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Left: Former President Donald Trump appears in a booking photo (via Fulton County (Ga.) Sheriff’s Office). Right: Jeffrey Clark appears in a booking photo (via Fulton County (Ga.) Sheriff’s Office).
Donald Trump, who is currently facing legal actions in at least four different jurisdictions, may be preparing to insert himself into yet another case — that of a former Justice Department lawyer facing disciplinary action in the nation’s capital.
Attorney and Trump ally Jeffrey Clark, who Trump reportedly considered installing as attorney general as lawyers scrambled to keep the former president in office despite losing the 2020 election to Joe Biden, allegedly drafted a letter in support of a plan for states to send slates of unauthorized electors to cast votes for Trump. As Law&Crime previously reported, Clark’s “false statements” in that draft — in which Clark indicated that the DOJ had “identified significant concerns” with the election — formed the basis of an ethics complaint filed by the D.C. Bar Office of Disciplinary Counsel.
Now, according to a letter sent to Clark by Trump lawyer Todd Blanche, the former president wants to stop Clark from sharing details of conversations they had in the waning days of the administration.
“[W]e hereby instruct you to maintain President Trump’s executive privilege and other related privileges, including law enforcement privilege, attorney client privilege, and deliberative process privilege,” says the letter, which later expressly says that Trump “reserve[s] the right” to intervene in the proceedings.
Blanche’s letter reminds Clark that when the disciplinary charges were first filed in August 2021, Trump’s then-lawyer Douglas Collins “provided [Clark with] specific instructions pertaining to requests” from Congress to former Justice Department officials who served during the Trump administration.
As the letter notes, Biden — the current president — has waived executive privilege over those conversations.
“The Collins Letter took the position, which I affirm by this letter, that President Biden and the Justice Department’s waivers of President Trump’s privileges were unlawful,” says Blanche’s letter, which was filed Friday, Jan. 12.
The letter strongly implies that Trump will try to assert executive privilege over conversations between Clark and Trump when Trump was in office. It specifically recalls a passage from Collins’ 2021 letter, which ominously predicted that if Clark reveals his conversations with the former president, then future non-Trump presidents could be headed for trouble.
“As the Collins Letter noted: ‘[I]f a President were empowered unilaterally to waive executive privilege applicable to communications with his or her predecessors, particularly those of the opposite party, there would effectively be no executive privilege,” Blanche’s letter says.
At the time, Collins wrote that Trump “will agree not to seek judicial intervention to prevent your testimony,” at least temporarily, but because Clark wasn’t subpoenaed to testify before Congress, “this assertion is now moot.”
Blanche argues that Collins’ letter “preserved President Trump’s executive privilege rights by not ‘otherwise waiving the executive privilege associated with the matters [concerning the 2020 election] the Committees are purporting to investigate.””
The Trump lawyer wants Clark to keep him updated on the proceedings.
“Please contact me with any questions and keep me apprised of Hearing Committee #12 and any ensuing legal proceedings bearing on President Trump’s privilege invocation,” the letter says. “I reserve the right for President Trump to intervene in any litigation involving these privileges.”
The former president is currently defending himself against civil fraud allegations and falsification of business records charges in New York, racketeering and conspiracy charges in Georgia, wrongful retention of documents charges in Florida, and election subversion allegations in Washington, D.C.
