Jeffrey Clark cooperates

Donald Trump intimidates

Jeffrey Clark, Acting Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights under President Donald Trump, has allegedly been cooperating with federal investigators. Clark began doing so shortly after his home was raided in a pre dawn raid¹.

And Liz Cheney (R-WY), Vice Chair of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the Capitol, revealed that the Committee had evidence of Donald Trump attempting to intimidate a witness². Yes, really³.

Let’s review:

Jeffrey Clark, formerly of Team Abnormal at Trump’s Department of Justice, who tried to have the Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and Acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue fired by Donald Trump so he could carry out Trump’s plan to overturn the election, had his house raided by the FBI on June 23, 2022 and has been cooperating with investigators for more than 2 weeks.

After December 11, 2020, Donald Trump spent all of his time fielding, planning, and plotting extra-legal and unconstitutional means of remaining in power after January 20, 2021. He kind of had to as the U.S. Supreme Court had nixed the last of his 65 legal challenges to the election on that date. Every meeting, conversation, e-mail, and text message after that date ties Trump to a plot to overthrow the government. That’s what realists call preventing the peaceful transfer of power after an election.

And now with hundreds of interviews, video-taped depositions, and live testimony, the picture of the attempted coup gets clearer and more indictable. That’s why people like Jeffrey Clark are cooperating.

And while there is a sizable queque of people like Clark lining up to prevent or mitigate their legal exposure at this point, some are not.

Donald Trump⁴ and attorney Sidney Powell⁵ have been paying the legal bills of some of those involved in the January 6th defendants. Yes, it’s ethically troublesome and borders on witness tampering. But Donald Trump, who has never been one to take the nuanced or subtle approach to anything, decided to actually call a witness directly.

The problem with that, outside of its illegality, is that it puts the witness in a vexing position — agree to be silent or telling their lawyer. Insofar as agreeing to be silent creates its own set of legal problems, it was an easy decision for the witness to ask their legal counsel what to do.

The lawyer was not similarly vexed. He was ethically bound to informed the Committee that the prime subject of the hearing, Donald Trump, had tried to contact his client.

There are now two fairly ring-fenced cases against Donald Trump. One for witness tampering and one for wire fraud⁶. And Merrick Garland is running out of legal rationales not to indict.

1. https://www.politico.com/news/2022/06/23/law-enforcement-trump-official-coup-00041767

2. https://www.rawstory.com/mobile-app-notification/liz-cheney-witness-intimidation/

3. https://www.rawstory.com/trump-witness-tampering-2657656773/

4. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-save-america-jan-6-witnesses-1377230/

5. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/06/sidney-powell-trump-kraken-january-6-defendants-doj/

6. The Big Lie and Wire Fraud