The War Against David Clements, Part 2
Photo Credit: Dan Fleuette, author of Rebels, Rogues, and Outlaws. Find his work at x.com/doitfluet and doitfluet.com.
Yesterday, The Stream brought you the first installment of a four-part series detailing the lawfare against election-integrity expert David Clements, a former New Mexico State University law professor. The person responsible for getting him fired from that job during the COVID pandemic has now filed another complaint seeking to have him disbarred. Journalist Rachel Alexander continues the story.
David Clements has been through fire after fire since choosing to speak out about the fraudulent election results of 2020.
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 law school 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.
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?”
Check back in to The Stream tomorrow for Part 3.
Rachel Alexander is the editor and founder of Intellectual Conservative. Named one of the top 78 news influencers on X by Pew Research, she is a reporter for Arizona Sun Times, a regular contributor to Townhall, WND, and more. She frequently appears on TV and news radio as a conservative commentator.