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Namesakes

I have what is apparently a very common name. In grade school I would occasionally be given grades on my report card and disciplinary warnings for someone else which is how I first learned that I was not unique. Throughout my adult life similar things happened with mail, bank statements, etc. I had a sheriff's deputy stop by my home once looking for another one of me and I've had several bill collectors annoy me until I threatened legal action for their lack of due diligence as to who I wasn't.

These past few months I've made the headlines because of the January 6 Committee, whose report I am slowly reading. A relatively low-level Department of Justice official with my name actively embraced Trump's attempted coup; at one point a Trump announcement referred to him/me as the new Attorney General.  

Quoting from the New York Times (January 24, 2021), confirmed by evidence gathered by the January 6 Committee:

"It was New Year’s Eve, but the Justice Department’s top leaders had little to celebrate as they discussed Jeffrey Clark, the acting head of the civil division, who had repeatedly pushed them to help President Donald J. Trump undo his electoral loss.

Huddled in the department’s headquarters, they noted that they had rebuked him for secretly meeting with Mr. Trump, even as the department had rebuffed the president’s outlandish requests for court filings and special counsels, according to six people with knowledge of the meeting. No official would host a news conference to say that federal fraud investigations cast the results in doubt, they told him. No one would send a letter making such claims to Georgia lawmakers.

When the meeting ended not long before midnight, Acting Attorney General Jeffrey A. Rosen hoped that the matter was settled, never suspecting that his subordinate would secretly discuss the plan for the letter with Mr. Trump, and very nearly take Mr. Rosen’s job, as part of a plot with the president to wield the department’s power to try to alter the Georgia election outcome.

It was clear that night, though, that Mr. Clark — with his willingness to entertain conspiracy theories about voting booth hacks and election fraud — was not the establishment lawyer they thought him to be. Some senior department leaders had considered him quiet, hard-working and detail-oriented. Others said they knew nothing about him, so low was his profile. He struck neither his fans in the department nor his detractors as being part of the Trumpist faction of the party, according to interviews."

(Note: at the time there was much vague denial of this reporting by the Trump quislings and there is now a good deal of confirmation of it available from the January 6 Committee's report.)

So far this traitor is the most famous Jeff Clark that I know of.  Nothing I am liable to achieve in my lifetime will reach this level of fame/notoriety.  Just another thing for me to hold against Trump, although he has hurt so many others far worse.

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