Republished with permission from The Stream, courtesy of investigative journalist Rachel Alexander.
Prominent election integrity lawyer and former law professor David Clements, known for his podcasts and landmark 2024 documentary about election fraud, Let My People Go, has been predictably under vicious attacks by the left over the past few years.
They are filing bar complaint after bar complaint against him, and got him fired from his law professor job at New Mexico State University due to refusing to subject his students to the mask and COVID-19 experimental drug mandates.
The retaliation against him for leading an election audit in New Mexico’s Otero County has been vile, resulting in death threats against him and his wife. However, he isn’t backing down, and instead is continuing to stand up to the corrupt political witch hunts.
This is my interview with him exposing what has happened to him. The details are stunning and frightening.
On February 14, 2025, former law professor David Clements was 680 miles away from his wife, Erin, meeting with election integrity experts on how to capitalize on the new Trump administration’s sweeping reforms to eliminate fraud, waste, and abuse throughout the federal government — but with a focus on elections.
At 6:17 pm, while most couples were celebrating Valentine’s Day, Clements received a text photo from Erin. Moments before, she had opened a letter marked “CONFIDENTIAL” from the Supreme Court of the State of New Mexico.
The contents revealed that the Disciplinary Board had opened an investigation over allegations of professional misconduct.
The accusation? That Clements’s recent visit with former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters in a Colorado jail — Peters being the wrongfully convicted and courageous whistleblower that exposed Dominion Voting Systems — was achieved through “false pretenses.”
She was sentenced to nine years after a sham trial that excluded nearly all her defenses and most of her testifying experts — one of whom was Clements.
Unable to help Peters at trial, Clements sought to bring greater awareness of her conditions by publishing a short video update with her, which went viral. The Clementses knew the claims were patently absurd – but reactions were markedly different. Clements texted Erin back “Yay!!!” He seemed to relish another opportunity to fight the bar association.
But when he called his wife, she was understandably worn down. “They never stop,” she said.
And she would know. This was the sixth complaint filed against Clements since August 2021 — and even worse, it would prove to be the start of a sixth preliminary investigation to determine whether Clements should be disbarred.
His latest accuser? Oddly enough, it was the same man who had brought accusations against him in 2020 that had gotten him fired from his job at New Mexico State University: Trent Toulouse.
We encourage you to read every word of Clements’s response to the Disciplinary Board.
What this journalist found is that the Toulouse complaint pales in comparison to a much larger story — namely, a coordinated effort between political operatives, government-funded media, and the bar association to destroy Clements.
I recently took the time to interview him and several others with whom he has crossed paths over the past several years.
“The Process Is the Punishment”
Clements easily rebutted Toulouse’s claims of entering a secure facility under “false pretenses.” Here is a short excerpt from his response:
“There is no legal or ethical prohibition for an attorney, whether licensed in the forum state or not, to visit a prisoner…. [t]he webpage explicitly welcomes video visitation, which can take place via “almost any smart phone or internet connected PC with a webcam and microphone.”
As you can see, there is no prohibition against screen recording from people on the outside, which the jail could not enforce even if they wanted to.
The undersigned produced his name and New Mexico bar card, produced the identity of Ms. Peters’ attorney of record, and disclosed the iPad I would be taking into the facility to Sheriff Deputy Michael Walters (Badge #16005).
I was cleared by his chain of command after they confirmed my identity, credentials, and searched my person. There is no rule restricting an attorney from taking a tablet into the facility that has recording capability.
In fact, it is customary practice for attorneys to meet with their clients to record statements, take electronic notes, and in some cases provide legal research while on the grounds. The meeting room has floor-to-ceiling windows, is transparent and under recorded surveillance.”
If there was no merit to Toulouse’s complaint, I asked Clements why he thought it was filed. He answered, “To keep me under continued investigation. The process is the punishment.
I have to tell prospective clients that my representation could hurt them by virtue of an ever-present black cloud hovering over my license. It also takes up considerable time and money on my end defending against these never-ending complaints.
“But to better answer your question, you have to know who Trent Toulouse is. He’s a psychology professor at a New Mexico community college that runs a radical left website called ‘RationalWiki.’ He’s on the board of trustees as the operations manager.
