Bright, boring, bitter and dangerous

Jeffrey Clark, the justice department factotum who conspired with Trump, is a type of little man I've come across far too often.

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The typical way guys like Clark are described is “nerdy,” but they’re far worse than that.  According to a report today in the New York Times, when Clark recently took over as acting director of the justice department’s civil division, he dug out a department legal rule from the 1980’s to insist that the word “acting” be removed from his title and in all official filings and briefs he should be identified as “director” of his division.

Petty, petty, petty you say?  Well that kind of pettiness almost got acting attorney general Jeffrey A. Rosen fired by Trump and replaced by Clark in a midnight move earlier this month when Clark conspired with Trump to take over the Department of Justice from his friend and mentor and start filing briefs and issuing letters to state attorney generals insisting that they pursue investigations of Trump’s false claims of election fraud.

Yes, you heard that right: Rosen was Clark’s mentor and champion, not only helping to get him the appointment to head up the civil division, but also in his career at the law firm of Kirkland and Ellis, where both men worked before going to work for the government.  Clark had followed Rosen into the department of justice previously, during the Bush administration, when Rosen helped get him a job in the department’s environmental and natural resources division. 

When he returned to Kirkland in 2005, he was named partner – but not an “equity” partner, which meant that he didn’t share in the firm’s profits or decision making.  It was like being admitted to the club as an associate member, while his mentor Rosen remained a full partner.

Gee, I wonder if that’s why when Clark informed Rosen that Trump was going to fire him and appoint himself in his place, he offered to keep Rosen on as an “acting” assistant attorney general.  Ya think?

I’ve run across guys like Clark throughout my life, at West Point, in the Army, working at newspapers and for studios in Hollywood.  They’re invariably intelligent and very resourceful when it comes to buttering up their bosses and co-workers, but the minute they get the barest smidgen of power, they start insisting on stuff like front page by-lines for second-rate articles, credits on screenplays they didn’t write or contribute to, and in the military, excessive quantities of obeisance from peers and subordinates they didn’t earn and aren’t entitled to.  Clark’s bio on the justice department website runs on for several grandiose paragraphs and includes the topics of his college debates and the fact that he worked for his college newspaper, while others’ bios are only a few lines.

Guys like Clark are dangerous because they are forever resentful that they never quite achieve the praise and position to which they feel entitled.  But when they are tapped for a position of authority, watch out, because that’s when the knives come out.

My father warned me about them before I went in the Army.  He called them “little men,” and he said their bitterness and anger was like a grenade that could go off and damage everyone around them. 

Put two of them together, like Clark and Trump and their midnight meetings before their plans were shut down by Rosen and other officials in the justice department, and the union can be nuclear.  It’s like combining two half-men and coming up with a monster Frankenstein would have been frightened of, and for good reason.

Yes, folks, more evidence that we dodged not just a bullet, but a detonation.  We almost lost not only the Capitol but the Constitution to these small-minded, bitter little men. 

Whew.