After being targeted by the Left in recent months, Associate Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas received some help from some friends. More than 100 of his former law clerks, including three circuit court judges, published a letter of support based on their experiences serving Thomas.
After reviewing his life story from poverty to the high court, the clerks wrote:
It is a story we’ve heard told from the man himself, for it is the story of our former boss. We are his former law clerks. We’ve had a front-row seat to the Justice at work. Justice Thomas is a man of greatest intellect, of greatest faith, and of greatest patriotism. We know because we lived it.
He is a man of unwavering principle. He welcomes the lone dissent. He is also a man of great humor and warmth and generosity. Walk the halls, and you’ll hear his laugh. Call, and he answers.
His grandfather’s sayings become our sayings. His chambers become our chambers—a place fueled by unstoppable curiosity and unreturned library books, all to get every case just right.
Those chambers become a way station for other Justices’ clerks too—a place where wisdom is freely shared by the man who made his way from Pin Point [Georgia] to the Supreme Court’s marbled halls.
The point of the exercise is to defend their former boss from the current and increasing attacks from the Left, not only against the justice but against the high court itself:
And yet, the stories most often told of Justice Thomas are not these.
The Justice is ever the subject of political headlines taking aim at his character, his judicial philosophy, his marriage, even his race.
They attempt to write over his actual story. Lately, the stories have questioned his integrity and his ethics for the friends he keeps….
These friends are not parties before him as a Justice of the Court … these stories are malicious, perpetuating the ugly assumption that the Justice cannot think for himself.
They are part of a larger attack on the Court and its legitimacy as an institution. The picture they paint of the Court and the man for whom we worked bears no resemblance to reality.
Those attacks began in earnest in April when the left-leaning investigative journal ProPublica (funded in part by the Ford and Carnegie Foundations) began publishing a series of articles reviewing what their bevy of 100+ investigative journalists had uncovered. The journal reported that Thomas had “accepted luxury trips virtually every year” from Texas billionaire Harlan Crow for the last two decades, and failed to report them properly.
It reported that one of Crow’s companies bought a house from Thomas, his mother, and the family of his deceased brother, and Thomas didn’t disclose the payments on his financial disclosure forms.
On August 10, ProPublica provided “the fullest accounting yet” of how the justice “secretly reaped the benefits from a network of wealthy and well-connected patrons that is far more extensive than previously understood.”
The reporting reflected the journal’s liberal slant by declaring that these donors “have been benefactors who share the ideology that drives his [Thomas’] jurisprudence.” In other words, as the article later concluded, it was, in the words of a Washington “ethics” lawyer, part of a “pay to play” scheme.
Having said that, however, the 4,000-plus word article raises questions that the friendly letter from former law clerks fails to address, such as regarding gifts Thomas received:
At least 38 destination vacations, including a previously unreported voyage on a yacht around the Bahamas; 26 private jet flights, plus an additional eight by helicopter; a dozen VIP passes to professional and college sporting events, typically perched in the skybox; two stays at luxury resorts in Florida and Jamaica; and one standing invitation to an uber-exclusive golf club overlooking the Atlantic coast.
The journal notes that its source is “an array of previously unavailable information,” and that “Thomas appears to have violated the law by failing to disclose” the flights, cruises, tickets to sporting events, and other gifts and gratuities.
ProPublica declares that “the total value of the undisclosed trips they’ve [Crow and other wealthy Republican donors] given Thomas since 1991 … is difficult to measure. But it’s likely in the millions.”
Just as the current headlines screaming about former President Trump’s legal difficulties are conveniently overshadowing the Hunter/Joe Biden family crime syndicate’s treason, the reason for this attack from another voice on the Left couldn’t be clearer: to draw attention away from the real crimes being committed by the real criminals currently running the country.