“Looking at RationalWiki’s X page, I’ve located a post advocating that the age of consent to engage in sexual intercourse with an adult be lowered to 14. He just took that down after I filed my response. The page is a treasure trove of perversion, and an incubator to target conservative influencers. I’ve got screenshots of it all.”
He continued: “And if Toulouse’s name sounds vaguely familiar, it’s because he is a family relation of New Mexico Secretary of State, Maggie Toulouse Oliver.”
The picture now begins to sharpen. Clements’s audit work in New Mexico has provided the basis for numerous articles exposing election corruption in New Mexico – and that has proven to be a personal wrecking ball to Oliver.
In August 2021, Trent Toulouse filed his first bar complaint against Clements, accusing him of “sedition and treason” after he made a presentation at a Cyber Symposium concerning the 2020 election that millions of people watched.
Around that time, New Mexico State University suspended Clements from his teaching job in the business college for refusing to subject his students to the mask and COVID-19 vaccine mandates.
A second complaint arrived shortly thereafter from attorney Nicholas Bullock, accusing Clements of jeopardizing the university’s safety because his influence as a subject-matter expert in consumer protection law stood as a stark rebuttal to the “settled science” that was at that time being proliferated on campus. A week later, fellow NMSU Professor Jamie Bronstein filed a third complaint, making similar allegations. A video on Rumble titled “Law Professor REFUSES to MASK UP or get the JAB,” which garnered hundreds of thousands of views, set much of these events in motion.
WATCH:
Tall Poppy Syndrome
Clements became an easy target after he appeared on Tucker Carlson’s primetime show, and also because of his history of thumbing his nose at the university for woke DEI “antiracism” and “antidiscrimination” policies. For example, out of approximately 60 university faculty senators, Clements was the only one to vote against a formal statement declaring that New Mexico State University was founded on institutional (i.e., white) racism. “We are a Hispanic-majority state, and our state was founded 50 years after the abolishment of slavery!” Clements said later. “But my vote gave the Marxist faculty all they needed to play the race game.”
The opening salvo from the first three Disciplinary Board investigations required Clements to produce 5,000 legal documents from hundreds of election cases nationwide on which he had offered commentary in response to questions during various podcasts. Simultaneously, the university was working through back channels to collect evidence it could use to fire him from his social media posts.
In response to the bar and his university’s groupthink on all things COVID-19, Clements ended up writing and submitting a legal treatise on the virus, highlighting scientific articles, legal defenses from the Nuremburg Code, and arguments provided under the Federal Trade Commission prohibiting deceptive practices.
He offered to walk the Disciplinary Board through election evidence aggregation websites to show them where they could locate and view thousands of sworn affidavits and expert election reports. In fact, he was so painfully helpful to the tribunal that the Disciplinary Board started backtracking as he provided receipt after receipt on the rigged 2020 election. The board modified its request for 5,000 documents to a paltry 10 affidavits. To Clements, it seemed as if the board wanted to limit what he put on the record.
Meanwhile, the university was unable to rebut a single claim Clements made in the medical-legal treatise he delivered to combat what looked to be an inevitable firing; Clements published the entire termination hearing online.
Gone, But Not Forgotten
After being tied up for months with discovery production, Clements eventually prevailed against his first three accusers. He maintained his law license while the Disciplinary Board issued an advisory opinion that fell well short of exonerating him.
Later, he reflected on his initial good fortune concerning why he wasn’t sanctioned.
“The answer is simple,” he said. “They knew I was about to be fired from the university. And the day after my termination hearing, I was.”
But instead of going away, Clements went on the warpath.
With the steadfast support of his wife, Erin — a formidable licensed engineer and data analyst — he secured approval to perform a commissioned forensic audit of Otero County, New Mexico, and partial audits in seven other counties statewide concerning the results of the 2020 presidential election.
