civil division

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Last week, the DC bar filed a Petition Institute Formal Disciplinary Proceedings against former Justice Department lawyer Jeffrey Clark. This is hardly the most pressing concern for the onetime Kirkland & Ellis attorney, who woke up on June 22 to the FBI knocking at his door with a warrant to size his electronic devices. But the prospect of bar sanctions on top of the rest of his legal worries isn’t exactly a plus on the old resume.

Clark’s plot to weaponize the DOJ as part of Trump’s fraudulent electors scheme has been widely reported for over a year. But the January 6 Select Committee’s June 23 public hearing laid bare his conduct for the wider public, and in the least flattering light possible. In short, Clark, an environmental lawyer who was then-acting head of the Civil Division, cooked up a Proof of Concept letter making various false allegations about fraud in the swing states to provide the Republican-dominated legislatures a pretext to re-cast the states’ electors for Trump.

The letter claimed that the Department had “identified significant concerns that may have impacted the outcome of the election in multiple States, including the State of Georgia.” This was false — in fact, multiple US Attorneys on the ground in Georgia investigated the fraud claims and found them groundless. Clark also claimed that it was the position of the Department that state legislatures had the inherent constitutional authority to convene themselves to bless “alternate” slates of electors. This was in no wise the position of the DOJ, although it was certainly the position of Trump’s coup-curious campaign lawyer, John Eastman.

Perhaps most hilariously, the complaint alleged that the Justice Department found “troubling the current posture of a pending lawsuit in Fulton County” and the “litigation’s sluggish