Nearly a dozen Republican senators wrote a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland last week demanding the Justice Department chief fire the agency’s top official for civil rights.
On Friday, lawmakers led by Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., on the Senate Judiciary Committee accused Clarke lying under oath during her 2021 confirmation process to serve as assistant attorney general for civil rights.
“During her nomination to her current role, Ms. Clarke was asked if she had ‘ever been arrested for or accused of committing a violent crime against any person,’” senators wrote. “Ms. Clarke was unequivocal, responding under oath to the Senate Judiciary Committee, ‘No.’ That was a lie.”
“Ms. Clarke has now admitted that she was arrested in 2006 for attacking and injuring someone with a knife,” the letter explained.
“It has also recently come to light that, shortly before the full Senate voted on her nomination, Ms. Clarke and her publicist contacted the man she attacked in an attempt to cover up her false testimony,” lawmakers added.
Senators cited a spring report from Daily Signal author and reporter Mary Margaret Olohan, who wrote in May that Clarke asked her ex-husband “for a statement saying that she was not a domestic abuser during a confirmation process where she did not disclose her past arrest.” Olohan’s reporting was based on an investigation from the American Accountability Foundation, which found Clarke pulled a knife on her ex-husband, Reginald Avery, “deeply slicing his finger to the bone” on July 4, 2006, when
