Special counsel demanded for Clarence Thomas’ ‘potential criminal violations’ mere days after the justice threw a wrench into Jack Smith’s Mar-a-Lago case

Law & Crime get serious

Senate Democrats want the Justice Department to launch a formal criminal investigation into Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

In a letter dated July 3, and released on Tuesday, Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse and Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden asked Attorney General Merrick Garland to appoint a special counsel over a series of financial ethics scandals that have dogged Thomas for years.

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. Then, in 2023, reports about Thomas’ failed gift disclosures cropped up again.

In their letter and attached exhibits, Whitehouse and Wyden document a series of “likely undisclosed gifts and income” dating back to 2003. But, the senators say, there may be far more to find.

The scale of the potential ethics violations by Justice Thomas, and the willful pattern of disregard for ethics laws, exceeds the conduct of other government officials investigated by the Department of Justice for similar violations,” the letter reads. “The breadth of the omissions uncovered to date, and the serious possibility of additional tax fraud and false statement violations by Justice Thomas and his associates, warrant the appointment of a Special Counsel to investigate this misconduct.”

The timing of the referral may upturn some eyebrows.

While Thomas’ current ethics scandals have drip-dripped into public view, enraging some people for well over a year, the special counsel request came just two days after Thomas’ scathing concurrence to the high court’s opinion granting Donald Trump presidential immunity. That concurrence quickly formed the basis for Trump’s lawyers to begin anew their efforts to kick special counsel Jack Smith off the Mar-a-Lago case. In turn, the judge overseeing the documents case all but immediately pumped the brakes on several pretrial proceedings.

A wide array of critics — including Democrats, nonpartisan ethics groups, law professors, and commentators — have expressed concerns about the gifts received by Thomas, as well as the justice’s concomitant aversion to transparency over such gifts. The scandals 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 Republican donor Harlan Crow.

Special counsel demanded for Clarence Thomas’ ‘potential criminal violations’ mere days after the justice threw a wrench into Jack Smith’s Mar-a-Lago case