Who is Jeffrey Clark, the Philly native and ex-Justice Department official charged in Trump’s Georgia indictment?

By now, the role Philadelphia native Jeffrey Clark played in former President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election has been well documented in congressional investigations, media reports, and law enforcement probes.

But the 40-count indictment returned Monday by a grand jury in Fulton County, Georgia, is the first time the Tacony-reared former Justice Department official has been charged with a crime.

Clark, 56, was one of 18 Trump aides and allies named as defendants alongside the former president in a case seeking to prosecute them for their role in undermining Georgia’s election results.

Here’s what you need to know about Clark, his role in the case, and his ties to Philadelphia:

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Before the 2020 election, Clark was a little-known environmental lawyer at the U.S. Justice Department.

But as Trump and his allies scrambled for a way to undo Joe Biden’s election victory in late 2020, he emerged as one of the DOJ officials most open to the president’s election lies.

Former Attorney General Bill Barr had resigned on Dec. 23 after concluding there was no evidence of widespread fraud in the election. And his acting replacement, Jeffrey Rosen, stood by those findings.

As Trump became increasingly annoyed by what he viewed as the department’s failure to find evidence to substantiate his conspiracy theories, a Pennsylvania lawmaker — U.S. Rep. Scott Perry — introduced him to Clark, who at the time was serving as acting head of the Justice Department’s Civil Division.

Perry, who represents the Harrisburg region and was one of the earliest proponents of Trump’s false claims about the election, has testified that he described Clark to Trump as someone “who could really get in there and do something about this.”

And after an initial Oval Office meeting in late December 2020, Clark began circulating a draft letter on DOJ letterhead addressed to state officials in Georgia. It said the department had identified “significant concerns that may have impacted the outcome of the election in multiple states.” It urged Georgia’s legislature to convene a special session to consider selecting an alternate slate of pro-Trump electors in time for the Jan. 6, 2021, congressional certification of the Electoral College vote.

Speaking later to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Rosen’s deputy Richard Donoghue described the letter as “wildly inappropriate and irresponsible … nothing less than the department meddling in the outcome of a presidential election.”

The letter was referenced in the federal indictment filed earlier this month by Special Counsel Jack Smith’s office in Washington.

Clark, however, was not charged with a crime or mentioned by name in that document. Instead, it refers to him only as unindicted “coconspirator No. 4.”

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Clark was born in Tacony, the youngest of four siblings, and spent his early years in a family home on Marsden Street in what, at the time, was a primarily white, working-class neighborhood near the foot of the Tacony-Palmyra Bridge.

He attended St. Leo’s Elementary School and Father Judge High School, where he graduated at the top of his class.

His senior yearbook lists a string of extracurricular activities including his participation in Mathletes, the National Honor Society, the newspaper and yearbook and clubs focused on chess, German, Latin and computer science.

Former classmates at Father Judge have described him as a serious and thoughtful student eager to impress by racking up academic titles and prestige.

He left Philadelphia shortly after his high school graduation in 1985 to attend Harvard. After earning degrees in economics and history there, he went on to receive advanced degrees from the University of Delaware and Georgetown law.

He’s based his career primarily in Washington ever since.

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Of Trump’s 18 codefendants in the Georgia case, Clark faces some of the fewest charges.

The grand jury indicted him on two counts — racketeering conspiracy and attempting to commit a false statement in writing.

That latter charge is tied to letters he sent on Dec. 28, 2020, and Jan. 2, 2021, to Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, Speaker of the Georgia House of Representatives David Ralston, and President Pro Tempore of the Georgia Senate Butch Miller on Justice Department letterhead saying investigators had identified “significant concerns” about the outcome of the Georgia election.

Prosecutors in Georgia allege that he knew those claims were false and attempted to use them to pressure the state officials to overturn President Joe Biden’s victory in the state.

The indictment also details an hour-long phone conversation Clark allegedly had on Jan. 2 with a codefendant, Scott Graham Hall.

Hall, an Atlanta-area bail bondsman, is accused in the indictment of illegally commandeering voting information from machines used in Coffee County, Georgia, that Trump and his allies allegedly later used to falsely claim fraud had taken place there.

Clark’s willingness to use the imprimatur of the Justice Department to back Trump’s false election claims nearly propelled him into the job of attorney general.

According to the report by the Congressional committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, Clark met with Trump in the days after sending the letter to Georgia officials to float a new plan: Oust Rosen as acting attorney general and appoint him instead.

According to Clark, Trump was keen on the idea that Clark, as attorney general, would adopt a more aggressive posture in pressuring state officials to appoint false Trump electors and was taking steps to name Clark to the DOJ’s top job.

But the federal indictment filed by Smith’s office earlier this month notes that a White House lawyer tried to dissuade Clark from accepting the promotion, warning him there had been no widespread fraud and that if Trump remained in office nonetheless, there would be “riots in every major city in the United States.”

According to the indictment, Clark responded: “Well … that’s why there’s an Insurrection Act” — a reference to the federal law that allows the president to deploy the military domestically.

Nonetheless, when word got out of what Clark and Trump were planning, Rosen demanded his own meeting with president. And on Jan. 3, he and Donoghue found themselves in the Oval Office for a tense exchange in which both men threatened to resign should Trump follow through with the appointment.

“You’re an environmental lawyer,” Donoghue told Clark during that meeting, according to the transcript. “How about you go back to your office, and we’ll call you when there’s an oil spill.”

Ultimately, the threat of mass resignations swayed Trump. According to accounts shared in court filings and Senate testimony, Trump told Clark he wasn’t going to take him up on his offer but praised his willingness to fight.

Clark resigned from the Justice Department shortly afterward, when the New York Times first reported details of his actions after the election.

Staff writer Andrew Seidman contributed to this article.