Who is Jeffrey Clark? The Northeast Philly native is identifiable in Trump’s third indictment.
The indictment does not name Trump’s alleged coconspirators, but one is identifiable as Jeffrey Clark, a lawyer who graduated from Father Judge High School in 1985.
A key player in Donald Trump’s efforts to subvert the 2020 election was a little-known Justice Department lawyer who grew up in Northeast Philadelphia, according to the federal indictment unsealed Tuesday.
The indictment does not name Trump’s alleged coconspirators, but one is identifiable as Jeffrey Clark, a lawyer who graduated from Father Judge High School in 1985.
The charging document describes him as a DOJ official who “worked on civil matters” and, along with Trump, “attempted to use the Justice Department to open sham election crime investigations and influence state legislatures with knowingly false claims of election fraud.”
» READ MORE: Read the full indictment against Donald Trump in the 2020 election probe
The Jan. 6 congressional committee previously documented Clark’s role in the alleged scheme to corrupt the Justice Department.
The indictment cites a draft letter Clark proposed sending to state officials in Georgia that said the legislature there should appoint pro-Trump electors. Clark also wanted to send similar letters to officials in other battleground states — a plan that would give Trump’s “lies the backing of the federal government,” the indictment says.
During a White House meeting on the morning of Jan. 3, 2021, Clark accepted Trump’s offer to become acting attorney general, according to prosecutors. That afternoon, a White House lawyer tried to dissuade Clark from taking the job. The unnamed lawyer told Clark that there had been no widespread fraud, and that if Trump remained in office nonetheless, there would be “riots in every major city in the United States.”
According to the indictment, Clark responded: “Well … that’s why there’s an Insurrection Act,” referring to a law that allows the president to deploy the military domestically.
Later that evening, Trump abandoned his plan to install Clark as acting attorney general after senior Justice Department officials threatened to resign.
Neither Clark nor any of Trump’s other alleged coconspirators have been officially accused of wrongdoing.
“The Department of Justice is running cover for the corrupt activities of regime allies, criminalizing the political activities of regime rivals, and attempting to entrap innocent Americans in criminal schemes,” said Russ Vought, president of Center for Renewing America, where Clark is director of litigation and a senior fellow.
“These attempts to criminalize legal work and political viewpoints disfavored by the regime show just how far the Deep State has gone in its journey to turn DOJ on Americans they disagree with,” Vought said in a statement Wednesday. “We are fighting with Jeff Clark and all Americans who have been taunted, abused, searched, arrested, and locked up by our federal government.”
Clark left Philadelphia soon after high school and went on to receive advanced degrees from Harvard and Georgetown. He spent most of his career practicing environmental law in Washington. Only after the 2020 election did he become a key Trump ally, following an introduction to the president by Rep. Scott Perry (R., Pa.).
In 2021, Perry told the Senate Judiciary Committee he described Clark to Trump as someone “who could really get in there and do something” about purported election fraud.
Clark, 56, was born in Tacony, the youngest of four siblings. He spent his early years in a family home on Marsden Street, at the time a primarily white, working-class neighborhood near the foot of the Tacony-Palmyra Bridge. He attended St. Leo’s elementary school and Father Judge, where he graduated at the top of his class.