Judicial Activist Moved to Cover Up Payments to Ginni Thomas: Report

May 5, 2023

A conservative judicial activist arranged for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ wife Ginni to be paid tens of thousands of dollars in consulting fees while specifying that her name be kept off billing paperwork, The Washington Post reported Thursday evening. 

Citing reviewed documents, the Post reported that in January 2012, activist Leonard Leo “instructed GOP pollster Kellyanne Conway to build a nonprofit group he advises and use that money to pay Virginia ‘Ginni’ Thomas, the documents show. The same year, the nonprofit, the Judicial Education Project, filed a brief to the Supreme Court in a landmark voting rights case.”

That case was Shelby County v Holder, in which five conservative Justices, including Thomas, ruled that Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act—which determined which states had to obtain federal clearance before changing their voting rules and procedures—was unconstitutional as it imposed burdens laid down in the 1960s that they said are no longer responsive to the current conditions in the voting districts in question.

Further, Thomas issued a concurring opinion on the case, arguing that the pre-clearance requirement itself was unconstitutional.

The Supreme Court’s 5-4 ruling favored the Judicial Education Project and several other conservative organizations who had filed amicus briefs in the case, though Thomas did not directly cite the Judicial Eduction Project in his opinion. 

In a statement to the Post Leo said of the effort to keep Ginni Thomas’ name off the paperwork, “Knowing how disrespectful, malicious and gossipy people can be, I have always tried to protect the privacy of Justice Thomas and Ginni.”

Conway, whose polling company paid Ginni Thomas’  Liberty Consulting firm $80,000 between June 2011 and June 2012 and was reportedly expected to pay another $20,000 by the end of 2012, responded to the reporting Friday.

“[Thomas] had worked with the Heritage Foundation. She was part of the grassroots, is part of the grassroots. She had worked in the Reagan administration,” Conway told Fox News. “This is a serious person who for years had worked in public policy.”

This is the latest revelation of questionable ethics in a string of reporting about Supreme Court Justices. On Thursday, the non-profit news outlet ProPublica reported that billionaire Republican donor Harlan Crow paid tens of thousands of dollars for Justice Thomas’ grandnephew to attend at least two high-priced boarding schools, which Thomas never publicly disclosed. 

Earlier this week, the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing to discuss Supreme Court ethics rules. The U.S. Supreme Court is virtually the only court in the country without a formal code of ethics.

The hearing was initially scheduled by committee Chair Dick Durbin (D-IL) in reaction to initial reporting by ProPublica, that Thomas accepted six-figure luxury vacations from Crow. Since then, it’s also come to light that Justice  Neil Gorsuch had failed to disclose the name of a person who has since had business before the Supreme Court with whom he’d done a six-figure business transaction.

During Tuesday’s hearing, Durbin also pointed to a $100,000+ real estate deal involving three properties Crow purchased from Thomas, including a home belonging to the Justice’s mother, in which she continue to live.

Further, three days after Roberts “respectfully decline[d]” Durbin’s invitation to testify, reporting revealed that a whistleblower from his wife’s law firm had signed an affidavit in December that Jane Roberts has made millions in commissions from elite law firms, and Roberts did not recuse when at least one of those firms had at least one case before the Supreme Court.

Assertions by conservative defenders that liberal Justices—including  the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg, now-retired Stephen Breyer and serving Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson—have also breached ethics would only seem to underscore the need to hold the Supreme Court to a formal ethics standard.

Two legal ethics experts who spoke to the Post disagreed about whether the Leo-Ginni Thomas arrangement should have led Justice Thomas to recuse himself from the Shelby case.

Federal law requires Justices to recuse if their “impartiality might reasonably be questioned,” a standard that has not been well-defined regarding amicus brief filers, according to the experts.

However, both experts said the the arrangement shows that current ethics rules and disclosure requirements fail to protect public confidence in the independence of the courts.

Public opinion of the Supreme Court sank to historic lows this past year, with just 25% of those Americans  surveyed by Gallup saying they had confidence in the Supreme Court—down from 36% a year ago and down five percentage points from the previous low recorded in 2014.

PHOTO Source: Gage Skidmore

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