Another Round at the Bar
Plus: States United is nominated for an award! 🗳️
Published April 5, 2024
In 2022, Washington, D.C. Bar officials filed disciplinary charges against Jeffrey Clark, a former Justice Department official. They alleged that while he was working at the Justice Department in the final months of the Trump administration, Clark worked to help Trump try to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia—and violated his professional ethics obligations in the process.
On Thursday, the committee that heard evidence and arguments in his disciplinary trial made a preliminary finding that Clark had violated at least one attorney ethics rule. The decision puts Clark on a path to potential disbarment, just as former Trump attorney John Eastman was recommended for in California last month.
Accountability takes time, but it’s worth it. As States United Senior Counsel Gillian Feiner said simply in a statement to the press on Thursday: “No one is above the law.”
➡️ READ: Backgrounder: Jeffrey Clark’s disciplinary trial
This Week in Democracy
- Judge Scott McAfee denied former President Trump’s latest attempt to have his election interference charges dismissed in Georgia. McAfee ruled against Trump’s argument, saying that the charges couldn’t be dismissed on First Amendment grounds at this point in the trial.
➡️ READ: Trump’s Georgia charges, explained
- Former Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark committed at least one professional ethics violation when he worked to help Trump try to overturn the 2020 election, a D.C. Bar panel found. The panel’s preliminary finding could result in Clark’s law license being revoked.
➡️ READ: Backgrounder: Jeffrey Clark’s disciplinary trial
- Judge Juan Merchan rejected Trump’s attempt to delay his criminal trial in New York about falsifying business records and hiding information from voters in 2016. Merchan also expanded the gag order he issued last week after the former president attacked the judge’s family on social media.
- States United Action’s ElectionDeniers.org is nominated for a Webby Award for Best News & Politics website! You can vote for the site—the only comprehensive tracker of Election Deniers in America—by selecting “Replacing the Refs”. Voting is open until Thursday, April 18.
➡️ VOTE: The Webby Awards
State of the States
In Wisconsin, Gov. Tony Evers filed a brief urging the Wisconsin Supreme Court to decide that clerks in the state may choose drop boxes as one option for safe, secure voting. Seeking to intervene in Priorities USA v. Wisconsin Elections Commission, Evers argued that the court’s 2022 decision to ban most drop boxes should be reversed as Wisconsin’s election laws do not prohibit drop boxes. In March, the state Supreme Court agreed to decide whether their prior decision should be reversed.
“Drop box voting is safe and secure,” Evers said in a statement. “In Wisconsin, we must work to protect that freedom and to empower our clerks and election administrators working hard at the local level to make decisions that are right for their communities.”
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