Even Clarence Thomas’s Law Clerks Can’t Defend His Misconduct
After the most recent revelations, Thomas’s defenders have gone conspicuously silent. Organs like National Review and conservative legal apparatchik Ed Whelan, who loudly dismissed evidence of wrongdoing by Thomas, have had nothing to say about Thomas’s many billionaire patrons.
Now, finally, comes a defense (sort of): A total of 112 former Thomas law clerks have signed an open letter defending him against charges of impropriety. It is a revealing document.
By “defending,” I don’t mean detailing the charges against Thomas and explaining why they lack merit. Rather, their approach is simply to insist Thomas is a good person while pretending the exhaustive evidence of his unethical behavior does not exist at all.
In lieu of any engagement with the facts of Thomas’s misconduct, the letter is padded out with biographical detail, in the style of a book report written by a sixth grader. The authors explain that Thomas “descended from West African slaves, was “born to a young mother, not more than 20, in segregated Georgia.” We learn “His father left. And a fire took all he had and the shack where he lived,” and even receive details of major world events that took place during his life. (“Then came 1968. King was assassinated. Then Kennedy. It transformed him. He left behind hopes of the priesthood. He found Black Power. He wrote about revolution.”)
There is just one small passage in the letter that even acknowledges the evidence of misconduct:
Lately, the stories have questioned his integrity and his ethics for the friends he keeps. They bury the lede. These friends are not parties before him as a Justice of the Court. And these stories are malicious, perpetuating the ugly assumption that the Justice cannot think for himself.
So the main defense is that Thomas is allowed to accept millions of dollars’ worth of gifts as long as his patrons are not personally involved in Supreme Court litigation? (As far as we know, anyway — since Thomas refuses to disclose his gifts, the public is only aware of what the media has been able to figure out in the face of his secrecy.)
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