The Genius of Clarence and Ginni Thomas

[whag]

Must be a 4D chess thing….

Surprise Surprise: The Karen Who said 'I Hate Black People' Just Got Hired By Clarence Thomas

[KingsGambit]

This generally falls under the "not sure why I should care about this" umbrella, but the whole "living with them" thing is quite weird.

[NorrinRadd]

I read the article. I followed some links.

I have, predictably, no problem with the hiring.

I don't know why the hell anyone thinks her PRIVATE text messages from years ago are anyone's business.

I don't know why anyone would give two craps about what those tools at "The Root" think about anything.

[whag]

I read the article. I followed some links.

I have, predictably, no problem with the hiring.

I don't know why the hell anyone thinks her PRIVATE text messages from years ago are anyone's business.

I don't know why anyone would give two craps about what those tools at "The Root" think about anything.

If you’d read the article, you’d know Kirk fired her. He thought those texts expressed her views.

[Hypatia_Alexandria]

If you’d read the article, you’d know Kirk fired her. He thought those texts expressed her views.

An interesting article in The New Yorker appeared on Thursday dealing with this. N.B. The opening lines of the following article are not included as they contain the language used in the texts

The group Turning Point USA sounds quite delightfulBleak House which is a brilliant satirical denunciation of judicial corruption as well as the comment at the end suggesting the furore if the individuals involved were flipped!

https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily...mass-new-clerk

In the past several years, as Clanton has risen through the ranks of conservative legal circles, the story of her alleged racist outburst has been curiously transformed into a tale of victimhood. The new narrative is that Clanton was somehow framed by an unnamed enemy who—for motives that remain unclear—fabricated the racist texts to defame her.

This new account has been greeted with suspicion by many. If the revised story is a lie, then it threatens to implicate not just Justice Thomas, who has endorsed it, but several lower-court federal judges and the leader of a major political group aligned with former President Donald Trump. Indeed, the whole affair may prove one of the most shopworn axioms of political reporting—that the coverup is worse than the crime.


When the vile texts were sent, Clanton was the second-in-command and field director of the hard-right youth group Turning Point USA. The organization, a nonprofit advocacy group closely allied with Donald Trump’s Presidential aspirations in 2024, is well known for poisonous rhetoric: its leader, Charlie Kirk, has recently denigrated Martin Luther King, Jr., as “awful,” questioned whether Black pilots are capable of flying planes, and argued that televised public executions, perhaps by guillotine, should be held in America, with young people watching. Yet, even within Turning Point, colleagues were so shocked by the bluntness of Clanton’s alleged texts that they preserved screenshots of the messages, which were shared in 2017 with The New Yorker. At the time, multiple Turning Point employees told me that Clanton was the author of the messages.

In 2017, Clanton told me, via e-mail, that she didn’t recall sending the texts, and that they seemed out of character. But when she was asked directly if she denied sending them she declined to answer. The screenshots of the messages bore her cell-phone number. Another former Turning Point employee, John Ryan O’Rourke, who was the recipient of the texts, said at the time that he preferred not to discuss them. Several other Turning Point colleagues had also seen and circulated the screenshots. And there was more evidence. In addition to the racist comments, the screenshots show Clanton asking, “Can I come to Starbucks in 5?”; she showed up at one, on cue, a few minutes later. (In 2018, the online platform Mediaite revealed another offensive statement by Clanton, sent on Snapchat. The post featured a photograph of a man who appeared to be Arab, accompanied by a caption that she had added: “Just thinking about ways to do another 9/11.”)

In 2017, Clanton told me that she had resigned from Turning Point. Kirk, her boss at the time, made her departure sound less voluntary. In an e-mail, he told me that, after he learned of the texts, “Turning Point assessed the situation and took decisive action within 72 hours.” Four years later, a spokesman for Turning Point, Andrew Kolvet, confirmed the same set of facts to Ruth Marcus, a columnist for the Washington Post, telling her that Clanton was “terminated from Turning Point after the discovery of problematic texts.”

