At the Federalist Society’s National Lawyers Convention in November, now Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche called the District of Columbia Bar “one of the most activist, obnoxious bars when it comes to going after conservative lawyers,” threatening to take it “out of the picture.”
Blanche has now delivered on this promise in a lawsuit filed last month against the D.C. Bar to shut down disciplinary action against Jeffrey Clark, who served in the Department of Justice during the first Trump administration. In July, the D.C. Board on Professional Responsibility recommended Clark be disbarred under D.C. Rule of Professional Conduct 8.4(a) for “attempt[ing] to make intentionally false statements” in a letter designed to help overturn the 2020 presidential election. The DOJ suit calls the D.C. Bar’s case against Clark another example of “weaponization” (used to mean any legal action against the president or his allies), making the claim at the same moment the DOJ unveiled a $1.8 billion Anti-Weaponization Fund to compensate people, such as Clark, whose actions have harmed American democracy.
It would be easy to dismiss this complaint as another instance of petty retaliation from the Trump administration—an attack on the bar for seeking to discipline a loyalist. It is partly that. But the stakes of this case are much higher—and Blanche knows that.
Clark’s Attempt to Overturn the 2020 Election
Understanding the stakes of DOJ’s new lawsuit starts with the unique role of the D.C. Bar. Federal law requires DOJ lawyers to follow the ethical rules of the state in which they practice. The D.C. Bar oversees lawyers in the District of Columbia, which includes DOJ headquarters and the D.C. U.S. Attorney’s Office. Without bar oversight, these lawyers would be exempt from the ethical rules governing their peers.
To appreciate why this would be so dangerous, it is important to recall the facts of Clark’s case. After the 2020 election resulted in razor-thin margins for Joe Biden in crucial swing states, the Trump campaign brought roughly 60 lawsuits, none of which uncovered any fraud remotely close to affecting the election outcome. Days after the election, Attorney General William Barr authorized the Justice Department “to pursue substantial allegations of voting and vote tabulation irregularities,” spurring investigations that also came up empty. Accordingly, on December 1, 2020, Barr announced that “we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome.” Shortly after, Barr submitted his letter of resignation.
None of this mattered to Clark. A DOJ civil attorney who had never been involved in election or criminal investigations, Clark decided that he would simply ignore this mountain of evidence to embrace the conspiracy that the election was stolen. Clark was put in direct touch with President Donald Trump by an election denier, Congressman Scott Perry (R-PA), and repeatedly broke Department protocol by speaking directly with the president to push his ideas.
When acting Attorney General Jeff Rosen refused to accede to Trump’s demand to “just say the election was corrupt,” Trump circumvented his top Justice officials to find a more pliable messenger in Clark, who drafted a “Proof of Concept” letter, which later became a central piece of evidence for why he should be disbarred. The letter urged state officials in Georgia to endorse a fake slate of Trump electors assembled according to a plan that hinged on the viability of ongoing lawsuits calling the outcome of the election into doubt. The problem was that all these lawsuits were failing.
Clark’s letter was designed to compensate for this fatal flaw by doing what no court or state official had done after six weeks of intense scrutiny: endorse that voting fraud had occurred. The letter, drafted on Justice Department letterhead for Rosen’s signature, asserted that “at this time we have identified significant concerns that may have impacted the outcome of the election.” For support, the letter cited a report from a Georgia state senator, which had been contradicted by Georgia’s secretary of state and governor, along with a “troubling” pending lawsuit in Fulton County—failing to mention that the suit was part of last-ditch litigation efforts by Trump loyalists, including John Eastman, recycling allegations of fraud already rejected by courts. (Eastman joined Trump’s legal team after the 2020 election and was disbarred this April in California for the actions he took to overturn the election.)
Upon reading the letter, Rosen explicitly told Clark that its central allegation—that the Department had identified “significant concerns”—was false. Clark simply ignored this conclusion without conducting any credible research on his own. He did not try to review FBI files on the election investigation. When he was instructed to contact the Georgia U.S. Attorney about his investigation into alleged fraud, Clark declined. Rather than talking to the Director of National Intelligence, who had found no evidence of fraud, Clark interviewed a shady bail bondsman in Georgia, who claimed he had surveillance of shred trucks at the election facility—which, unsurprisingly, he could never produce—and who later pled guilty to election interference.
