WASHINGTON — Three former US attorneys general have come out against the disbarment of President Trump’s regulatory czar Jeffrey Clark in DC — even after one of them, Bill Barr, criticized the ex-Department of Justice official for recommending that state legislatures investigate “voting irregularities” in 2020.
Barr, Jeff Sessions and Michael Mukasey filed an amicus brief Thursday with the DC Court of Appeals advocating for Clark after the district bar’s disciplinary board recommended Clark lose his law license for recommending state-level probes of possible election fraud in a December 2020 letter as the DOJ’s then-acting assistant attorney general.
The trio noted that while they weren’t “persuaded” by the draft letter’s “legal strategy,” punishing Clark for making recommendations that were “never intended to be released publicly” would “set a dangerous precedent,” according to a the 23-page filing submitted by attorneys at Boyden Gray PLLC.
“Disciplining Mr. Clark would open the door to charging federal lawyers with ‘dishonesty’ or ‘attempted dishonesty’ for statements made during oral arguments, theories in briefs, legal advice provided in memoranda, or even (as here) proposals in privileged internal draft documents and discussions,” they wrote.
“Such acts of political retribution would severely discourage lawyers from serving in the federal government and invite extraordinary dysfunction as federal lawyers constrain the advice they provide for fear of political retaliation by the Bar.”
A committee of the DC Bar’s Board of Professional Responsibility suggested in an August 2024 preliminary ruling that Clark’s law license should be suspended for two years.
On July 31 of this year, however, the full DC Court of Appeals Board of Professional Responsibility recommended permanent disbarment.
Clark currently works as an acting administrator in the White House Office of Management and Budget’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs — a job which does not require the ability to practice law.
“Lawyers cannot advocate for any outcome based on false statements and they certainly cannot urge others to do so,” the board stated.
Clark “persistently and energetically sought to do just that on an important national issue,” the board wrote. “He should be disbarred as a consequence and to send a message to the rest of the Bar and to the public that this behavior will not be tolerated.”
Clark’s lawyer Harry MacDougald responded in a statement at the time that his client “never lied about anything to anybody.”
“They want disbar Jeff Clark for the heresy of privately recommending further investigations of the 2020 election,” MacDougald said. “This is a pure thought crime and a travesty of justice.”
Both MacDougald and the former attorneys general have pointed to ex-FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith only receiving a one-year suspension from the DC bar after pleading guilty to falsifying court documents in order to obtain a warrant used to monitor 2016 Trump campaign aide Carter Page.
“If it weren’t for double standards, they wouldn’t have any standards at all,” quipped MacDougald.
“[T]he Board retroactively suspended Mr. Clinesmith for just one year,” wrote the AGs in their brief, “and restored his license even before he completed his term of probation.”
“The contrast with Mr. Clark’s case is striking,” they noted. “The Board seeks to disbar Mr. Clark, not merely suspend his license, despite the absence of any criminal conviction or false statement made to any court.”
