Election Plot Puts Environment Official in Spotlight

prominence among the general public. For example, if I log onto Twitter and see Ben Grumbles trending, I'm going to be very, very surprised. But that's basically what happened last week with Jeffrey Bossert Clark, the top environmental attorney within

the Trump administration's Department of Justice. Clark came to prominence when The New York Times reported late Friday that he was involved in a plan earlier this month to oust the acting Attorney General and then use the Justice Department to give support to lawsuits challenging this November's election results.

Almost instantly, Clark went from being a little known environmental attorney to a key player in the ongoing drama over the former president's attempts to cling to power and delegitimize the election. Bloomberg laws Ellen Gilmer, a familiar voice to many of you, was curious as to how Clark got mixed up in all of this and about what this could mean for his legal career moving forward. I spoke to Ellen about all of this and about how she

found out that Clark was in the news. Well, it was Friday night of the week of inauguration, which was a busy week for all reporters, for everybody who's involved in the news. So I was finally sitting down on the couch after a very long week, scrolling through Twitter, and I see this New York Times bombshell about some Justice Department official. And the picture with the story is somebody I recognize. It looks like Jeffrey Bosser. Clark can't

be Jeff Clark. I click on the story, and sure enough, it's the one and only Jeff Clark, head of the Environment and Natural Resources Division under President Trump. And that should give you an indication of how low key he was in that. It was a surprise to see his photo on Twitter. And we'll get to that in a little bit about his You know stature. But first off, let's remind people what he actually did and what the

Environment Division at DOJ does. The Environment Division handles all of the environmental litigation that the United States is involved in, so that's basically two different sides of things. First, they enforce all of the major environmental laws, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act. They bring they bring cases to enforce against alleged violators. And the second piece is they defend environmental policies put forth by the Interior Department, the EPA,

and other agencies. And we cover that a lot because you know, whenever anyone ensues the EPA or the Interior Department, we follow those lawsuits very closely. And his division is the one that defends those agencies. He's basically the EPA's defense attorney, to sort of oversimplify it, right. More or less, he leads a team of lawyers within the Justice Department, and he has told us and others many times his primary goal as head of the Environment Division is to

or was to defend the Trump administration's agenda. Okay, so let's get into the latest news. You mentioned. There was a big bombshell New York Times story for the people who haven't seen it, can you summarize what the story said, what it alleged that Jeff Clark did, and how Jeff

himself responded. So, the reports, which were based on the record, but anonymous sources, said there was a plot to ask Acting Attorney General Rosen and to replace him with what the New York Times called a Trump loyalist who would use the Justice Departments resources to challenge the election results in Georgia. So the DOJ official who was allegedly that Trump loyalist was Jeffrey Bosser Clark, and he has confirmed that he did have a meeting with the president. That

much he has acknowledged. But he otherwise says the New York Times story includes various inaccuracies. He hasn't gone into detail about what those inaccuracies are, except that he says there was no plan on his part to oust Jeff Rosen. Guy. So let's go back to what you were mentioning earlier that you were really surprised to see his photo while you were doing some weekend doom scrolling on Twitter as we all do. Why were you surprised and what does

that say about his stature? I mean, I guess What it implies is that he was not really a very high level, well known type person in the Trump administration. Right, Well, he was fairly high level. He was the assistant Attorney General overseeing the Environment Division, but there are many assistant attorneys general, and it's a few tiers down from attorney general. So he was a Trump appointee Senate confirmed, So in that regard, you know, he was certainly important, but he

did not. He was not the face of the agency. He was not certainly not a household name, and he kind of flew under the radar for people outside of environment circles. Like, nobody outside of environment circles would know who Jeff Clark is, except maybe in the final few months of his time at DOJ, where he was filling in as acting head of the Civil Division in addition to his Environment Division duties. Well, let's talk about people

within environment circles. You know, did the environmental activists and the environmental attorneys that you spoke with, were they really surprised to see that Clark had been kind of mixed up in all of this, or were they, you know, is this something that wasn't surprising to them? People were shocked.

