Federal agents on Wednesday searched the home of Jeffrey Clark, a former Trump Justice Department official who notably pushed the president’s false election fraud claims.
The New York Times reported that federal authorities arrived at the former acting assistant attorney general’s home in Virginia home early Wednesday morning in connection to an ongoing investigation into efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
A spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington, D.C., confirmed to The Daily Beast that there was “law enforcement activity in the Lorton, Virginia area yesterday” but declined to provide further details. “We have no comment regarding the nature of that activity or any particular individuals,” the spokesperson added.
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Russ Vought, Trump’s former director of the Office of Management and Budget, took to Twitter to provide more details of the search. Vought is also the president of the Center for Renewing America, where Clark is a fellow.
“Yesterday more than a dozen DOJ law enforcement officials searched Jeff Clark’s house in a pre dawn raid, put him in the streets in his pjs, and took his electronic devices,” Vought said. “All because Jeff saw fit to investigate voter fraud. This is not America, folks. The weaponization of govt must end. Let me be very clear. We stand by Jeff and so must all patriots in this country.”
Clark was at the center of President Donald Trump’s attempt to get the Department of Justice to falsely claim there was voter fraud in Georgia and several other states Trump had lost. Notably, he proposed writing a letter to several Georgia officials to say the DOJ had evidence that could lead the state to rescind Biden’s victory. During the final days of his presidency, Trump considered appointing Clark as the head of the Justice Department but other top officials threatened to quit en masse and Trump abandoned the plan. Clark headed the department’s environment and natural resources division for most of Trump’s presidency.
The house search came a day before the House Jan. 6 Select Committee held its fifth public hearing, this one focusing on Clark and other Trump allies.
In a video deposition clip played during Thursday’s hearing, former acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue recalled a Jan. 2021 Oval Office meeting in which he told Trump that Clark “is not even competent to serve as the attorney general.”
“He’s never been a criminal attorney. He’s never conducted a criminal investigation in his life. He’s never been in front of a grand jury, much less a trial jury,” Donoghue said.
Donoghue said then-White House counsel Pat Cipollone insisted during the Oval Office meeting that Clark’s plan to send letters to battleground states to encourage them to meddle with the election results was a “murder-suicide pact.” In another video deposition played Thursday, White House lawyer Eric Herschmann admitted he called Clark a “fucking asshole” for his proposal to use the DOJ to investigate Trump’s phony claims.
Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) described Clark as the “one candidate at Justice who seemed willing to do anything to help [Trump] stay in power.”
“So who is Jeff Clark? An environmental lawyer with no experience relevant to leading the entire Department of Justice. What was his only qualification?” he said during the hearing. “That he would do whatever the president wanted him to do, including overthrowing a free and a fair democratic election.”
Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), a member of the Jan. 6 select committee, told reporters on Capitol Hill on Thursday afternoon that he was not aware of any circumstances surrounding the raid beyond what was publicly reported. But he did say the DOJ “is certainly now visibly investigating certain elements” of the pre-Jan. 6 efforts by Trump allies to subvert the presidential transition process.
“While the Department of Justice has a policy of not speaking about any ongoing investigation, you can usually see signs of it with a convening of a grand jury or the execution of a search warrant or the serving of subpoenas,” Schiff said. “And now we’re starting to see some of that activity, and going beyond a focus on those who broke into this building on January 6.”
