CNN reports, Former Trump DOJ official Jeffrey Clark met with January 6 committee for nearly two hours:
Former Department of Justice official Jeffrey Clark and his attorneys met with the House select committee investigating the January 6 insurrection for nearly two hours on Wednesday, two months after the panel voted to hold him in contempt for his lack of cooperation.
Clark was seen entering a meeting room Wednesday in a building on the US Capitol Complex where the committee has routinely been interviewing witnesses.
After voting to hold Clark in contempt in December, the committee paused on proceeding because Clark said he planned to plead the Fifth Amendment. The committee then gave Clark another chance to testify, but that initial date got postponed because of a “medical condition”until Wednesday.
Democratic Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, the chairman of the committee, said the panel has gone to great lengths to allow Clark an opportunity to cooperate.
“We’ve operated in good faith in scheduling him and kind of accommodating him,” Thompson said earlier Wednesday. “We’ll just see what develops.”
Thompson said he had not gotten a readout of the proceedings and could not say if Clark plead the Fifth Amendment, as he had previously said he would.
Clark’s interview Wednesday is expected to play a significant role in determining if the committee will take the next step in referring him to the Department of Justice.
Clark is key to the panel’s investigation as he was one of the officials within the Justice Department pushing to pursue unfounded claims of voter fraud in the weeks after the 2020 election, and, according to officials who interacted with him was in touch with then-President Donald Trump repeatedly.
The fact that this deposition lasted only two hours, given Clark’s integral role in attempting to corrupt the Justice Department and become acting attorney general, suggests to me that he followed through on taking the Fifth Amendment to questions put to him until it became tiresome to the Committee’s attorneys. I seriously doubt that this insurrectionist was a cooperative witness.
RawStory reports, ‘Real villain’ Jeffrey Clark slammed for running ‘a coup inside the Justice Department’ by CNN legal analyst:
On Wednesday’s edition of CNN’s “The Situation Room,” former federal prosecutor Elie Honig tore into former Trump DOJ official Jeffrey Clark following his testimony to the House Select Committee investigating the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, in which he repeatedly took the Fifth Amendment.
“How significant is it that Jeffrey Clark, who tried to orchestrate the Trump coup plot from inside the Justice Department, actually appeared today after being threatened with contempt?” asked anchor Wolf Blitzer.
“Jeffrey Clark is a real villain in the whole story behind and leading up to January 6th,” said Honig. “He’s sort of slid under the radar, but let’s remember, he tried to run a coup attempt inside the Justice Department to aid Donald Trump’s effort to steal the election. He tried to get himself installed as the acting AG, going outside the chain of command. And he wrote a letter that falsely stated that DOJ had found evidence of election fraud.”
“Now, if he took the Fifth today, he is entitled to do that, that’s a constitutional right,” added Honig. “But we in the public are entitled to know what an embarrassment and a disgrace it is for a former high-ranking DOJ official to have to hide behind the Fifth.”
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