The Justice Department is suing District of Columbia Bar officials for disciplinary actions against former Assistant Attorney General Jeffrey Clark.
The DOJ complaint references information first published by The Daily Signal in an opinion piece by Zack Smith, a senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation, specifically pertaining to ideological social media posts by D.C. Bar Senior Assistant Disciplinary Counsel Jack Metzler. This included calling Justice Samuel Alito a “Natural Born Fool.”
The Justice Department announced it filed a complaint against D.C. Disciplinary Counsel Hamilton P. Fox III, the D.C. Office of Disciplinary Counsel, and the D.C. Court of Appeals Board on Professional Responsibility, alleging improper use of bar discipline to target and regulate the official actions of federal government lawyers.
In June, the D.C. Bar Board on Professional Responsibility, with the backing of Metzler, recommended that Clark be disbarred for the advice he gave President Donald Trump and the actions he took after the 2020 election while serving as a Justice Department lawyer.
The Justice Department complaint, filed in U.S. District Court, asserts, “D.C. disciplinary authorities may not punish a United States official for disagreeing with a superior or coworker or for sharing an opinion just because those disciplinary authorities disagree with it.”
“As applied to Mr. Clark, Defendants’ disciplinary proceedings violate the Supremacy Clause by unlawfully regulating and discriminating against the Federal Government,” the complaint says.
In a post on X, Clark thanked Smith for the article, calling it “excellent work,” adding, “It shows that I never had unbiased DC Bar prosecutors. Never. Just actors who were political hatchet men for the Left.”
“Just on the basis of what you uncovered about Metzler, Zack, the case against me should be immediately dismissed. And, in reality, what you summarize just scratches the surface of all of the legal defects the case has, as DOJ’s new case will now show to a wider audience,” Clark wrote.
The DOJ complaint specifically references Metzler’s politicized social media posts.
“During and after prosecuting Mr. Clark, one member of the Office of Disciplinary Counsel, Assistant Disciplinary Counsel Jack Metzler, posted dozens of ideological messages demonstrating his and the Office of Disciplinary Counsel’s bias and poor judgment,” the complaint says.
The complaint noted that Metzler once posted: “It is unethical to engage with anti-vaxxers and people who claim there is a debate about birthright citizenship. Some ideas are so toxic the only permissible response is shunning and perhaps ridicule.”
He wrote, “SCOTUS be like oh we don’t care if u disappear people off the street.”
Besides denigrating Alito, he supported Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, posting, “every Justice except Jackson is dead to [him].”
As also noted in The Daily Signal piece, “On Mr. Metzler’s very same social media feed, he solicited applications to join the Office of Disciplinary Counsel.”
The D.C. Bar referred inquiries for this story to the Board on Professional Responsibility, and the D.C. Office of Disciplinary, which shares a website, but have autonomy from the DC Bar. Neither office responded to email and phone inquiries by publication time.
Metzler did not have a publicly listed phone number online and did not appear to have acknowledged the complaint on his Bluesky account as of publication time.
