Senate Republicans Seek Firing, Potential Prosecution of Biden DOJ Civil-Rights Chief

Kristen Clarke lied to Congress under oath, the senators claim, and then manipulated a witness to conceal the felony.

L ive by the sword, die by the sword.

That is the message Senate Judiciary Committee Republicans, led by Senator Tom Cotton (R., Ark.), have just sent Merrick Garland, the Biden attorney general and lawfare maestro, in a letter seeking the “immediate termination and removal from office” — for starters — of Kristen Clarke, the chief of the Biden DOJ’s Civil Rights Division.

Clarke has admitted to lying to Congress in her background investigation about a violent domestic crime she committed at the age of 31, after she’d been a federal prosecutor for several years. Moreover, there is evidence that she then obstructed Congress by scheming to suborn the main witness — her ex-husband — to provide a misleading statement about the incident.

Clarke’s false statement to Congress during her 2021 confirmation process involved a prior arrest 15 years earlier. Ordinarily, I am something of a squish on this sort of thing. Background checks are very intrusive, and while the process only occurs because one is seeking a powerful government job, it’s not like the investigation is triggered because the subject is a suspected criminal. Overwhelmingly, we’re talking about law-abiding people, many of them exemplary. Most of us have done things we’re not proud of, even if the behavior was undeserving of criminal or civil lawsuits.

What’s more, the political parties — especially the Democrats — have strategically made the confirmation process more intrusive and punitive than it needs to be in order to discourage good people — especially conservatives — from taking consequential government positions. To exaggerate youthful indiscretions merely because one objects to the politics of a nominee or the administration’s proposing the nominee only makes things more toxic.

Moreover, in the context of a background investigation, it is common for nominees to be genuinely confused about whether they have to admit to foolish misconduct committed during adolescence and young adulthood (when many people are immature). Often, such people have been arrested but ultimately not charged in some incident that is more rash than grave, so their record is expunged. The expungement, they believe (or at least hope), is license for them to deny the arrest if asked about it — after all, that’s the point of getting the record expunged. If a nominee reasonably claims that she thought not having been convicted meant she needn’t admit an arrest, I’m inclined to cut some slack.

That said, “some slack” is not a complete pass. Kristen Clarke graduated from Harvard College and Columbia Law School before joining the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division at the age of 25. The violent attack she falsely denied (even if she was not indicted for it) happened when she was 31. By then, she had been a federal prosecutor for six years. The apparent obstruction of Congress to cover up the incident happened just three years ago, when she was 46. At the time, she was seeking one of the most important law-enforcement jobs in the country — the Civil Rights perch from which progressive administrations, such as the incumbent Biden administration, endeavor to micromanage the nation’s police departments. The obfuscation is relevant to how competently the FBI investigated her background and whether it was irresponsible of President Biden to nominate her in the first place — especially given what else was known about her, which I’ll come to.

Let’s start with the lie and work backwards. For purposes of written “responses for the record” in connection with Clarke’s spring 2021 confirmation hearing, Senator Cotton asked her, “Since becoming a legal adult, have you ever been arrested for or accused of committing a violent crime against any person?” Obviously, that question could not reasonably be construed by a highly educated, highly experienced lawyer and former federal prosecutor to be narrowly confined to expunged matters that she was not obliged to admit. Clarke was asked not only about arrests but about whether she’d merely been accused of a violent crime. She unequivocally answered “No.”

That was false. Clarke “has now admitted that she was arrested in 2006 for attacking and injuring someone with a knife,” the senators write, citing a New York Post report. Apparently, she was taken into custody for a time, but the matter was subsequently dropped.

The “someone” Clarke attacked and allegedly stabbed with a knife was her then-husband, Reginald Avery. It is not unusual that, when people who are not criminals commit rash violent or otherwise lawless acts, the context is a fraught personal relationship. Clarke and Avery had a tempestuous marriage, during which they cohabited in Prince George’s County, Md., between 2003 and 2007. The couple share a son, born the year before the stabbing (he’s now 19), and they divorced in 2009.

