Time for Conservatives Who Sit on New Civil Liberties Alliance Board to Speak Up Explaining Hiring of Coup Promoter Jeffrey Clark

August 6, 2021, 3:25 pmelection subversion risk, fraudulent fraud squadRick Hasen

The actions of Jeffrey Clark in attempting to help President Trump remain in office and interfere with the election process despite losing the election are reprehensible and potentially open up Clark to disbarment or criminal charges.

And yet, as reported by Mark Joseph Stern, Clark has a cushy new gig with the New Civil Liberties Alliance. Can’t blame the board for hiring him before all the information came out, perhaps. But now? Stern reports:

Despite the extreme and dangerous nature of these antics, Clark has not been exiled from the conservative legal movement. Clark’s new employer, the NCLA, was founded in 2017 by Philip Hamburger, a legal scholar who believes that much of the administrative state—the hundreds of agencies that enforce federal regulations—is unlawful. It is largely funded by the Charles G. Koch Foundation. routinely sues the government. In recent months, the NCLA has fought to overturn the federal ban on bump stocks, shield the Federalist from an unfair labor practice after its publisher threatened any employee who tried to unionize, and topple the federal government’s COVID eviction moratorium. On Tuesday, the organization filed suit on behalf an Antonin Scalia Law School professor who refuses to get vaccinated against COVID, arguing that the school’s vaccine mandate is illegal.
The NCLA is not a fringe firm. Its Board of Advisors includes retired conservative judge Janice Rogers Brown, prominent libertarian law professors Randy Barnett and Eugene Volokh, Supreme Court litigators Mike Carvin and Chuck Cooper, former Trump lawyer William Consovoy, and Clark’s former DOJ colleague Jennifer Mascott, who served as Associate Deputy Attorney General under Trump. The NCLA did not return my repeated requests for comment for this article.
Like other right-wing legal groups—including Clark’s own Federalist Society—the NLCA appears to have decided that abetting a failed coup does not render an attorney unfit for employment. The conservative legal movement has welcomed Trump’s schemers back into the fold with open arms. They will, it seems, experience no ramifications for their plots to steal the race.