I haven’t tried this plugin myself, but this plugin might help:
Of note it can do custom regex cleanup when pasting, e.g. one of the examples is converting google docs inline css styles to semantic formatting:
- Convert Google Docs span styles to semantic elements
- Pattern:
<span style="font-weight:\s*bold[^"]*">(.*?)</span> - Replacement:
<strong>$1</strong> - Description: Converts Google Docs styled spans to proper HTML elements
If that regex pattern alone doesn’t fix it the ** above/below the pasted text, you might be able to add some regex in the post processing stage (Markdown Regex Replacements) to remove ** if it’s on its own line with no other content