Covering the story, the Daily Signal’s Mary Margaret Olohan reports that the stabbing incident, in which Avery said Clarke sliced one of his fingers to the bone, occurred in July 2006. He admits that he was far from “blameless” for what happened. As he recalls it, Clarke was enraged because he was seeing another woman, and while she obviously shouldn’t have threatened him with a knife, he was badly injured in part because he tried to grab the weapon from her.

Sounds like a mess, and I can certainly understand why prosecutors dropped the case. Still, that’s not the issue. The very different context here is the false statement 15 years later, made during a background investigation conducted pursuant to Congress’s obligation to vet executive-branch officers.

Even in normal circumstances, it would be hard to turn a blind eye to a material lie in response to a direct question from a senator, let alone to overlook such a lie regarding a serious crime by a former prosecutor seeking to become one of the nation’s highest-ranking Justice Department officials. But these are not normal circumstances. We are dealing here with the Biden Justice Department, which routinely prosecutes people who engage in less serious misconduct, and which has smashed a long-standing norm against putting executive-branch prosecutorial power in the service of congressional investigations. The Biden DOJ, at the behest of the Democrat-dominated House January 6 Committee, prosecuted former Trump-administration officials Peter Navarro and Steve Bannon for obstructing lawmakers. In addition, Trump himself has been indicted by the Biden DOJ’s special counsel for, among other things, making false statements to investigators (in the Mar-a-Lago documents case).

But here, the story gets worse.

Clarke appears to have compounded her lie by scheming to further obstruct Congress’s investigation and create a false exculpatory narrative. She provided the false answer to Senator Cotton’s question on April 14, 2021, but quickly realized that enough people had heard a rumor of the stabbing that the issue might not fade away. Clarke thus called her ex-husband and asked him to write a statement intimating that he, not she, was the sole domestic abuser in their relationship. On the call, Clarke had a witness, her publicist, Clothilde Ewing. The Daily Signal elaborates that Ewing is a “children’s author,” who has worked for the Obama 2012 reelection campaign, former Chicago mayor (and current Biden ambassador to Japan) Rahm Emanuel, and Oprah Winfrey’s long-running television program.

According to Avery, Clarke and Ewing wanted him to state that Clarke was not “the” abuser in their relationship. Clarke had to know it would be foolish to ask Avery to deny that the stabbing had happened: Too many people knew about it, Clarke had been taken into custody, and there were hospital records of Avery’s treatment. So, instead, she asked him to frame the statement as if there had been only one abuser in the relationship — Avery.

Avery denies being an abusive husband. We’re not in a position to judge, but we can tell that, while Clarke appears to have been the principal physical abuser in the 2006 incident, there were plenty of other incidents. The Daily Signal reports that, between 2003 and 2007, nine calls were made to the county police department to respond to domestic “threat” or “violence” at the Clarke/Avery home. Toward the end of their cohabitation, Avery claims, Clarke lied to a court to get a temporary restraining order against him. After they’d had an argument, he says she told the court “a bunch of nonsense”; but although the resulting restraining order was only temporary, he adds that he had decided to move out anyway: “I got my own place,” he recalls. “I was so over it.”

Avery says it was mainly out of concern for their son that he agreed to give Clarke a statement along the lines — though not the precise lines — she was seeking. He now says doing so was “stupid” and a “huge mistake.” He told the Daily Signal he was led to believe Clarke was facing underhanded attacks from conservatives and that his statement would “bring closure to the whole thing.”

On May 19, 2021, he emailed Ewing, the aforementioned publicist, the following statement: “Kristen Clarke was not an abuser in our relationship.” “An abuser” is a vague term: It could be interpreted to refer to one who is habitually abusive; but it could also mean one who was abusive on one or more occasions. Clarke knew she had falsely denied the arrest and accusation that she’d committed a violent crime. It’s fair to assume she wanted the statement from Avery so that, if she were ever pressed on the matter, she could deceptively claim that even he admitted she was not abusive to him. Otherwise, she would keep quiet and hope to be confirmed without further attention to the matter, as she was on May 25, 2021.

