One month later, Clarke still in Milwaukee
Homeland position lingers unresolved
One month after David A. Clarke Jr. said he was leaving to take a job in President Donald Trump’s administration, the Milwaukee County sheriff hasn’t budged.
On May 17, Clarke said he would start in June at a federal appointment as an assistant secretary in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, but so far he’s not turned in his resignation back home.
Homeland Security officials have given no clues about the appointment since they batted back Clarke’s initial announcement, leaving the job in a bureaucratic limbo.
Is Clarke’s appointment simply facing the same delays that have dogged many others in the Trump administration this year or is something amiss?
“I’m looking forward to joining that team,” Clarke told conservative talk radio host Vicki McKenna last month.
Clarke said then he would work in the department’s Office of Partnership and Engagement as a liaison with state, local and tribal law enforcement and governments. It would be an extension of the role Clarke has already taken on as a defender of police on media outlets like Fox News and would follow the campaigning he did for Trump around the country last year.
But when Clarke put out the news of his appointment on his own last month, it quickly drew a rebuke in an agency tweet that said “no such announcement” had been made. Agency spokeswoman Jenny Burke
repeated the language of the tweet almost word for word Friday.
“The position mentioned is a secretarial appointment. Such senior positions are announced by the department when made official by the secretary,” Burke said in an email. “No such announcement with regard to the Office of Partnership and Engagement
has been made.”
A source said the sheriff attended the Tuesday night fundraiser that President Donald Trump hosted for Gov. Scott Walker at the Hyatt Regency in Milwaukee.
The source said Clarke was conspicuously seen asking administration officials about talking to Reince Priebus, Trump’s chief of staff and a former state Republican Party chairman. The source did not see whether Clarke and Priebus eventually talked.
Clarke and a spokeswoman didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
Trump has filled his top cabinet posts but has been slower than other presidents to make other appointments.
For instance, Trump has nominated people for just 94 of 558 appointments that require Senate confirmation, according to the Partnership for Public Service, which tracks appointments.
The Homeland Security position for Clarke would not require Senate confirmation, however.
While the Trump administration considers the appointment, Clarke and the Milwaukee County Jail that he oversees have faced controversy.
An inquest jury last month found probable cause to charge five corrections officers, a jail lieutenant and the jail’s former commander with abuse of an inmate stemming from the April 2016 death of Terrill Thomas. Thomas died from dehydration after he went without water for seven days because of blunders by jail staff.
The jury’s findings were advisory and it is up to Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm to decide whether to charge anyone.
Witnesses at the inquest said jail staff
turned off the water in Thomas’ solitary confinement cell, then forgot to turn it back on. During the seven days Thomas went without water, officers failed to get him medical help.
Prosecutors have said Thomas’ mental illnesses — he suffered from bipolar disorder and was in the throes of a breakdown — prevented him from asking for help. Other inmates have said they asked jail staff to help Thomas.
Clarke has made few comments about the case nor have any administrative changes been made at the jail. He has criticized the news media for failing to report on the separate case involving Thomas, who was in the jail after allegedly confessing to shooting a man in the chest and later firing two shots in the Potawatomi casino.
In addition, testimony was taken this month from a 19-year-old woman who sued Milwaukee County, alleging she was raped multiple times in the jail by a guard in 2013 and was later shackled to her hospital bed while she gave birth.
Last month, the Naval Postgraduate School removed Clarke’s 2013 master’s thesis from its website and said it was reviewing his work after CNN reported the thesis included large sections that matched the work of others word for word. There were no quotation marks around the passages, but the sources were cited in footnotes.
Clarke has said CNN has exaggerated the importance of what he calls “a formatting error.”
While Clarke’s appointment lingers unresolved, candidates have been lining up to run for his job next year.
They include: former Milwaukee Police Capt. Earnell Lucas, who works as a vice president of security with Major League Baseball; and Milwaukee County Circuit Judge John Siefert.