential pardons after it all hit the fan on January 6. According to the videotaped testimony of several people, Rep. Matt Gaetz inquired about a pardon with just about everyone inside the Beltway. Also named were former Rep. Mo Brooks; soon-to-be-former Rep. Louie Gohmert, outgoing Padishah Emperor of the Crazy People; Rep. Andy Biggs; and Rep. Scott Perry. Cassidy Hutchinson, who worked for White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, said she’d heard that Jim Jordan was asking about pardons, but that he hadn’t asked her directly for one. Hutchinson also testified that it was her understanding that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene had contacted the White House counsel’s office in this regard. In the retelling, you could almost hear the squealing on the ratlines as the ship went down.
But the central figure was Jeffrey Clark, a small man whose ego turned into a funhouse mirror in which he saw a towering legal giant. (The former president*, of course, saw just another sucker.) “Thank God we had men at the top of the DOJ who understood their jobs,” Rep. Adam Schiff, a member of the committee said after the committee had adjourned. “The department would have been destroyed. It would have been a disaster for the entire country.”
As the committee goes dark, I wish I didn’t feel so strongly that the last part wasn’t still an open question.
1 comment:
Trump drew in all the cess and stupid people and tried to manipulate them to his benefit..all of which was detrimental to himself and others in the end. Smart people avoided him while the stupid people went down with the Trumptanic.
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