A government ethics watchdog is demanding that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas resign in the wake of numerous accounts of corruption and seeming right-wing conspiracies involving the justice unveiled by investigative reports in recent weeks.
In a letter sent to Thomas on Tuesday, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) wrote that the “truly shocking” reports that Thomas accepted and concealed hundreds of dollars’ worth of gifts and trips from conservative billionaire Harlan Crow — along with his refusal to recuse himself from key cases involving his wife — are posing major threats to American democracy.
“For the sake of the Court and for the sake of our democracy which depends on a judiciary that the public accepts as legitimate and free from corruption, we urge you to resign from office,” the letter says.
The organization published the letter in a post on its website simply titled: “Clarence Thomas must resign.”
“Your conduct has likely violated civil and criminal laws and has created the impression that access to and influence over Supreme Court justices is for sale,” CREW continued. “Moreover, it is contributing to a catastrophic decline in public confidence that threatens to undermine the entire federal judiciary. Resignation is the only course of action that remains to undo the damage you have done to the Court’s institutional legitimacy.
CREW President Noah Bookbinder emphasized the significance of the decision to call for Thomas to resign in a statement. “This is not something we do lightly,” said Bookbinder. “This is a place we never wanted to be.”
A mountain of revelations have come out about Thomas’s close relationship with Crow — and thus, his ties to the network of right-wing activists that Crow operates within, all hungry for access to one of the U.S.’s most influential legal officials.
This includes reports that Thomas accepted a trip valued at $500,000 to Indonesia on Crow’s superyacht, sold three properties for over $130,000 to Crow, and accepted tuition for his child’s boarding school potentially totalling over $100,000 — all without disclosing any of the gifts or transactions. Despite their decades-long relationship, however, Thomas refused to recuse himself from a 2005 Supreme Court case regarding an architecture firm founded by Crow’s father that the Crow family had a non-controlling stake in.
Thomas’s excuse for his failure to disclose the transactions, which experts have said is illegal, was that he was not aware of the law regarding disclosures and that he “was advised” that he didn’t have to disclose them.
CREW also points out Thomas’s “long-standing pattern of judicial misconduct” in the letter. In the past year, Thomas has come under fire for not recusing himself in Supreme Court cases related to the far right attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, despite his wife’s role in orchestrating the attack; last January, he was the only justice who dissented to halting Donald Trump’s attempt to stop the release of presidential documents related to the attack.
Thomas’s evidently close relationship with right-wing activists has given the wealthy and the far right tremendous favor in the High Court during his tenure, and Thomas has continually stood alone in writing decisions that, if they went his way, would give the wealthiest echelons of American society private and unfettered access to the Supreme Court and other high-level officials. Thomas has so cozied up to the right that Trump’s legal team openly spoke in emails about Thomas being a key legal ally in the Supreme Court in their fight to overturn the 2020 election.
CREW joins a number of other voices who have called for Thomas to be removed from his post. Shortly after the first bombshell ProPublica report was published last month, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) said that Thomas “must be impeached,” and that “This degree of corruption is shocking — almost cartoonish.”
Last year, as Thomas was facing scrutiny over his wife’s January 6 ties, a petition for the justice to be impeached reached over a million signatures.
Truthout Is Preparing to Meet Trump’s Agenda With Resistance at Every Turn
Dear Truthout Community,
If you feel rage, despondency, confusion and deep fear today, you are not alone. We’re feeling it too. We are heartsick. Facing down Trump’s fascist agenda, we are desperately worried about the most vulnerable people among us, including our loved ones and everyone in the Truthout community, and our minds are racing a million miles a minute to try to map out all that needs to be done.
We must give ourselves space to grieve and feel our fear, feel our rage, and keep in the forefront of our mind the stark truth that millions of real human lives are on the line. And simultaneously, we’ve got to get to work, take stock of our resources, and prepare to throw ourselves full force into the movement.
Journalism is a linchpin of that movement. Even as we are reeling, we’re summoning up all the energy we can to face down what’s coming, because we know that one of the sharpest weapons against fascism is publishing the truth.
There are many terrifying planks to the Trump agenda, and we plan to devote ourselves to reporting thoroughly on each one and, crucially, covering the movements resisting them. We also recognize that Trump is a dire threat to journalism itself, and that we must take this seriously from the outset.
After the election, the four of us sat down to have some hard but necessary conversations about Truthout under a Trump presidency. How would we defend our publication from an avalanche of far right lawsuits that seek to bankrupt us? How would we keep our reporters safe if they need to cover outbreaks of political violence, or if they are targeted by authorities? How will we urgently produce the practical analysis, tools and movement coverage that you need right now — breaking through our normal routines to meet a terrifying moment in ways that best serve you?
It will be a tough, scary four years to produce social justice-driven journalism. We need to deliver news, strategy, liberatory ideas, tools and movement-sparking solutions with a force that we never have had to before. And at the same time, we desperately need to protect our ability to do so.
We know this is such a painful moment and donations may understandably be the last thing on your mind. But we must ask for your support, which is needed in a new and urgent way.
We promise we will kick into an even higher gear to give you truthful news that cuts against the disinformation and vitriol and hate and violence. We promise to publish analyses that will serve the needs of the movements we all rely on to survive the next four years, and even build for the future. We promise to be responsive, to recognize you as members of our community with a vital stake and voice in this work.
Please dig deep if you can, but a donation of any amount will be a truly meaningful and tangible action in this cataclysmic historical moment.
We’re with you. Let’s do all we can to move forward together.
With love, rage, and solidarity,
Maya, Negin, Saima, and Ziggy