A few of Mr. Clark’s associates mentioned he might be pedantic. As a supervisor, he made no effort to cover when he had little respect for his profession subordinates’ opinions.
He’s not identified for being understated on the subject of himself. The place the standard biography on the Justice Division web site runs just a few paragraphs, Mr. Clark’s contains the elementary faculty he attended in Philadelphia, a subject he debated in faculty and that he labored for his faculty newspaper, The Harvard Crimson.
After graduating from Harvard in 1989, Mr. Clark earned a grasp’s diploma in city affairs and public coverage from the Biden Faculty of Public Coverage on the College of Delaware in 1993 and a legislation diploma from Georgetown College in 1995. He clerked for an appeals court docket choose, Danny Boggs, who was identified for giving potential clerks quizzes that examined not simply their data of the legislation, but additionally a variety of esoteric trivia.
Mr. Clark then labored for Kirkland & Ellis from 1996 to 2001, adopted by a stint within the Justice Division’s environmental and pure sources division in the course of the Bush administration, earlier than returning to Kirkland in 2005 as a accomplice, however not one with an fairness stake within the agency, in keeping with an individual who labored carefully with him on the legislation agency.He held the title of “non-equity accomplice,” which meant that he didn’t share within the agency’s earnings or make management selections.
When Mr. Clark returned to the Justice Division as the top of the environmental division in 2018, he flew underneath the radar. Like different Republican officers, he narrowly interpreted the division’s authorized authority and had a sometimes tense relationship with profession attorneys when it got here to implementing anti-pollution legal guidelines.
In a single occasion, Mr. Clark held up Clear Water Act enforcement circumstances due to a pending matter earlier than the Supreme Court docket that profession attorneys felt didn’t straight relate to their work, in keeping with a lawyer with data of these circumstances. The Supreme Court docket was listening to a matter that concerned discharges that flowed by way of groundwater earlier than reaching waters regulated by the federal authorities, and the division was engaged on a case that concerned flows over land.
His workers believed that Mr. Clark hoped the court docket would curtail the legislation’s attain in a means that will apply to overland spills, too, however by a 6-to-3 ruling, it did not.
