Jeffrey Clark Is Looking Like the Perfect Fall Guy for Trump's Operation Overturn
The sequence is the message.
Jeffrey Clark, the jumped-up Department of Justice apparatchik who offered his support to the previous president*’s cockamamie scheme to use the electoral-vote certification process to keep himself in office, spent a great deal of the past month or so arguing that, no, he wasn’t complicit in an actual plan, doncha know? They were all just spitballing about what if we got battleground states to send two sets of electors and then Mike Pence magically certified the Trump electors? And also, the letter Clark wanted DOJ to send to Georgia Governor Brian Kemp explaining that the Feds had “significant concerns” about the vote count in that state was just, you know, kind of a first-draft thing, some ideas on paper. And also the former president*’s plan to 86 Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and install Clark as acting AG was just, like, a thought experiment.
(Aside: Too many Jeffreys in this story. It’s like covering the Plantagenets.)
Then, Rosen himself testified before the House Select Committee looking into the events of January 6, immediately after which the committee dropped paper on Clark seeking documents, as well as his ass in a witness chair. Meanwhile, the former president* is out there ranting and raving his way across the landscape without apparent consequences, and Steve Bannon is developing his new persona as the John Peter Zenger of ratfcking. You know that old gambling saw about what it means if you sit down at the table and you can’t figure out who the sucker is?
Think about it, Jeff.
From the New York Times:
“The select committee needs to understand all the details about efforts inside the previous administration to delay the certification of the 2020 election and amplify misinformation about the election results,” Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi and the committee chairman, said in a statement. “We need to understand Mr. Clark’s role in these efforts at the Justice Department and learn who was involved across the administration.”
From the standpoint of the other participants, Clark is a near-perfect fall guy. He’s relatively anonymous. He wasn’t part of the inner inner circle at Camp Runamuck. His former DOJ superiors all have given sworn testimony that they were prepared to quit if the proposed scheme was put in place. And, if the Senate Judiciary Committee’s interim report is accurate, Clark was positively giddy at the prospect of putting Operation Overturn into action.
The report fleshes out the role of Jeffrey Clark, a little-known Justice Department official who participated in multiple conversations with Mr. Trump about how to upend the election and who pushed his superiors to send Georgia officials a letter that falsely claimed the Justice Department had identified “significant concerns that may have impacted the outcome of the election.” Mr. Trump was weighing whether to replace Mr. Rosen with Mr. Clark. At the start of the Jan. 3 Oval Office meeting, Mr. Rosen recounted, Mr. Trump said, “One thing we know is you, Rosen, aren’t going to do anything to overturn the election.”
If Rosen’s willing to tell that story to Congress, if he’s willing to give up the former president* so readily, then there clearly are not an unlimited number of parachutes here. And so here you are. If you stiff the committee, it’s not likely to tip-toe around you the way it is tip-toeing around Bannon, who’s behaving like he can bring the temple down on himself, a mighty man is he. I’d fold the hand, if I were you.
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