Jeffrey Clark, the Trump-era Justice Department official who advocated for the department to contact Georgia and cast doubt on Donald Trump’s 2020 election loss, should face a two-year suspension from practicing law, a disciplinary committee in Washington, DC, said Thursday.
As an environmental lawyer at the Justice Department, Clark tried to push through an official letter to officials in Georgia after the 2020 election, urging the state to interfere with the election results. His superiors at the Justice Department told him no.
The disciplinary committee found Clark included false and misleading information in the letter.
“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 hearing committee wrote in its findings.
Just a note, I’m not American or familiar with how professional standards organizations work in the US and I just quickly skimmed the committee’s report, so this is all broad strokes.
What the article missed is that the committee recommended that Clark’s punishment include Clark having to prove he is fit to practice law before Clark can be readmitted after the two year suspension, not an automatic reinstatement after two years has elapsed. In my opinion, this is a very serious omission on the part of the CNN writer that makes the recommendation sound lighter than it actually is.
If the disciplinary committee’s recommendation is implemented in full, Clark needs to demonstrate to the satisfaction of the state’s professional standards organization that he understands how badly he behaved as a lawyer, why he was punished as a result, and how he must behave in the future to meet the professional standards of a licensed lawyer. If the professional standards board members in the future are extremely strict and set an unreachable bar for Clark (which, in my opinion, would not be surprising given the international coverage of this entire disaster), this could essentially be a permanent loss of license.
How strict the professional standards organization would interpret “fitness to practice” in two year’s time or the correctness of the disciplinary board’s finding that Clark’s behaviour didn’t rise to the same level as Giuliani’s (partially because Clark wasn’t filing lawsuits over this matter) thus warranting a lighter punishment is up for debate. The less cynical and more optimistic side of me interprets this as a permanent loss in practice with a crack in the door that is the size of one atom if Clark can prove with absolute certainty he turned things around and spends his waking hours repenting for his misdeeds, is now an absolutely flawless example of how an ethical lawyer should behave, and uses any spare moment he has rescuing all the abandoned puppies and kittens in the world and finding them amazing forever homes. Realistically? Who knows. Two years is long enough that people forget and won’t be outraged if the organization’s requirements are low.