Shortly after Donald Trump’s 2020 election defeat, the then-outgoing president considered a ridiculous plan in which he’d fire acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and replace him with Jeffrey Clark, an environmental lawyer within the administration. The motivation for the change was obvious: Clark, unlike Rosen, was telling Trump what he wanted to hear about keeping him in power, despite his defeat.
Indeed, as regular readers might recall, Clark sketched out a map for Republican legislators to follow as part of a partisan plot, even as he quietly pressed Trump to put him in charge of the Justice Department.
Ultimately, that didn’t happen. The then-president considered but eventually backed away from the plan to make Clark the acting A.G., not because the plan was stark raving mad — though it certainly was — but because the Justice Department’s senior leadership team threatened to resign en masse if Rosen was ousted.
It was around the same time when there was a high-level meeting at which a White House lawyer said that if Trump remained in office despite his defeat, there would be riots nationwide. According to a federal criminal indictment, Clark allegedly responded, “Well ... that’s why there’s an Insurrection Act.”
In other words, if Trump claimed illegitimate power and Americans took to the streets, the Republican White House could use the Insurrection Act to deploy the U.S. military against American civilians — which in Clark’s mind, according to the indictment, would solve the problem.
That was three years ago. What became of Clark? As it turns out, he remains a surprisingly relevant figure.
For example, a Washington Post report in August described Clark as “a rising legal star” in the Republican Party, which now considers him a “luminary.” The same week, federal prosecutors had a different label in mind for the GOP lawyer: The criminal indictment in the 2020 election case referenced Clark as “Co-Conspirator 4.”
Meanwhile, in Fulton County, Georgia, Clark was also among the many people in Trump’s orbit who were charged with election crimes. That came on the heels of a fundraiser the former president held for Jan. 6 criminal defendants. Among those who spoke at the event was — you guessed it — Jeffrey Clark.
But the Republican lawyer’s name also popped up this week, as the Washington Post reported that Trump and his allies have “begun mapping out specific plans for using the federal government” in a possible second term. The broader vision, known as “Project 2025,” reportedly includes associates of the former president “drafting plans to potentially invoke the Insurrection Act on his first day in office to allow him to deploy the military against civil demonstrations.”
The article, which has not been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News, added:
Jeffrey Clark, a fellow at [former White House budget chief Russel] Vought’s think tank, is leading the work on the Insurrection Act under Project 2025.
Oh. In other words, Clark allegedly took an interest in having Trump invoke the Insurrection Act after the 2020 elections, and according to the Post’s reporting, he hasn’t given up on the idea.
The same article noted Clark, who had dinner with Trump over the summer, was at Mar-a-Lago last week “for a screening of a new Dinesh D’Souza movie that uses falsehoods, misleading interviews and dramatizations to allege federal persecution of Jan. 6 rioters and Christians.”
A spokesperson for the Heritage Foundation, which is playing a leadership role in the “Project 2025” initiative, told the Post, “There are no plans within Project 2025 related to the Insurrection Act or targeting political enemies.” A reporter on the story appeared on The Rachel Maddow Show last night and stood by the reporting.