"Assured failure." Pat Philbin gives first public testimony about insurrection. [View all]

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/03/26/white-house-trump-2020-00149195

It was just a few days until Jan. 6, 2021, when Congress was slated to certify Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election, and Trump had suddenly resuscitated a plan to replace the leadership of the Justice Department with Jeffrey Clark, a little known DOJ official who Trump expected to mount a sweeping nationwide effort to help him remain in power.

So Philbin called Clark, a colleague from their days in private practice dating back to the 1990s and tried to talk him out of it.

“I tried to explain to him that it was a bad idea for multiple reasons,” Philbin recalled Tuesday at a long-delayed disbarment hearing for Clark. “He would be starting down a path of assured failure … If by some miracle somehow, it worked, there’d be riots in every major city in the country and it was not an outcome the country would accept.”