The story would likely be long forgotten, were it not for an extremely strange plot twist. After the texting scandal, Ginni ThomasmyPost opinion writer, posted a column asking of Pryor, “Why is a prominent federal judge hiring a law clerk who said she hates Black people?” Democrats on Capitol Hill filed an ethics complaint with the Eleventh Circuit, complaining that Maze and Pryor had hired “an individual with a history of nakedly racist and hateful conduct.” They warned that placing such a person in “close proximity to judicial decision-making threatens to seriously undermine the public’s faith” in the federal courts. And they argued that no member of any minority would “trust that they will receive equal justice before these judges.”

The federal judiciary’s self-policing process is abstruse enough to delight fans of “Bleak House.” The complaint was transferred to the Second Circuit, in New York, where Chief Judge Debra Ann Livingston, an appointee of George W. Bush, began an inquiry. The confidential process took place behind closed doors, but Bill Rankin, a reporter for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, obtained letters that Justice Thomas and Judge Pryor sent to the Second Circuit in support of Clanton. Justice Thomas wrote that his wife had “informed me of the horrible way” Clanton “had been treated at Turning Point and asked that she be allowed to live with us.” The implication was that Clanton had been victimized at Turning Point.

Pryor added more detail. He put forward a novel defense of Clanton, which he attributed to conversations he’d had with Justice Thomas, along with a previously unmentioned set of facts provided by Charlie Kirk. According to this new account, Clanton was actually the victim of an unidentified former employee, who, for unknown reasons, had framed her as the author of the racist texts. It was not explained why this outlandishly devious plot hadn’t been exposed earlier—not at the time of her resignation, nor when Clanton was interviewed by The New Yorker, nor during the subsequent four years, when Turning Point’s spokesman consistently confirmed that Clanton had been fired for sending the texts.

According to Pryor’s letter, Clanton had been unable to deny the allegations about the racist texts earlier because she had been bound by a nondisclosure agreement, the existence of which she evidently had failed to mention to reporters at the time. If there was an N.D.A., Clanton also didn’t mention it to a lawyer to whom she referred my questions in 2017. The lawyer, Robert Grabemann, told me that he hadn’t prepared an N.D.A. for her and wasn’t aware that one existed. Stephen Gillers, a law professor at N.Y.U. who is considered a leading authority on questions of judicial ethics, said the claim that an N.D.A. prevented Clanton from telling the truth earlier “is simply not credible,” adding, “I’ve seen my share of N.D.A.s, and I can’t imagine one that would forbid a person to deny making racist statements. I don’t know how one might even word such an N.D.A. To me, this claim is preposterous and strong evidence that information needed for public understanding of these events has been hidden.”

In Pryor’s letter, he said Justice Thomas had assured him that Clanton “was a victim of a pernicious attempt to portray her as a racist.” Kirk, meanwhile, had told Pryor “the media has alleged that Crystal said and did things that are simply untrue.” Instead, Kirk claimed, the real culprit was a former employee who had “created fake text messages to be used against other employees,” in order to make it seem as though they had engaged in misconduct. The real culprit’s name was not identified.

Clanton did not respond to a request for comment. When I reached Kirk to ask him to explain his volte-face on Clanton’s responsibility for the texts, he referred me to his spokesman, who said that he had no comment on the veracity of the new version of the facts, even though it contradicted the explanation that he had provided before. Moreover, when I checked this new account with former Turning Point employees, they hadn’t heard anything about faked texts, or were aware of any other employee having been held responsible for the elaborate ruse. And when Marcus, at the Washington Post, inquired about the new origin story for the texts, a former Turning Point staffer simply replied, “Not fake,” and declined to say more. In a column, Marcus, a graduate of Harvard Law School, deemed the revisionist narrative “not credible.”

Nonetheless, Judge Livingston seemed satisfied. Without obtaining the disputed texts or interviewing key witnesses, she dismissed the ethics complaint against Judge Pryor and Judge Maze. In her ruling, Livingston echoed the claim that the original news coverage was false, and that Clanton had always treated everyone with “kindness, respect and fairness.” She wrote that a Turning Point executive—clearly Kirk—had explained that a different employee “was fired after the organization learned that this person had created fake text messages to be used against coworkers, to make it appear they had engaged in misconduct, when they had not.” Livingston noted that Clanton was highly qualified, and that Pryor and Maze knew about the allegations against Clanton before offering her the coveted clerkships, and that both had determined the allegations of racist behavior by Clanton to be untrue. The “undisputed record,” Livingston concluded, shows that Pryor and Maze “performed all the due diligence that a responsible Judge would undertake.”