The audit team they selected was akin to something Clements would have pulled together when he was a prosecutor taking on a drug trafficking organization: Nation-state vulnerability experts, master statisticians, and IT professionals analyzed everything they could get their hands on. They ended up producing a report so devastating in its scope that Otero was the first county nationwide to vote to get rid of Dominion Voting Systems and remove Mark Zuckerberg-funded ballot drop boxes. It also voted to sue Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver for illegally certifying a fraudulent system.
The Clementses’ expert team believed they confirmed that Dominion illegally wiped the entire 2020 election file from the county’s Election Management System – which made it an active crime scene.
While the audit was being performed, the U.S. Congress issued a cease-and-desist order against its prime contractort. The order, signed by Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland), claimed the auditors were engaging in voter intimidation, and included subpoenas demanding that all communications be turned over to the Subcommittee on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties.
With Congress intervening, the Otero Commission fell under pressure from every direction to distance itself from the Clementses. And of course, the media and social media played their roles: a political operative uploaded a TikTok video fabricating an encounter with “intimidating” canvassers that never happened. The Daily Beast published the fabricated account, all too happy to participate in a national smear campaign.
And then “it got worse,” Clements said. “Operatives schemed with a two-faced Otero County attorney who worked behind the scenes to shut down the audit and discredit the team.”
A Pivotal Meeting
One such effort involved the county attorney drafting a public censure, which would rebuke Clements’s canvassing team. The commission would read the censure aloud and vote on it, with propaganda outlets standing by to publish a false narrative that the auditors were violating voters’ civil rights.
When the Clementses learned of the scheme, they drove to Alamogordo, New Mexico from their home in Las Cruces to attend the Otero County meeting. There, they exposed the source of the fabricated encounter and played voicemail message after voicemail message of leftist political operatives leaving death threats for Clements and his wife.
“As each voicemail was played, you could see [the county attorney] shrinking in size, looking more and more resigned that their scheme was being exposed in real time,” Clements said. [Watch the whole encounter at “Otero County Commission Meeting March 10, 2022.” [Fast-forward to the 2:30:00 mark for this part.]
After the rebuttal, the attorney still half-heartedly pushed for a censure, but to no avail. The commission voted to rescind it. Regardless, the Clementses’ efforts to rid the county of Dominion were short-lived: Clements later met with County Sheriff David Black and District Attorney Scot Key. “I handed them probable cause on a silver platter to seize the tabulators that were wiped by Dominion,” he recalled. “I remember them looking at me like I had lost my mind, like, ‘What do you expect us to do, go to war with the federal government?”
With most of the Otero County commissioners still holding the line to get rid of Dominion Systems voting machines, Mark Zuckerberg-funded ballot drop boxes, and sue New Mexico Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver, a radical leftist network aided by Oliver went to work to undo the victory.
“First, Oliver petitioned the New Mexico Supreme Court for a Writ of Mandamus,” Clements explained. “Within 24 hours, the Court declared that the Otero County commission had no choice but to certify what they believed to be a fraudulent election. The court also referred the commissioners to a George Soros-funded attorney general to prosecute them if they did not provide a rubber stamp of approval.”
As a result, one county commissioner changed his vote, fearful of being arrested; the other two held strong.
So three individuals in New Mexico, supported by a coalition ranging from a D.C.-based NGO called Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics to the NAACP and the watchdog group Common Cause, along with several New Mexico-based law firms, filed a lawsuit in left-leaning Santa Fe County to remove Otero Commissioner Couy Griffin from office. Griffin had been deemed to be “an insurrectionist” for praying and reciting the Pledge of Allegiance outside the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. on January 6, 2021.
While federal prosecutors declined to charge Griffin with anything tantamount to insurrection, an out-of-county civil lawsuit was used as pretext to remove him – and then bar him from holding office for the rest of his life.
“Why?” asked Clements. “Because for a heartbeat, the election cartel feared that other commissioners would discover they had the power to say no to corruption.”
Justice Denied
When the dust settled, the majority vote to make the needed changes in Otero County and sue the Secretary of State had vanished.
“Sheriff Black, who holds himself out as a constitutional sheriff, stood by while Griffin was physically escorted from his commissioners’ office. Sickening.” said Clements. “He is the most courageous commissioner in the country. He gave the effort everything he had.”
