Background: This artist sketch depicts the scene in the Supreme Court as the justices — Justice Clarence Thomas fourth from left — hear arguments about the Colorado Supreme Court’s ruling that former President Donald Trump should be removed from the primary ballot on Feb. 8, 2024 (Dana Verkouteren via AP). Inset: Justice Clarence Thomas during the Presidential Inauguration ceremony for Donald Trump as the 45th President of the United States held at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, DC on January 20, 2017. (Photo by Anthony Behar. Sipa via AP)
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.
Just last month, a nonprofit group known as the Campaign Legal Center seized on a detail it found in a public report from the Judicial Conference’s committee on financial disclosures. The detail was a sentence stating the conference was conducting an “ongoing review of public written allegations of errors or omissions in a filer’s financial disclosure reports.”
That “filer,” the CLC believes, is Thomas.
This is so, the group argues, because in the months preceding the conference’s disclosure, increasingly undeniable questions over Thomas’ alleged corruption had reached a fever pitch.
Investigative reporting into Thomas’ decades-old friendships with billionaire donors and conservative activists triggered a national wave of focused interest from lawmakers. That included pointed letters from those on the Senate and House Judiciary Committees to the conference in April and August. The letters asked to get Attorney General Merrick Garland involved for review of potential ethics violations by Thomas.
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 here.
A spokesperson for the high court did not immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday.