Critics howled. Congressman Hank Johnson, a Democrat from Georgia on the House Judiciary Committee, who helped initiate the ethics complaint, declared that “the 2nd Circuit’s decision does a disservice to everyone involved,” adding, “This cannot be the end of the matter.” (When I reached out to Livingston, a spokesman for the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts replied that misconduct proceedings are “confidential by statute. So Chief Judge Livingston cannot comment.”)

There was one final attempt to get to the bottom of the allegations. The Judicial Conduct and Disability Committee of the U.S. Judicial Conference asked a special committee to gather more evidence. The committee told the Second Circuit that it needed to go back and find out whether Clanton had, in fact, made the racist statements attributed to her, and exactly what Clanton had told Pryor and Maze about the matter. It pointed out that Clanton “has never publicly denied the allegations,” and noted that “there are numerous individuals with first-hand knowledge of the candidate’s alleged conduct.” At a minimum, it said, “the special committee should attempt to interview the candidate and the witnesses identified in the media reports we have cited.”

But that didn’t happen. Instead, Judge Pryor and Judge Maze invoked a legal rule to bar the Judicial Conference from reopening Livingston’s findings. Jeremy Fogel, the director of the Berkeley Judicial Institute and a retired federal judge, told me, in an e-mail, that those who support Justice Thomas’s outlook “likely will argue that this decision clearly is within his discretion as a justice, especially given the close working relationship and level of trust expected between justices and their law clerks.” His critics, however, “will see this as another example of his willingness to ignore ethical rules.” (Justice Thomas and Ginni Thomas declined to comment for this story, as did Judge Maze. Judge Pryor did not respond to a request for comment.)

Either way, with the help of some rather powerful patrons, and a weak judicial-ethics system, Crystal Clanton is on her way to clerk at the highest court in the land. Eric Segall, a law professor at the Georgia State University College of Law, who served in George H. W. Bush’s Justice Department, told me, “Can you imagine what would happen if a Black person who said ‘I hate all white people’ ended up clerking for Sotomayor? You’d never hear the end of it on Fox News. But there’s almost total silence about this.” ♦

[whag]

An interesting article in The New Yorker appeared on Thursday dealing with this. N.B. The opening lines of the following article are not included as they contain the language used in the texts

The group Turning Point USA sounds quite delightfulBleak House which is a brilliant satirical denunciation of judicial corruption as well as the comment at the end suggesting the furore if the individuals involved were flipped!

IMG_1619.jpeg

https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily...mass-new-clerk

In the past several years, as Clanton has risen through the ranks of conservative legal circles, the story of her alleged racist outburst has been curiously transformed into a tale of victimhood. The new narrative is that Clanton was somehow framed by an unnamed enemy who—for motives that remain unclear—fabricated the racist texts to defame her.

This new account has been greeted with suspicion by many. If the revised story is a lie, then it threatens to implicate not just Justice Thomas, who has endorsed it, but several lower-court federal judges and the leader of a major political group aligned with former President Donald Trump. Indeed, the whole affair may prove one of the most shopworn axioms of political reporting—that the coverup is worse than the crime.


When the vile texts were sent, Clanton was the second-in-command and field director of the hard-right youth group Turning Point USA. The organization, a nonprofit advocacy group closely allied with Donald Trump’s Presidential aspirations in 2024, is well known for poisonous rhetoric: its leader, Charlie Kirk, has recently denigrated Martin Luther King, Jr., as “awful,” questioned whether Black pilots are capable of flying planes, and argued that televised public executions, perhaps by guillotine, should be held in America, with young people watching. Yet, even within Turning Point, colleagues were so shocked by the bluntness of Clanton’s alleged texts that they preserved screenshots of the messages, which were shared in 2017 with The New Yorker. At the time, multiple Turning Point employees told me that Clanton was the author of the messages.