Now that she has been caught in a lie, Clarke has admitted concealing the arrest. In a written statement shared with CNN, she rationalized: “Nearly 2 decades ago, I was subjected to years-long abuse and domestic violence at the hands of my ex-husband.” Rather than answer questions honestly in an official proceeding, Clarke says she prioritized “promot[ing] my personal health, healing and well-being” by seeking to “put behind me” the “emotional abuse and exploitation, and the lying” to which she says she was subjected.

That last part about being lied to is curious. Maybe Avery lied to Clarke, but the government, to whom she owed a duty of candor, did not. The Senate asked her questions in connection with an official proceeding. As a longtime federal prosecutor, Clarke knows full well that people called on to provide evidence in an official proceeding — even if they’re not in the proceeding only because they hope to acquire a powerful government position — have a duty to be honest about indecorous conduct that they’d prefer to “put behind” them. In fact, it is often the prosecutor’s job to compel people to provide truthful information; if those people lie, the prosecutors tend not to be very sympathetic — it is not a defense to a false-statements charge that one has been hurt and lied to. And if, rather than come clean, people engage in obstructive conduct to cover the tracks of their lies, prosecutors like Clarke tend to indict them.

I can’t say I’m terribly surprised to find Clarke in this situation. As I wrote when Biden nominated her:

At the all-important Civil Rights Division, Biden has appointed Kristen Clarke, a radical with a history of racist and anti-Semitic commentary. At Harvard, where she led the Black Students Association as an undergrad, Clarke publicly contended that blacks were superior to whites physically and mentally because their brains contain higher amounts of neuro-melanin. Blacks are also spiritually superior, she said, though she elaborated that this is not an attribute that can be “measured based on Eurocentric standards.”

Though she does not exactly come off like a career in stand-up was an option, Clarke would like us to believe that she was just joking — resorting to parody in her umbrage over the publication of Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein’s The Bell Curve. People seemed to think she was pretty serious at the time, as she took pains to cite Richard King, a psychiatrist and melanin/pineal-gland scholar, as authority for the proposition that melanin is “the chemical basis for the cultural differences between blacks and whites,” and the reason why “Black infants sit, crawl and walk sooner than whites.” (C’mon, you know you were wondering!) On a related subject, Clarke certainly seemed serious when she invited a notoriously anti-Semitic Trinidadian academic, Tony Martin, to expound on his theories about the racism of the Torah and the “Jewish monopoly over Blacks” — and when she later asserted, in his defense, “Professor Martin is an intelligent, well-versed Black intellectual who bases his information on indisputable fact.”

Clarke is dedicated to the proposition that identity — racial, ethnic, sex (including, of course, sexual identification), sexual preference, etc. — trumps merit. She made that clear in a recent interview with Fox News’ Tucker Carlson (embedded in this Paul Mirengoff post at Powerline). She swaddles this noxious ideology in the euphonious argot of “diversity,” much as [Attorney General] Garland, in his [confirmation] hearing, toed the Biden line of describing as “equity” the Left’s championing of discrimination against whites for the purpose of fighting “systemic racism.” Equity, in this construction, is the antithesis of equal protection under the law, that passé constitutional value it used to be the Justice Department’s mission to defend. Equal opportunity is out, disparate impact is in. Naturally, Clarke thus frets that if COVID-19 has hit black communities harder than others, it must be due to “racial bias.”

Clarke is a natural for the Civil Rights Division in this Obama redux.

In their letter to AG Garland, the senators demand that Clarke be fired. They further point out that “lying to Congress under oath is a felony,” the implication being that Clarke should also be prosecuted. And they remind Garland of his recent high-minded Senate testimony:

The integrity of our legal system is premised on adherence to the rule of law. In order to have confidence in our Department and in our democracy, the American people must be able to trust that we will adhere to the rule of law in everything that we do.

If Garland was serious about this, he must be truly outraged that one of his top subordinates, to get her job, provided a false statement to the Senate about her past misconduct and not only remained silent about her false statement while she was performing her job but also sought to influence a witness to help her conceal what she had done.

So I guess we’ll find out if Garland was serious.