During his time in office for the Trump Department of Justice, President Trump summoned Jeffrey Clark to inquire into allegations of election fraud in the state of Georgia, among other places, after the 2020 election.
Since that time, Clark faced criminal charges for making honest inquiries into election fraud affecting the 2020 results, particularly in the Peach State, where the evidence overwhelmingly proves the election was riven with fraud, for which he was indicted, and forced to take a mugshot, alongside both Attorney John Eastman and President Trump,in 2023.
TGP contributor Paul Ingrassia, who currently works in the Trump White House, wrote a moving tribute to Jeffrey Clark in October before the presidential election.
We are including Paul’s words about Jeffrey here.
Jeff Clark, former Assistant Attorney General under President Trump, who dared to do the unthinkable and actually remain loyal to his former boss during a period of unprecedented political turmoil in the lead-up and immediate aftermath of the 2020 presidential contest belongs to that latter lot.
Originally a Philadelphia native, Clark went to Harvard for his undergraduate studies, where he majored in history — and portentously, the history of the Soviet legal system under communism.
Law school followed Harvard. Following undergraduate, Clark migrated from Boston to Washington, DC, to attend Georgetown for law. It was during his time in law school where he met his future wife, with whom he later married and had four children.
He eventually would make the decision to settle down in that same city, surely knowing even at the start of his professional life that a career in government and public service would be his destiny.
Following Georgetown, Clark served as a clerk on the Sixth Circuit under Judge Danny J. Boggs (a Reagan appointee), and then returned to DC, working himself all the way up to partner at Kirkland & Ellis, one of the most prestigious white shoe law firms in the country.
In short, Jeff Clark had a picture-perfect legal career.
And though he resided in the Swamp for most of his adult life, Clark never succumbed to it. Unlike so many of his peers, Clark served under two Republican presidents, serving two separate stints at the Department of Justice, and never selling himself out to DC’s countless lucrative special interests.
From 2001-2005, he served as Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the Environment and Natural Resources Division.
This was a post that he would later upgrade to US Assistant Attorney General for that same division under President Trump, a little over a decade later, in which he served from 2018 until 2021.
Until the November 2020 election (whose events and immediate aftermath sent his professional career spiraling) Clark’s body of work was defined by his devotion to the Constitution and his love of lawyering.
Many lawyers begrudge the day-to-day clerical work of the job. Not Jeff Clark.
In speaking with Clark, one immediately gathers that Clark is the quintessential “lawyer’s lawyer,” one of the rare lawyers who genuinely loves the job of lawyering.
As a devout and lifelong Catholic, Jeff Clark’s convictions in the law are doubtlessly entwined with his faith.
As far as his professional vocation goes, Clark is the type of lawyer that could convince even an atheist that certain men are divinely ordained by God, from birth, to serve a particular vocation — and for Jeff Clark, that vocation was being a lawyer.
Having a true love for one’s vocation often always is a wellspring for greatness, whatever that vocation might be.
Clark’s backstory lends support to the lawyer-by-birth theory: he himself concedes that the type of analytical reasoning lawyers engage in was intuitive to him from a young age. He took to the profession as an athlete does to sport.
When he got to Georgetown, he aced his law school exams with ease; in practice, he unspools his opponent’s erroneous arguments with Olympian deftness.
He cuts through dicta and fluff like the sword of a legal ninja.
His persecution at the hand of a megalomaniacal government, one on the brink of full-fledged tyranny, is uncannily reminiscent of another lawyer, St. Thomas Moore, the Catholic saint who was similarly persecuted for upholding the truth in the face of dark opposition.
While Clark, a humble man, may shun comparisons between himself and Moore’s literal martyrdom, the comparison is apt, and not only because each involves the persecution of two great lawyers, who stood up for truth despite having every incentive on earth not to.
But there are also spiritual parallels between each case – in the sixteenth century, it was a Christian lawyer against a secular (and, as Catholics see it, heretical) king.
In our times, those who most ardently uphold America’s political creed, like Jeff Clark, John Eastman, Rudy Giuliani, and Donald Trump, tend to also be men of faith, or at least men of deep-seated beliefs about right and wrong, justice and injustice, who respect the traditional morality out of which both Constitution and Country was carved.
Congratulations to one of the great men of our time, Jeffrey Clark, on your new position inside the Trump White House!
