Clarke meets with Donald Trump in New York
This story was originally published on Nov. 28, 2016.
Milwaukee County Sheriff David A. Clarke Jr. — who traveled the country campaigning for Donald Trump — met Monday afternoon with the president-elect at Trump Tower about a possible job in the new administration.
Accompanied by his wife Julie, Clarke left the meeting around 4:15 p.m. (Central time), waved at supporters in the hotel lobby but took no questions from the media.
Clarke, dressed in a black suit, red tie and white Stetson for the interview, has been mentioned widely as a potential Trump appointee to head the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, though insiders say he might be open to a policy position in the White House on security matters. The sheriff runs as a Democrat but is a hard-right conservative.
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"The sheriff has nothing to say," Clarke spokeswoman Fran McLaughlin said Friday of his chat with Trump. But on Sunday, an unsigned post on the Facebook page for the Milwaukee County sheriff's office complained that a story on Clarke's interview wasn't getting more attention.
"Funny, Dan Bice's gossip column gets front page when it's about the sheriff," the post said. "The MJS buried this story in the middle of the paper. Meeting with the President-elect doesn't warrant front page placement?"
Earlier Monday, Trump met with Frances Townsend, who served as a homeland security adviser in the George W. Bush administration. On Tuesday, Trump is due to meet with U.S. Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Tex.), chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee.
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Clarke, who was first appointed sheriff in 2002 and has been elected four times since then, has made it clear that he will accept a job with the Republican administration if offered one.
"I don't expect anything — I don't have an entitlement mentality. I told Donald Trump I wanted to help him because I thought that this country needed his leadership," Clarke told conservative radio host Joe Pags earlier this month. "That being said, if the president asks you to serve, you step up to fulfill that duty. So if he feels that I can help him and he calls on me, sure, I'll accept it, but I'm not expecting anything."
In his upcoming memoir, Clarke has called for an overhaul of the nation's homeland security program, writing that American citizens suspected of being terrorists should be treated as "enemy combatants" who can be questioned without an attorney, arrested by authorities and held indefinitely.
Their cases would then be handled by military tribunals, not the traditional court system. One left-leaning constitutional law expert has called Clarke's views on this issue "extreme."
"We are at war. Homegrown radicalization has the enemy inside our borders," Clarke writes, according to an advanced readers copy of Clarke's 272-page memoir, which is set for release on March 7 . "Islamist radicalized Americans are not criminals; they are enemy combatants."
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Since the election, Clarke has adopted a new role on Trump's team, defending U.S. Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), Trump's pick for attorney general, against charges of racism. Clarke, who is black, has said the white AG nominee "doesn't have a racist bone in his body." The sheriff has even defended the use of the term "boy" when referring to a black staffer, saying he calls himself a "Milwaukee boy."
But the job of Homeland Security boss would be quite a promotion for the Milwaukee County lawman, who oversees a staff of 618 employees, including 271 deputy sheriffs. By comparison, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is some 400 times as large, with more than 240,000 jobs, ranging from aviation and border security to cyber security analyst and chemical facility inspector.
Also, FBI records show that Clarke's office has handled a declining number of violent crimes. In 2012, Milwaukee County deputies were involved in investigating 184 violent crimes. That number dropped to 25 in 2013 and just 20 a year later. Over that three-year span, Clarke's office handled no murder cases and five rapes.
If selected to a cabinet post, the combative Democratic sheriff would likely face a contentious confirmation battle in the U.S. Senate over his oversight of the County Jail, where four people have died since April. He could also come under scrutiny for some of his more incendiary remarks, including calls for a "second American revolution" over gun confiscations and his October tweet that it's "pitchforks and torches time" in America — remarks he repeats in his upcoming memoir.
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"This guy, who spends more time chasing media appearances than doing his job, has no business anywhere close to a job with responsibility for protecting national security," said Scot Ross, a frequent Clarke critic who oversees the liberal group One Wisconsin Now.
Clarke was last elected in 2014, defeating Milwaukee Police Lt. Chris Moews by 52% to 48% in the Democratic primary. He faced only token opposition in the general election.
When a sheriff leaves office midway through a term, the governor typically appoints a successor who would fill out the rest of the term and potentially run for election at the end of it, said Tom Evenson, a spokesman for Gov. Scott Walker.
That's how Clarke himself came to hold the job. Clarke isn't scheduled to face the voters again for two more years, making it unlikely the job would be left unfilled in the meantime.
When a sheriff's job opens up, Walker asks for applicants and then goes through a vetting process over a period of weeks, Evenson said.
Jason Stein of the Journal Sentinel staff contributed to this report.