Undeterred, Clements proceeded to travel to 47 states over the next three years — holding hundreds of evidence seminars, providing legal briefs, and equipping citizens to become experts in their own right to stand up against the maladministration of local elections.
Nebraska election activists Brad and Connie Reinke shared some insights into Clements’s mentality during that time. “He drove a 17-hour trip through the night to get to a meeting in our county of 6,000 after his flight was canceled,” said Connie. “And wouldn’t accept payment for his services.”
Brad added, “To make matters more complicated, his flight home was cancelled due to bad weather, and he had to be at a county meeting the next evening for a crucial vote. I got to be a part of his adventure when he agreed to let me drive him back through the night. It was surreal to have this guy I’ve read about crashing in the back of my minivan on sofa cushions.”
Spiritual Warfare
Two more Disciplinary Board investigations seeking to disbar Clements followed in late 2022. One complaint was lodged by apolitical operative who ran for office on the Democrat ticket in one of the counties the Clementses audited, claiming he had slandered her. Clements ultimately prevailed — but not without the investigator writing an advisory opinion that his actions were “suitable for the FBI.” That advisory opinion was leaked to the press and became a dog whistle for others to file complaints.
So a fifth investigation came courtesy of a woman Clements learned was corresponding directly with Disciplinary Board investigators weeks before she filed her complaint. In his Response to the Disciplinary Board, Clements proved that she had made the following statements:
- “I know it’s a holiday weekend but I wanted to send you what I have when I find it….”
- “You might want to get this info over to Jane Gagne ASAP….”
- “You might want to read this thread…. Those two are mentally unstable. But I know you can only deal with complaints about David sadly not (his wife).”
Instead of dismissing the complaint based on its clear conflict of interests, the Disciplinary Board subjected Clements to another preliminary investigation. Clements provided the Board with screenshots of a website his accuser operated, which contained occult tarot card readings about his and his wife’s deaths. Two of his accuser’s ominous warnings were submitted to the Disciplinary Board:
- “It’s interesting she is your present card. Consider what your future card reveals. The Empress just might mean it will be a woman who will be responsible for your downward spiral.”
- “In the future you will be made to look like a fool, because you are a fool. You will probably even take an insanity plea at some point.”
I asked Clements if he truly felt his license was in jeopardy, given how ridiculous the complaint was. “Every complaint is different,” he said. “I think after I provided the Board with the occult screenshots, they knew they had to abandon ship. The worst part was that I never received a formal ruling on the complaint. For years, I’d have to tell clients that I was still under investigation. That’s how they got their pound of flesh.”
Pressing On
Clements kept busy doing the work of a lawyer, but stayed tight-lipped, knowing his public profile could be used against his clients.
“I try to be a hard target,” he said. “Pick my spots. Get in. Get out.” For example, prosecutors pursued nation-state vulnerability expert Jeff Lenberg in Michigan after he exposed election machines shifting thousands of votes from Donald Trump to Joe Biden in Antrim County. In Georgia, Lenberg — based on Clements’s expert opinion — believed he showed that Dominion machines were remotely accessed during an election. As corrupt law enforcement started targeting the investigators, Clements took Lenberg on as a client.
“I would have owed hundreds of thousands of dollars to a law firm to represent me,” Lenberg said. “[Clements] wouldn’t take a penny. “He defended me in Curling v. Raffensperger — the case where CISA had to admit the tabulators had massive vulnerabilities. During my deposition, we sparred with over a dozen lawyers on the other side for eight hours, with David making objection after objection. Efforts were made to indict me in Fani Willis’ RICO prosecution of President Trump. In the Michigan prosecution, David met directly with the special prosecutor and two other attorneys in their office. He doesn’t avoid conflict. So far, the efforts to indict me have failed.”
Then there is the high-profile J6 prisoner, Jake Lang, a 29-year-old from upstate New York who spent nearly four years behind bars awaiting trial.
“I have worked with dozens of attorneys. David is in a class of his own,” he said. “I was a month out from trial, and he agreed to be my attorney. He refused multiple attempts to compensate him. From late-night calls to visiting me in prison, he’s been there for me.
