Dan McLaughlin of National Review Online writes about the latest attempt to tar U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ reputation.
Stephanie Kirchgaessner of the Guardian wants her readers to think she has unearthed a real scandal:
“Several lawyers who have had business before the supreme court . . . paid money to a top aide to Justice Clarence Thomas, according to the aide’s Venmo transactions. The payments appear to have been made in connection to Thomas’s 2019 Christmas party.” …
… A real Sherlock Holmes case, this one. Maybe they were for a Christmas party? Who were these lawyers? …
… A simple Google search of the bios of the named lawyers would confirm that all of them clerked for Thomas — a fact that ought to be front and center in any honest effort to tell this story, yet they’re headlined as “Lawyers with supreme court business,” and a casual reader scanning it might not immediately pick up that this is simply a list of his former clerks. An email promoting the story headlined it with “Guardian Exclusive: Clarence Thomas Ethics Investigation Finds Suspect Payments.” The notion that it’s improper for a Supreme Court justice to socialize with his former clerks is preposterous, notwithstanding the fact that most Supreme Court arguments in today’s world are made by attorneys who previously clerked for the Court — often for the currently sitting justices. Lawyers typically treat the judges they clerked for as mentors, with many remaining in close contact for years. Judges at any level rarely recuse themselves simply because the lawyers in a case are their former clerks.
If you read further down in the article, the quoted “ethics experts” at least seem to grasp that this is a story about a party with Thomas’s former clerks. However, one of them tries to invent a distinction in which it’s appropriate to charge lawyers to pay for the cost of their own attendance at a party only if they are junior lawyers not making the big money yet, which is a weird idea with no basis in any ethics rules. …