Clark’s actions during this time are documented in the D.C. Board report, the reports conducted by Democrats and Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee, and the final report from the House Select Committee to Investigate January 6th. Clark was also one of 18 people charged in Georgia for trying to overturn the 2020 election and he was named as a co-conspirator in the Special Counsel’s indictment of Trump.
Immunizing the Justice Department from Ethical Oversight
Blanche’s lawsuit against the D.C. Bar deeply distorts these documented facts. In less than three cursory pages, it presents Clark’s letter as nothing more than a routine “pre-decisional” draft for circulation that was considered and rejected by his superiors. On this basis, the complaint blithely asserts that the Bar is violating federal supremacy by seeking to punish Clark simply because his “inchoate views differed from the agency’s final views.”
Nothing could be further from the truth. The complaint’s legal sleight of hand transforms Clark’s dangerous effort to help subvert the election into a mere “difference of opinion” in the routine course of executive branch “deliberation.” It fundamentally misrepresents the fact that Clark’s views were not “inchoate”—they were outright false. And it omits the critical detail that the only way that the “agency’s final views” ultimately carried the day was because of an extraordinary intervention by DOJ leaders and White House Counsel, all Republicans appointed by Trump, who threatened to quit if Clark accepted Trump’s offer to become acting attorney general in order to send the letter.
It was these ethical DOJ lawyers, mainstream conservatives committed to the Constitution over loyalty to the president, who helped thwart the 2020 election attack.
Which crystallizes the real stakes of the D.C. Bar complaint: the prospect of immunizing Blanche and other DOJ lawyers from ethical accountability for any actions they take while in office. The past year, there have been over a dozen ethics complaints filed against Justice Department lawyers at the very top, including former Attorney General Pam Bondi for her involvement in the improper removal of Kilmar Abrego Garcia to El Salvador and former Deputy Attorney General Emile Bove for the dismissal of the Eric Adams prosecution. Judging from the deeply misleading DOJ complaint, Blanche could be next.
This is why the complaint is simply the tip of the spear of a broader campaign to disable the D.C. Bar from holding government lawyers to high ethical standards. Last June, the former attorney general’s brother, Brad Bondi, ran for president of the D.C. Bar, losing in a landslide. Since then, the Trump administration has sought to gain control over the D.C. Court of Appeals, which sits over the Bar disciplinary board, and proposed a rule that would give the attorney general, through the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), the “right to review in the first instance any allegations” against DOJ lawyers and “request that the State bar disciplinary authorities to suspend any parallel investigations or disciplinary proceedings . . . until the completion of OPR’s review.” Although the proposed rule asserts it would not require a state bar “to defer to OPR’s findings,” it would only give state bars’ authority to impose “additional sanctions if the Department determines that an attorney violated an ethics rule”—suggesting that if OPR exonerated an attorney, the state bar would not have authority to impose its own sanctions. DOJ presents the rule as simply a procedural change allowing the DOJ, through OPR, to police its own lawyers’ conduct to ensure “the highest standards of ethics.” Yet while OPR has operated effectively in the past–most notably, recommending sanctions for lawyers who authored the Torture Memos during the George W. Bush administration–it is no longer independent, underscoring that the true intent of the rule is to immunize DOJ lawyers from accountability.
These efforts are in addition to the attack on the D.C. Bar contained in Clark’s own appeal of his ethics case, currently pending in front of the D.C. Court of Appeals, which has ultimate authority over discipline of lawyers licensed in the District. Marching in legal lockstep with the DOJ suit, Clark has argued, among other things, that the Supremacy Clause preempts D.C. Bar regulation impeding DOJ lawyers in the “internal deliberations of the Executive Branch,” his good faith “legal opinion” was protected speech, and his conduct was covered by official immunity–all arguments that the D.C. Bar disciplinary committee first reviewing the case concluded “attack[ed] the very idea of holding lawyers to bar standards” and sought to exempt Clark from the rules of the bar he voluntarily joined.
The administration’s campaign against the bar echoes the actions of authoritarians elsewhere, who disable ethical oversight of government lawyers to unleash illegal executive action and mobilize the disciplinary apparatus against independent lawyers willing to stand up for the rule of law.
The DOJ complaint against the D.C. Bar sounds the alarm that this is now happening in the United States. If it succeeds, the case would transform the Department of Justice from what it has been and should be—an independent public office protecting the Constitution against executive overreach—into what the president wants and is dangerously close to achieving: a private law firm whose lawyers operate above the law.