“His documentary showed the real story about J6ers and elections. As the country learned what was really happening, the discussion of getting pardons became a real possibility. Trump won and I was pardoned. David waited outside the gulag in the freezing cold for two days so he could give me a hug.”
Amid all the distractions, Clements managed to write and direct an explosive documentary about the January 6 protest against the 2020 election results and how J6 “rioters” were targeted by the Biden administration called Let My People Go. But even that was not free from lawfare. The documentary was hacked during its release and cancelled by its credit card processing and DVD packaging companies. Just after the launch, Clements was targeted by the IRS.
The film’s cinematographer and editor, Kent Esmeier, had a front-row seat for all of that action. “You’ll notice the film is uncredited with exception of the J6 prisoners,” he pointed out. “David did not want the artists to be targeted, even if that meant no one knew we made the film. [We spent] many early mornings, late nights, going back and forth, editing. “He’s fueled by the Holy Spirit and a never-ending cup of coffee. I’m glad to call him my friend.”
Starting a Ministry
I asked Clements how he keeps his perspective, not letting the lawfare get to him. “People like Jake [Lang],” he responded. “No matter how bad things are, someone is going through something worse. Focusing on the J6 prisoners has helped me not do the pity party thing.”
In 2021, Clements started a ministry called “The Prisoners Record,” which served the needs of J6 prisoners. Tim Rivers, creator of the book The American Gulag Chronicles offered his thoughts on what the ministry has meant. “Over the four years of the Biden administration’s pursuit of January 6 protestors, The Prisoners Record’s nightly prayer vigils have continued without a missing a single day,” he said. “Its discussion channels became a center point of resistance and communications. Other subchannels were formed from it. Some focused on commissary needs and letter writing … others on calls to action. But in hindsight, they all sprang organically from The Prisoner’s Record. They raised over $2 million that went directly to prisoners.” As with the rest of his efforts, Clements refused to allow any of the administrators to take a salary.
While his friends and colleagues are quick to offer praise, a quick internet search offers countless negative articles about Clements, mostly related to his election advocacy. I asked him if he knew how many.
“I used Google alerts,” he said. “I stopped counting after about a 1,000 hit pieces. I’m not saying these were unique stories. You’d see weird stuff, like a Washington Post article about me being reprinted word-for-word in a Malaysian newspaper. Or a local story from my hometown in New Mexico showing up in a Clemson, South Carolina, student newspaper. So, the same story could be circulating with 50 different publishers. It wasn’t organic.”
A Coordinated Effort?
Clements’s suspicions have all but been confirmed. According to a fact sheet which has since been taken offline, in 2023, USAID funded training and support for 6,200 journalists, assisted 707 non-state news outlets, and supported 279 media-sector civil society organizations. Former Administrator Samantha Power admitted the agency’s role in influencing “strategically important elections” by using the “Democratic Elections Fund.” USAID directed nearly $500 million into the secretive, U.S. government-funded NGO Internews Network, which collaborated with 4,291 media outlets, had produced 4,799 hours of broadcasts in a single year — reaching up to 778 million people — and trained over 9,000 journalists as of 2023.
The Internews Network also has supported social media censorship initiatives. Unsurprisingly, many of the news outlets that published hit pieces about Clements received USAID funding. “Now understand that the American Bar Association has been proven to receive millions from USAID,” said Clements. “It’s bad enough that the media has been bought off, but organizations that regulate my profession are also on the take.”
I asked Clements to put aside the latest investigation for two last questions. What has been the key to survival, and what’s next? He responded:
“God’s daily provision. His goodness. He has saved our country. This latest investigation is nothing more than an enemy drawing its last dying breath — desperately thrashing about, too stupid to know it’s already defeated.
“We have won. Trump is in. Most J6 prisoners have been pardoned and released. DOGE is kicking butt. And Trump just declared to governors everywhere that we are getting rid of the rigged machines. I’ll get through this, and once Tina Peters is set free, I’ll take a giant victory lap.
“As for what’s next… my cabin burned down in one of those mysterious fires last summer. My family needs to start picking up the pieces to rebuild. We’ll start there.”
