Jeffrey Clark

Jeffrey Clark was Trump’s Acting Assistant Attorney General for DOJ’s Civil Division and Trump’s choice to be Attorney General in the days before the insurrection, a move that spurred senior DOJ officials to threaten to resign en masse. Clark stated: “Well, that’s why there’s an Insurrection Act” in discussions around riots that could occur if Trump did not leave office. Clark is a senior fellow at Russ Vought’s Center for Renewing America, a Project 2025 Advisory Board member.

While Acting Assistant AG, Clark pushed higher ups at the DOJ to pressure states to overturn the presidential election. In one example, Clark circulated a letter urging Georgia officials to convene the legislature for a special session to investigate so-called claims of voter fraud and overturn the election. He was indicted, along with Trump and others, in the Georgia state criminal prosecution “stemming from [Trump’s] efforts to overturn his 2020 electoral defeat,” as described by CNN. Clark also targeted Pennsylvania, coordinating with state Rep. Scott Perry to urge Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to help overturn the election there.

The House Committee investigating January 6 also recommended criminal charges against Clark, who refused to cooperate. In the panel’s final report, it specifically named Clark as “stand(ing) out as a participant,” in the alleged effort to overthrow the election. Clark was also identified as “co-conspirator 4” in the federal grand jury’s indictment against Trump regarding January 6 and the attempted coup. Clark has also faced potential disbarment from the D.C. Bar.

Clark is a senior fellow at the Center for Renewing America (CRA), a Project 2025 Advisory Board member that aims to provide “ideological ammunition to sustain” the MAGA movement. CRA was founded by Russell Vought, a self-described Christian nationalist who led the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) during the Trump administration. At CRA, Clark has worked to reverse long-standing norms to protect the Justice Department from presidential interference.

Clark also briefly worked as chief of litigation at the New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA) after he left the DOJ. The non-profit was created in 2017 by law professor Philip Hamburger and staked by Charles Koch to attack the Chevron precedent. NCLA also challenged President Joe Biden’s modest student debt relief plan and assailed government agencies’ ability to protect public health by limiting the spread of disinformation about treatments for the deadly Covid-19 virus.

Clark, who has described himself as a “climate hysteria lawyer,” has also sought to thwart efforts to mitigate climate change. As a partner at the law firm Kirkland and Ellis, he was centrally involved in industry challenges to the EPA’s “endangerment finding,” which helped provide scientific support for regulating carbon dioxide. He has also promoted discredited claims about climate, for example: “One of the legal briefs he signed is such a comprehensive compendium of thoroughly debunked denial of the scientific consensus that it stands as a classic of the genre, replete with condemnations not just of the EPA but of the IPCC, whose work the petitioners tried to persuade the court to rule out of bounds. A series of podcasts and papers he has written on The Federalist Society website continue his arguments against the endangerment finding and climate science more broadly.” Clark’s rhetoric includes: “When did America risk coming to be ruled by foreign scientists and apparatchiks at the United Nations?”

Clark also defended BP after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill: “He was involved in the fight against the U.S. government to obtain documents regarding officials’ deliberations over how fast the oil was flowing. The size of the oil spill, which was deeply underestimated at first, was crucial to determining the penalties that BP might face.”