Before law school, Crystal Clanton lived for a year with Clarence and Ginni Thomas. Whatever else is off about Clanton (and there is evidence of more), that connection makes it unethical for C. Thomas to have hired her as a Supreme Court clerk. That is a position of public trust and just the appearance of awarding the post on the basis of a personal relationship is ethically inappropriate. Reporting on the situation: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/clarence-thomas-hires-clerk-crystal-clanton#LawFedi#JudicialEthics
The more I think about this, the more I think that it shows how thoroughly unethical #ClarenceThomas is, precisely because hiring a clerk with whom he has a prior personal relationship is, for Thomas, a comparatively minor ethical wrong. But it shows how pervasively corrupt he is. His moral sense can never be trusted. This makes him unfit to be a judge let alone a Supreme Court Justice.#LawFedi#JudicialEthics
I love this. I think the best part about it is it puts the lie to the "gifts from friends" claim. I don't think anybody expects #ClarenceThomas to take the deal. I know I don't. I don't think #JohnOliver does. Everybody involved knows these "gifts" were bribes. These "friends" will go away as soon as the position does, and no more lavish presents. If it was just the paycheck and the RV, Oliver's deal is amazing. I'd take it in a heart beat. Thomas won't because he knows.
Ahead of a significant meeting next month for members of the federal judiciary, a watchdog group hoisted another red flag over U.S. Supreme Court Justice 🔸Clarence Thomas 🔸for what it says is a
👉 “30 year pattern” of cherry-picking his financial disclosures once he is raked in the press.
The renewed call for review of the long-embroiled justice comes exactly a month before the "Judicial Conference of the United States" convenes for its first of only two meetings this year.
The group of federal judges, which is led by the chief justice of the Supreme Court, acts as a policymaking body for federal courts across the land and can also make recommendations to Congress.
It is, as ProPublica has reported at length, a powerful but largely opaque body that polices itself.
On Wednesday, the Campaign Legal Center raised the alarm again, this time in a letter to Lee Ann Bennett, the conference’s acting secretary, urging the group to weigh findings of a troubling pattern that has gone on since 1996.
Using a flowchart to clarify, the watchdog group contends that each time Thomas complied with financial disclosure rules and then received negative media attention, he responded in kind.
When he was first asked to disclose his spouse’s employer between 1987 and 1996 and media reporting exploded on the controversy surrounding his spouse’s employment with the Republican Majority Leader at the time and her role investigating a sitting president, Thomas stopped formally reporting his spouse’s employment until the media caught on in 2011.
When he first complied with disclosing his travel expenses from a friend in 1997, and then media reporting emerged a year later that he traveled on a private jet and had expensed a “wealthy real estate magnate,” the justice spent the next 24 years omitting any disclosures on travel expenses from his friends until reports surfaced in 2023.
The same thing happened in 2002 when he initially disclosed tuition he had gifted to a grandnephew.
Two years later, he was outed in the press about the tuition gift, and by 2009, Thomas again stopped disclosing tuition gifts entirely.
In 2011, Thomas initially complied with a disclosure for assets he had sold off, including those assets sold without capital gains.
That same year, reporting emerged on the role he played in having Harlan Crow purchase real estate in Georgia from a third party.
That too appears to have prompted the justice not to fully disclose those details for at least three years until the press unearthed the omission, the CLC contends.
This all goes toward proving Thomas knowingly and willfully violating the Ethics in Government Act, the center argues. Extensive details about the omissions can be found in the CLC’s 161-page letter
Excellent recap of the #MAGA judge's consistent disclosure failures over several decades. Looks like a clear pattern.
Disclosure is just one thing. If you don't declare something in your income tax declarations, that often leads to #TaxFraud.
I hope someone in the #IRS and the #DoJ's #TaxDivision is looking at these (partially) new findings closely. They seem to be showing intent if fraud were involved.
"Last Week Tonight" host John Oliver has offered to pay Clarence Thomas $1M a year and give him a top-of-the-line motorhome to "get the f*** off the Supreme Court." Deadline has more details on the offer, which expires on March 19.
VIDEO: ‘Last Week Tonight's’ John Oliver offers to give Clarence Thomas a $2.4 million dollar motorcoach and $1 million a year for the rest of his life to “Get The F*ck off the Supreme Court”
ProPublica team wins 2024 Selden Ring Award for ‘Friends of the Court’
...
The reporters ultimately exposed the most serious ethical scandal in the modern history of the U.S. Supreme Court, revealing lavish travel and financial support that wealthy businessmen provided to the court’s current longest-serving justice.