Former Department of Justice official Jeffrey Clark, one of the 19 charged in the case against former President Donald Trump in Georgia, opposes the case’s trial beginning next March, according to a court document filed Thursday.
Clark’s attorney called Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’s proposed trial start date of March 4, 2024, “highly premature” because, the attorney said, none of the 19 defendants had been arraigned yet following their indictment this past Monday.
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Clark, who served as head of the DOJ’s Civil Divison under Trump, is the first defendant to file an objection to the proposed start date after he and the others were charged with violating the state’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act for their alleged efforts to reverse the results of the 2020 election.
Clark’s attorney also said Willis had not engaged with counsel for any of the defendants on start date options and that she therefore had “no earthly idea whether any of the proposed dates fit the calendars of any, much less all of the dozens of busy attorneys who will be involved” in the case.
The court filing also noted that Clark reserved the right to attempt to remove his case to a federal court, a maneuver co-defendant Mark Meadows, Trump’s former chief of staff, is already in the process of attempting.
While Trump was charged with 13 felonies in the case, Clark was charged with two, racketeering and a criminal attempt to commit false statements and writings.
His attorney wrote that Clark believed Willis’s charges were based “on a turgid and prolix conspiracy theory” and that her desired trial start date coming eight days before Georgia’s presidential primary, in which Trump is the current front-runner, was “just one example” of the politicization of the case.
The indictment marks the fourth criminal case leveled against Trump this year after he was indicted on state charges in New York over a 2016 hush money scheme and federal charges in Florida and Washington, D.C., over classified documents and the 2020 election, respectively.
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While this is the first time Clark has been criminally charged, he was also referenced as an unnamed “co-conspirator” in the Washington, D.C., indictment.
In it, special counsel Jack Smith alleged that Clark had met with Trump at the White House on Jan. 3, 2021, without the DOJ official giving requisite notice to his superiors, and accepted an offer from Trump to replace the then-acting attorney general so that Clark would have more authority to help Trump with election matters.
