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Clarence Thomas during a 2018 legal discussion (YouTube/Library of Congress).
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas will not be subject to a law enforcement investigation over alleged ethics violations, the federal agency responsible for promulgating judicial guidelines said this week.
In a Tuesday letter sent to Rep. Hank Johnson, a Georgia Democrat, the Judicial Conference of the United States nixed a request to refer Thomas to the U.S. Department of Justice over a widely publicized series of ethical lapses and multimillion dollar gift-giving scandals.
Since 2004, public reporting has documented that Thomas was the top recipient of gifts among his colleagues on the nation’s highest bench. For years thereafter, Thomas stopped disclosing such gifts. In 2011, Thomas’ practice of serially failing to disclose such gifts — along with his wife’s income — was reported on and prompted the justice to amend several years’ worth of disclosure reports.
A wide array of critics — including Democrats, nonpartisan ethics groups, law professors, and commentators — have long expressed concerns about the gifts received by Thomas, as well as his concomitant aversion to transparency over receiving those gifts.
The ethics scandals surrounding the conservative jurist were given life anew when an April 2023 exposé by nonprofit news outlet ProPublica revealed that Thomas and his wife had, for decades, taken numerous undisclosed trips around the world on a “superyacht” owned by Dallas billionaire and Republican Party donor Harlan Crow.
Johnson then sent three letters to the Judicial Conference referencing Thomas’ behavior.
The first was sent that same month. Then similar letters were sent by the ranking member on the House Judiciary subcommittee on courts, again in June and December 2024. The final letter was coauthored by Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, also a Democrat.
In July 2024, Whitehouse and Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden, another Democrat, skipped ahead — asking Attorney General Merrick Garland directly to intervene in the matter and launch a criminal investigation into Thomas over the gift-giving and nondisclosure scandals.
Each of those letters, with differing levels of urgency, asked for the federal judicial ethics body to consider its responsibility with regard to the ethics of one of the most senior members of the federal judiciary, and to otherwise provide information about its financial disclosure policy.
On Thursday, the Judicial Conference told Johnson and Whitehouse, in substantially similar letters, that it would be taking no action with regard to the requests about Thomas.
“Since those letters, the Committee on Financial Disclosure has proposed, and the Judicial Conference has approved, several changes to these reporting requirements — some in 2023 and some in 2024,” the letters read. “Justice Thomas has agreed to follow all of them.”
Judicial Conference Secretary Robert J. Conrad Jr. said “the Judicial Conference has been busy over the last few years” dealing with updates to financial disclosure issues for federal judges.
Conrad, a judge who also serves as the spokesperson and Director of the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, the central support organization for federal judges, went on to recite a laundry list of updates to ethics requirements and standards instituted since Thomas’ lapses became flashpoints of national attention.
The judge’s letter addresses Thomas directly in detail.
“As you know, the Judicial Conference does not superintend the Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States,” Conrad’s letter reads. “Nonetheless, the Justices have agreed to follow the reporting requirements applicable to other federal judges and to comply with guidance provided by the Judicial Conference about these requirements, including by filing an annual report with the Financial Disclosure Committee. Justice Thomas has filed amended financial disclosure statements that address several issues identified in your letter. In addition, he has agreed to follow the relevant guidance issued to other federal judges, which would include the guidance mentioned above. We have no reason to believe he has done anything less.”
Conrad then went one step further by offering an ancillary argument about the general remit of the Judicial Conference.
From the letter, at length [emphasis in original]:
The question, to be clear, is not whether the Ethics in Government Act applies to the Justices of the Court. It is whether the Judicial Conference’s referral authority applies to the Justices. There is reason to doubt that the Conference has any such authority. Because the Judicial Conference does not superintend the Supreme Court and because any effort to grant the Conference such authority would raise serious constitutional questions, one would expect Congress at a minimum to state any such directive clearly.
In other words, Conrad is suggesting the Judicial Conference does not even have the power to make the kind of law enforcement requests envisioned by Johnson and Whitehouse.
The letter concludes with something not entirely unlike a fait accompli.
Conrad says the July effort by Whitehouse and Wyden to get Garland on board with such an investigation by appointing a special counsel rendered the request “largely … moot” and that “there is no longer any cognizable basis for acting on your referral request.”
