After months of repeated attacks against Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, over alleged financial wrongdoings, the court’s longest-serving justice finally disclosed his finances this week, debunking many of the claims against him.
As Breitbart reports, the official guidance for financial disclosures from federal judges was changed back in March, with Thomas’ revelations this week following those new guidelines. The senior justice disclosed additional details concerning hospitality and gifts he had received in previous years.
Despite the Left immediately declaring that these disclosures confirmed wrongdoing, further analysis reveals that Thomas’ various gifts all remained within the boundaries of the new law. In one example, Texas billionaire Harlan Crow, with whom Thomas has frequently traveled on vacation, paid for the tuition of Thomas’ great-nephew. Although the Left pointed to this as an alleged example of cronyism, the new rules dictate that a disclosure would only have to be made if such a gift had been made for a direct family member such as a child.
Furthermore, Crow has never had any business with the Supreme Court. While wrongdoing might have been suggested if Crow was involved in a case on which Thomas had not recused himself, there is no record of Crow being involved in any cases before the Court.
In a statement following the disclosure, Thomas’ lawyer Elliot Berke said that “much of the noise to the contrary is based on malicious and sloppy reporting and attacks from partisans who disagree with his jurisprudence and want to drive him and others off the Court.”
By contrast, it has since been revealed that financial corruption appeared to be more prominent among the Court’s left-wing justices. Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor, for example, repeatedly refused to recuse herself from cases involving the publisher Penguin Random House, even though the company had paid her $3 million to publish her books. The late Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who was succeeded on the Court by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, had donated $1 million to multiple organizations whose identities have been kept private, even to this day.