In 2017, Clanton told me, via e-mail, that she didn’t recall sending the texts, and that they seemed out of character. But when she was asked directly if she denied sending them she declined to answer. The screenshots of the messages bore her cell-phone number. Another former Turning Point employee, John Ryan O’Rourke, who was the recipient of the texts, said at the time that he preferred not to discuss them. Several other Turning Point colleagues had also seen and circulated the screenshots. And there was more evidence. In addition to the racist comments, the screenshots show Clanton asking, “Can I come to Starbucks in 5?”; she showed up at one, on cue, a few minutes later. (In 2018, the online platform Mediaite revealed another offensive statement by Clanton, sent on Snapchat. The post featured a photograph of a man who appeared to be Arab, accompanied by a caption that she had added: “Just thinking about ways to do another 9/11.”)

In 2017, Clanton told me that she had resigned from Turning Point. Kirk, her boss at the time, made her departure sound less voluntary. In an e-mail, he told me that, after he learned of the texts, “Turning Point assessed the situation and took decisive action within 72 hours.” Four years later, a spokesman for Turning Point, Andrew Kolvet, confirmed the same set of facts to Ruth Marcus, a columnist for the Washington Post, telling her that Clanton was “terminated from Turning Point after the discovery of problematic texts.”

The story would likely be long forgotten, were it not for an extremely strange plot twist. After the texting scandal, Ginni ThomasmyPost opinion writer, posted a column asking of Pryor, “Why is a prominent federal judge hiring a law clerk who said she hates Black people?” Democrats on Capitol Hill filed an ethics complaint with the Eleventh Circuit, complaining that Maze and Pryor had hired “an individual with a history of nakedly racist and hateful conduct.” They warned that placing such a person in “close proximity to judicial decision-making threatens to seriously undermine the public’s faith” in the federal courts. And they argued that no member of any minority would “trust that they will receive equal justice before these judges.”

The federal judiciary’s self-policing process is abstruse enough to delight fans of “Bleak House.” The complaint was transferred to the Second Circuit, in New York, where Chief Judge Debra Ann Livingston, an appointee of George W. Bush, began an inquiry. The confidential process took place behind closed doors, but Bill Rankin, a reporter for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, obtained letters that Justice Thomas and Judge Pryor sent to the Second Circuit in support of Clanton. Justice Thomas wrote that his wife had “informed me of the horrible way” Clanton “had been treated at Turning Point and asked that she be allowed to live with us.” The implication was that Clanton had been victimized at Turning Point.

Pryor added more detail. He put forward a novel defense of Clanton, which he attributed to conversations he’d had with Justice Thomas, along with a previously unmentioned set of facts provided by Charlie Kirk. According to this new account, Clanton was actually the victim of an unidentified former employee, who, for unknown reasons, had framed her as the author of the racist texts. It was not explained why this outlandishly devious plot hadn’t been exposed earlier—not at the time of her resignation, nor when Clanton was interviewed by The New Yorker, nor during the subsequent four years, when Turning Point’s spokesman consistently confirmed that Clanton had been fired for sending the texts.

According to Pryor’s letter, Clanton had been unable to deny the allegations about the racist texts earlier because she had been bound by a nondisclosure agreement, the existence of which she evidently had failed to mention to reporters at the time. If there was an N.D.A., Clanton also didn’t mention it to a lawyer to whom she referred my questions in 2017. The lawyer, Robert Grabemann, told me that he hadn’t prepared an N.D.A. for her and wasn’t aware that one existed. Stephen Gillers, a law professor at N.Y.U. who is considered a leading authority on questions of judicial ethics, said the claim that an N.D.A. prevented Clanton from telling the truth earlier “is simply not credible,” adding, “I’ve seen my share of N.D.A.s, and I can’t imagine one that would forbid a person to deny making racist statements. I don’t know how one might even word such an N.D.A. To me, this claim is preposterous and strong evidence that information needed for public understanding of these events has been hidden.”

