White House metadata? No wonder Jeffrey Clark is pleading the fifth – and it’s all landing in Donald Trump’s lap
Over the past few days former Trump DOJ official Jeffrey Clark has gone from seemingly okay with being indicted for contempt of Congress, to suddenly wanting to come in and plead the fifth tomorrow at the last minute, to… suddenly being too ill to come in and testify tomorrow? This all keeps getting stranger, and now a huge piece of the puzzle has just been revealed.
Jeffrey Clark is in legal trouble because he sent a letter to Georgia officials, demanding in bad faith that they overturn the election results, which constitutes election tampering. Tonight MSNBC is reporting that the January 6th Committee has discovered White House metadata on Clark’s letter, which means the letter electronically passed through the Trump White House at some point.
In other words, at least one person in the Trump White House was either involved in the crafting of, or was at least aware of, Clark’s letter before he sent it to Georgia. This implicates the Trump White House person in Clark’s election crimes. And this all comes in the midst of Clark having gone from suddenly wanting to plead the fifth tomorrow, to suddenly not being able to testify tomorrow.
There’s a lot going on here. At this point Clark has to be wondering if he should try to cut a plea deal against the Trump White House official he was coordinating with. But given that Clark could potentially end up criminally charged with some form of election tampering by the Department of Justice and Georgia officials, he’d have to negotiate one heck of a complicated deal.
Right now the Jeffrey Clark situation is confusing and there appear to be more moving parts than we know about. That’s before even getting to Trump lawyer John Eastman’s decision to also plead the fifth to the January 6th Committee. But as these things tend to go, more details and context should emerge this weekend, and we’ll soon likely have a much clearer picture about what’s really going on here.
In the meantime, Clark is already scared enough of criminal prosecution that he was going to plead the fifth tomorrow, and now there’s hard evidence that implicates at least one Trump White House official in Clark’s election crimes. The kicker is that if Clark flips on the unnamed Trump White House official, that person will then have to consider flipping on Donald Trump himself. Somebody is going to prison over this. It’s all steadily leading up to landing in Trump’s lap.
