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FIRST ON FOX — The authorized group of former President Trump is instructing former Justice Department official Jeffery Clark to keep up executive privilege amid the combat to strip his bar license.
Clark, who served as assistant lawyer basic for the Environment and Natural Resources Division throughout Trump’s administration, is combating efforts by the D.C. Office of Disciplinary Counsel to have him disbarred for a letter he drafted during which he outlined what he perceived as “significant concerns” in Georgia in the course of the 2020 election.
According to a letter obtained by Fox News Digital from white-collar lawyer Todd Blanche, who represents the forty fifth president in two of his legal instances, Trump’s authorized group is instructing Clark to “maintain President Trump’s executive privilege and other related privileges, including law enforcement privilege, attorney client privilege, and deliberative process privilege.”
A District of Columbia Bar disciplinary continuing in opposition to Clark is about to start on March 26, when former White House Counsel Patrick Philbin is scheduled to testify, in response to Blanche.
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Jeffrey Clark (AP Photo/Susan Walsh/Pool/File)
Clark can be a named defendant within the ongoing racketeering case in opposition to Trump in Georgia.
The query of executive privilege between a president and his administration appointees has been central to instances in opposition to Trump and allegations that he tried to intrude with the 2020 election.
In 2021, the Department of Justice instructed Clark that President Biden’s choice to waive executive privilege gave Clark and different former division officers clearance to testify about their deliberations in relation to Trump’s alleged efforts to overturn the presidential election.
But Doug Collins, then-attorney for Trump, instructed Clark that waiver was “unlawful.”
“The executive privilege applicable to communications with President Trump belongs to the Office of the Presidency, not to any individual President, and President Biden has no power to unilaterally waive it. The reason is clear: if a President were empowered unilaterally to waive executive privilege applicable to communications with his or her predecessors, particularly those of the opposite party, there would effectively be no executive privilege,” Collins wrote in an August 2021 letter.
Former President Trump leaves the courtroom for a lunch break throughout his civil fraud trial at New York State Supreme Court on Nov. 6, 2023. (Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)
Blanche in his Jan. 4 letter notes that on the time Trump didn’t search judicial intervention to stop Clark’s testimony or the testimony of different former division officers.
But as a result of Clark was “never subpoenaed to testify to the House Oversight or Senate Judiciary Committees, never sat for transcribed interviews with these Committees, and seeing that there are no similar pending congressional subpoenas applicable to you, this assertion is now moot,” Blanche writes.
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Donald Trump (Sean Rayford/Getty Images)
“Further, the Collins Letter preserved President Trump’s executive privilege rights by not “’in any other case waiving the executive privilege related to the issues [concerning the 2020 election] the Committees are purporting to research,’” Blanche continued.
“In gentle of those circumstances and the pending D.C. Bar disciplinary continuing in opposition to you, … we hereby instruct you to keep up President Trump’s executive privilege and different associated privileges, together with legislation enforcement privilege, lawyer shopper privilege, and deliberative course of privilege,” he concluded.
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Trump, who is leading the polls in the 2024 GOP presidential primaries, will be in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday to ask the U.S. Court of Appeals to toss out criminal charges filed by Special Counsel Jack Smith against the former president for alleged election interference in the 2020 election.
The former president has claimed “absolute immunity” from prosecution since he was president within the weeks after the election and on Jan 6, 2021, when the Capitol riots occurred.
Fox News’ Bill Mears and Tyler Olsen contributed to this report.
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