In Pryor’s letter, he said Justice Thomas had assured him that Clanton “was a victim of a pernicious attempt to portray her as a racist.” Kirk, meanwhile, had told Pryor “the media has alleged that Crystal said and did things that are simply untrue.” Instead, Kirk claimed, the real culprit was a former employee who had “created fake text messages to be used against other employees,” in order to make it seem as though they had engaged in misconduct. The real culprit’s name was not identified.

Clanton did not respond to a request for comment. When I reached Kirk to ask him to explain his volte-face on Clanton’s responsibility for the texts, he referred me to his spokesman, who said that he had no comment on the veracity of the new version of the facts, even though it contradicted the explanation that he had provided before. Moreover, when I checked this new account with former Turning Point employees, they hadn’t heard anything about faked texts, or were aware of any other employee having been held responsible for the elaborate ruse. And when Marcus, at the Washington Post, inquired about the new origin story for the texts, a former Turning Point staffer simply replied, “Not fake,” and declined to say more. In a column, Marcus, a graduate of Harvard Law School, deemed the revisionist narrative “not credible.”

Nonetheless, Judge Livingston seemed satisfied. Without obtaining the disputed texts or interviewing key witnesses, she dismissed the ethics complaint against Judge Pryor and Judge Maze. In her ruling, Livingston echoed the claim that the original news coverage was false, and that Clanton had always treated everyone with “kindness, respect and fairness.” She wrote that a Turning Point executive—clearly Kirk—had explained that a different employee “was fired after the organization learned that this person had created fake text messages to be used against coworkers, to make it appear they had engaged in misconduct, when they had not.” Livingston noted that Clanton was highly qualified, and that Pryor and Maze knew about the allegations against Clanton before offering her the coveted clerkships, and that both had determined the allegations of racist behavior by Clanton to be untrue. The “undisputed record,” Livingston concluded, shows that Pryor and Maze “performed all the due diligence that a responsible Judge would undertake.”

Critics howled. Congressman Hank Johnson, a Democrat from Georgia on the House Judiciary Committee, who helped initiate the ethics complaint, declared that “the 2nd Circuit’s decision does a disservice to everyone involved,” adding, “This cannot be the end of the matter.” (When I reached out to Livingston, a spokesman for the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts replied that misconduct proceedings are “confidential by statute. So Chief Judge Livingston cannot comment.”)

There was one final attempt to get to the bottom of the allegations. The Judicial Conduct and Disability Committee of the U.S. Judicial Conference asked a special committee to gather more evidence. The committee told the Second Circuit that it needed to go back and find out whether Clanton had, in fact, made the racist statements attributed to her, and exactly what Clanton had told Pryor and Maze about the matter. It pointed out that Clanton “has never publicly denied the allegations,” and noted that “there are numerous individuals with first-hand knowledge of the candidate’s alleged conduct.” At a minimum, it said, “the special committee should attempt to interview the candidate and the witnesses identified in the media reports we have cited.”

But that didn’t happen. Instead, Judge Pryor and Judge Maze invoked a legal rule to bar the Judicial Conference from reopening Livingston’s findings. Jeremy Fogel, the director of the Berkeley Judicial Institute and a retired federal judge, told me, in an e-mail, that those who support Justice Thomas’s outlook “likely will argue that this decision clearly is within his discretion as a justice, especially given the close working relationship and level of trust expected between justices and their law clerks.” His critics, however, “will see this as another example of his willingness to ignore ethical rules.” (Justice Thomas and Ginni Thomas declined to comment for this story, as did Judge Maze. Judge Pryor did not respond to a request for comment.)

Either way, with the help of some rather powerful patrons, and a weak judicial-ethics system, Crystal Clanton is on her way to clerk at the highest court in the land. Eric Segall, a law professor at the Georgia State University College of Law, who served in George H. W. Bush’s Justice Department, told me, “Can you imagine what would happen if a Black person who said ‘I hate all white people’ ended up clerking for Sotomayor? You’d never hear the end of it on Fox News. But there’s almost total silence about this.” ♦

I get the feeling Ginny wouldn’t have rewarded her for saying “I HATE ALL WHITE PEOPLE.”