Kristen Clarke, the anti-white, black supremacist who heads the U.S. Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, has admitted that she lied during her confirmation process when asked whether she was ever arrested for a violent crime.
Clarke confessed the lie to CNN after The Daily Signal confirmed the arrest with court and police records, but she blamed the arrest on her husband. Clarke claims that Reginald Avery abused her for years, which he claims is another lie. In 2006, cops in Prince George’s County, Maryland, arrested Clarke after she attacked her husband with a knife during a domestic squabble.
The arrest was expunged, which raises the legal and ethical question of whether she was required to disclose it.
The latest on the radical Clarke — who wants to defund the police and has falsely said that cop-killer Mumia Al-Jamal is innocent — is yet another black eye for the Biden administration because of its apparent unwillingness to vet top employees.
The Arrest
In 2021, Avery told the American Accountability Foundation (AAF) that the enraged Clarke nearly cut off his finger.
An attorney in the Civil Rights Division until April 2006, The Daily Signal reported, Clarke was headmistress of voting and elections for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People when she slashed Avery on July 4, 2006.
In a text to AAF, the website reported, Avery admitted that he was “seeing another woman” and that Clarke “was angry. Attacked me with a knife. I instinctively grabbed it. As I said earlier, I’m not blameless.”
Added Avery: “That’s the story. That’s what happened. She went to jail.”
Avery didn’t press charges, and federal authorities didn’t contact him about the knife attack when Biden nominated Clarke to head the civil rights bureau.
But the Night of the Long Knife wasn’t the only “incident” between the two.
Police records “show that the department was called on nine different occasions by someone at Avery’s and Clarke’s Upper Marlboro, Maryland, household between May 2003 and December 2007,” The Daily Signal reported:
Seven of those calls were for a “threat” or some type of domestic violence, but most were cleared without a report. The July 4, 2006, call was made by “Mr. Reginald” (Avery’s first name) and accompanied by a 760 code, according to a mainframe print-out from Prince George’s County computer-aided dispatch system obtained by The Daily Signal.
That 760 code is the department’s clearance code for “arrest,” the Prince George[‘s] County Police Department confirmed.
That call was not cleared for four hours, and Avery maintains it was Clarke who was arrested. Clarke has not addressed the matter, though given multiple opportunities to respond.
County prosecutors requested a nolle prosequi, which dismissed the charge, after which Clarke sought and received an expungement from court records in 2008.
Avery and Clarke divorced in 2009.
Cotton’s Question
In a written question from Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton after her confirmation hearing, Clarke lied about the arrest.
“Since becoming a legal adult, have you ever been arrested for or accused of committing a hate crime against any person?” Cotton asked.
“No,” Clarke replied.
She answered likewise when asked whether she had “ever been arrested for or accused of committing a violent crime against any person?”
After The Daily Signal’s exposé, Clarke explained the lie.
“Nearly 2 decades ago, I was subjected to years-long abuse and domestic violence at the hands of my ex-husband,” Clarke wrote in a statement for CNN:
This was a terrorizing and traumatizing period that I have sought to put behind me to promote my personal health, healing and well-being. The physical and emotional scars, the emotional abuse and exploitation, and the lying are things that no woman or mother should ever have to endure.
Avery told The Daily Signal that Clarke is lying, and called the CNN story a “hit piece”:
I deny it of course and think this [is] a sad and pathetic effort to make herself a victim, and is revealing of her character.
Clarke’s convenient excuse aside, Maryland law, The Daily Signal observed, prohibits requiring a job applicant to reveal an expunged crime. But lawyers advise disclosing such a record when applying for a sensitive job in the military or government for an obvious reason: Those employers will find out about it anyway.
“Mark Robbins, who served as general counsel of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management under former Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump, believes that a DOJ nominee should indeed disclose an expunged arrest when specifically asked,” The Daily Signal reported:
Robbins noted that though the expungement processes are typically determined by state law, presidential nominees for Senate confirmation go through a political process. There are two sets of paperwork relevant to a nomination, he said: the first from the White House for clearance before nomination, and the second from the relevant Senate committee.
Both of these sets contain questions about criminal and civil legal actions, Robbins said, as well as an open-ended question to the effect of: “Is there anything else that could even unfairly be seen as a potential hurdle to confirmation?”
“An arrest with an expungement likely has a background and explanation,” he said. “Why not disclose it? It isn’t particularly relevant what the legal consequence of expungement is. The issue is the political consequence of an arrest becoming public during or after the confirmation process, thus embarrassing the administration and Senate.”
And, indeed, the government’s public-trust questionnaire that every applicant for government must complete requires the disclosure of most expunged records, The Daily Signal observed.
As well, the confidential section of the Judiciary Committee’s pre-hearing questionnaire provided Clarke with the chance to come clean privately. Cotton’s questions suggest that she didn’t, sources told the website.
Said a former aide to Republican Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, “I can’t imagine a Republican nomination getting away with this.”
Clarke’s Other Problems
Nor would a Republican nominee have been confirmed were he openly anti-black in his youth, or an apologist for a racist murderer.
Clarke was or is both. In college, she wrote a piece for Harvard’s Crimson newspaper that said blacks were intellectually superior to whites. In 1999, she shared unhinged claims via email about police being the Ku Klux Klan and that Jamal, convicted of the 1981 murder of Philadelphia cop Daniel Faulkner, was a “scapegoat” and “lynch victim.”
The latest imbroglio over the past of a Biden appointee suggests that the administration did not properly vet Clarke, just as it likely didn’t properly vet former nuclear-waste official Sam Brinton. Brinton is the bald sadist who was fired after he was arrested for stealing luggage from airport carousels.
Brinton had advocated underage homosexual prostitution.