My phone started blowing up on Friday night after this news came out from people former colleagues of Jeff Clark, along with you know, legal adversaries and other people in environmental circles who just thought that Jeff was extremely conservative in his legal views but didn't see this election issue. They didn't see him going this far into this election issue in the way that the New York Times story alleges.

Let's talk about the consequences for Clark himself. You did some great reporting to advance this story where you talked about how this could affect Clark's career moving forward. You know, now that he's out of the administration, can you talk

a little bit about that you know and what you learned. Yes. So, first of all, before Jeff Clark has time to think about any career consequences, he has to deal with some investigations that are going to be underway from the Senate and inside the Justice Department into what went on here. Jeff Clark resigned January fourteenth, which was a little less than a week before President Biden was inaugurated. At the time,

he didn't have any job plans nailed down. And now, in addition to the Senate investigation of the Senate investigation, in the DJA investigation, He's going to have to deal with potential ethics complaints. Some legal ethics experts who we talked to law professors said that especially during the Trump era, members of the public are really mobilized on legal ethics issues, and if they see something, especially from a government lawyer that seems potentially, you know, askew, they are a lot

more savvy about filing bar complaints. So Jeff Clark is member of the DC Bar, it's conceivable some members of the public could file bar complaints if they see some of Jeff Clark's alleged actions as violating the rules of professional conduct for lawyers. So that would be a matter for the DC Bar, and the people we talked to had some different points of view about whether such complaints

would be successful. And when there is a bar complaint, there's like a big range of consequences that can range from very minor to very severe. The other consequence that Jeff Clark will have to deal with is just like his marketability as a lawyer getting into a job, and that is a more tangible, immediate consequence of all of this.

One recruit legal industry recruiting expert we talked to described him describe Clark as being radioactive in the wake of the New York Times story in that, you know, law firms, traditional big law law firms are not going to want to bring this guy on board and send out a press release and say, hey, look at this great DJ lawyer we hired, which would normally be what happens when you leave DJ as a high ranking official, Right, That's what you had some great stuff in your story about that,

where it's like, you know, law firms, especially in big law, would be following all over themselves to get an alumni of DJ on board, and in this case, you know, they don't. It seems like they might not want to go near him. I mean, that's just amazing. And it's certainly possible. The dynamic will change as details come out as a result of the investigation and as there's more clarity about what actually happened. But for now, at least, there's a really big cloud over his head in terms

of the job market. So let's talk about broader, the broader issues for big law. You know, typically when there's a change in administration, a lot of alumni from the outgoing administration finds a very lucrative home within these big law firms, But as we just talked about with Jeff Clark, he may have some trouble doing that. Do you think there'll be other Trump alumni who also face difficulty in getting that typical like corporate law law firm job. It depends.

I think any lawyers who from the Trump administration who have some close connection to challenging the election or some sort of connection to the Capitol riot for whatever reason, those would definitely be people who law firms are going to want to avoid for a while probably, But I think other people won't have a hard time, like just packaging themselves as a traditional conservative lawyer, because I think

that's what a lot of them are. And there might be a little bit of pushback or a little bit of hesitance on the part of some especially cautious law firms, but for the most part, I think they're going to want to hire a lot of those folks who just kind of stayed in their lane of whatever policy issue it was they were working on during the Trump administration and didn't stray into these other really controversial and difficult issues. That was Bloomberg Laws, Alan Gilmer, and that'll do it

for today's episode of Parts per Billion. If you want more environmental news, check us out on Twitter. We use the handle at environment. Just that it's at environment. I'm at David B. Schultz. If you want to let me know that some other random person is the news, let's say I don't know, Joel bove Kankaposis, Jim Jones, who knows. Today's episode of Parts per Billion was produced by myself and Josh Block. Parts Pavilion was created by Jessica Combs

and Rachel Daegel. The music of today's episode is a message by Jazzar and the Quest by Tom Hillock and Nicholas Boskovic. Here we use up to a Creative Commons license. Thanks everyone for listening. Those nine justices in Washington that can be pretty hard to keep track up. That's where we come in. I'm Jordan Rubin and I'm Kimberly Robinson. On our podcast Cases and Controversies, we give you a week by week accounting of the Supreme Court, the filings,

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