Days before being indicted, Jeffrey Clark appeared on a QAnon-supporting channel, referring to charges against Trump as “overkill” and calling for DOJ to be “reformed and overhauled”

Written by Media Matters Staff

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On August 11 — just days before Fulton County, Georgia, indicted former President Donald Trump along with his former assistant attorney general, Jeffrey Clark, and 17 others on racketeering charges — Clark appeared on an online channel that supports the QAnon conspiracy theory. 

The channel, American Media Periscope, is openly supportive of QAnon, prominently displaying the QAnon motto “Where We Go One We Go All” on its website and in videos. Show host Alex Newman has also amplified QAnon.

During his appearance, Clark attempted to downplay the charges from Trump’s previous indictments and attacked the Department of Justice, calling for it to be “reformed and overhauled.”

From the August 11, 2023, edition of America Media Periscope's Liberty Hour, streamed on Rumble 

ALEX NEWMAN (HOST): I want to ask you about the persecution that we are seeing of Donald Trump. Of course, we've got the documents case, we've got the Alvin Bragg case, and now we've got Georgia. Now they’re trying to go after lawyers who helped Trump or who might help Trump. It seems to me like a witch hunt. You had a front row seat to some of this. What are your views on what is happening with the DOJ and also the state and local efforts to bring down Trump?

JEFF CLARK (FORMER ASSISTANT ATTORNEY GENERAL): Sure. Well, look, I think it's a massive effort at lawfare. I think more and more American people are seeing through it. It creates a kind of nightly porn of anti-Trump frenzy on networks like MSNBC and CNN. I mean, if you watch these things regularly, you would think that President Trump was a one-man crime spree if you had no independent sources of evidence. But again, I do think the American people are seeing through it. I was talking with someone in my family recently and I said, look, if I were a Democrat and I wanted to use lawfare against Trump, I think I might say to myself that the optimal number of lawfare issues to launch against Trump attacks would be two. Why two? Well, because you want a backup in case your main one fails. But when you get up to three, four, maybe we'll get to five — and if you count the superseding indictment as to the Mar-a-Lago document situation, right, we really might get up to five. Because we've got Alvin Bragg, we have the Washington, D.C., J6-related thing. We have one base indictment and then a superseding indictment down in Florida. And then, you know, we have the potential for Fulton County to bring another indictment. And so I think it's such overkill that it causes a lot of people to say, “Like really? Like this — there's another action you're bringing against him?” It looks to me like fear. It looks highly defensive and like it's their only plan to try to win the 2024 election, Alex.

NEWMAN: Yeah, it's — the last count I saw was, I think, 78 felony charges. It's hard to imagine. And yet, as we discussed on the show last week, nobody even knows the number of federal regulations with criminal penalties attached. I mean, there’s just potentially infinite avenues for them to do this to people that they want to take out. In the last minute that we have left, Jeff, how do we prevent this from happening in the future? I mean, are we too far gone? Are there reforms that Republicans in Congress could do to try to protect Americans — not just Trump in particular, but just Americans in general — from this kind of lawfare, from these kinds of abuses?

CLARK: Well, I think that the Justice Department needs to be reformed and overhauled. That's first and foremost. And, you know, there are a number of organizations, like the Center for Renewing America, working on that issue and working on FBI reform as well. The other thing I would say is I think we need venue reform, right? I think that officials who come to Washington, D.C., to serve in Republican administrations shouldn't be subjected to a 92% Democrat-controlled D.C. federal or local court system. And I think the same is true for people who come from the rest of the country to protests in the United States. I think that basically if there are any issues that arise, even just claims that something improper happened, they should be given a venue choice to go back to their home state, where their actual jury of peers is, and see what the result would be there. I think that would cabin a lot of this stuff and shut a lot of this stuff off. But if you have a jurisdiction that, you know, really everybody is at the mercy of the federal government because they work for the federal government, they have federal jobs or other contracts with the federal government, right — they just think in the mode of the permanent D.C. government, and I think that's a pernicious kind of development. It's like D.C. is the new Versailles, and if you travel around D.C., you just see one crane building something in the area, whether it's Maryland or Northern Virginia or D.C. it's all over the place because this city, because of all the taxation and regulation and government programs, is attracting more and more people and more and more power.