The Washington Post
now reporting that
Ginni Thomas,
the conservative
activist and firebrand
and wife of Justice Clarence Thomas,
received tens of thousands of dollars
in hidden payments for consulting work.
The Post reviewed documents
that showed that the payments to Ginni
Thomas were set up by conservative
judicial activist Leonard Leo.
Leonard Leo may not be a household name.
Where you are,
but Leonard Leo
helped pick
every single one of Donald Trump's
Supreme Court
justice appointments,
as well as dozens of conservative judges
with lifetime
appointments to the federal bench.
During a Senate
Judiciary hearing this week on ethics
in the Supreme Court,
or lack thereof,
Democratic Senator
Sheldon Whitehouse described Leonard Leo
this way.
This guy doesn't have business
before the court.
His business is the court.
According to the Washington Post
in January 2012.
Leonard Leo told conservative pollster
Kellyanne Conway
to bill
the Judicial Education Project nonprofit.
Leo then instructed Conway
to give Ginni Thomas another $25,000
and the documents show, he emphasized,
there should be no mention
of Ginni Thomas in any paperwork.
Never good
when someone tells you
not to put something in writing
and then puts it in writing.
Leo told the Post, quote,
It is no secret that Ginni Thomas
has a long history of working on issues
within the conservative movement.
The work she did here
did not involve anything
connected with
either the court's business
or with other legal issues, unquote.
When asked
why he wanted to keep Ginni
Thomas's name off the paperwork,
Leonard Leo told the Post, quote,
Knowing how
disrespectful, malicious and gossipy
people can be,
I have always tried
to protect the privacy of Justice
Thomas and Ginni, unquote.
Apparently the belief
that transparency and accountability
for the highest court in the land
are just gauche and rude.
Let's bring in CNN's senior
Supreme Court analyst
Joan Biskupic,
along with the former director
for the Office of Government
Ethics, Walter Shaub.
Joan, let me start with you.
So people out
there might not realize
how huge a role Leonard Leo has played in
so much of what the court has done,
including overturning Roe v Wade
and turning the.
What we assume is going to be
the dismantling of affirmative action
in higher education.
Walk us through the kind of influence
he has.
You cannot overstate the influence
of Leonard Leo on the Supreme Court.
In fact,
I've described him as someone who
once you get beyond the White House
or Congress,
he has had arguably the greatest effect
on our federal bench.
You mentioned the three Trump appointees
that he essentially handpicked
through the years.
He also every single
Republican appointee on this court
was approved by him
one way or another,
including Chief
Justice John Roberts, who met with him.
John Roberts
probably would have been selected anyway,
but he did meet with Leonard Leo.
He is the consummate networker.
The Federalist Society goes
all the way back to the early 1980s,
but it was in 1991
when Leonard Leo became a director,
that he began raising all sorts of money
in high school. His nickname was Mr.
Moneybags.
He is he is a terrific networker.
He's very effective.
Anyone on what he wants.
He worked
very closely with Mitch McConnell
in the Senate leader in selecting people.
And he was very close to Don McGahn
in the Trump White House.
And most recently,
he secured a $1.6 billion donation
that will help him be even more powerful
going forward with money.
So, Walter,
Democratic Congressman
Ted Lieu of California
tweeted, quote,
Leonard Leo directed
fake invoices to be made
so that he could secretly line
the pockets of the wife
of a Supreme Court justice.
This is corrupt, unquote.
How is it corrupt?
Obviously, it doesn't look good,
but it's not as though Leonard
Leo is
secretive about what
he wants the court to do.
It's not as though he's
there making decisions
like in the Pelican Brief,
where he stands
to make millions of dollars
from from land acquisitions in Florida.
I mean, how is it corrupt
if you think it is?
You know,
I think his own actions
demonstrate that there was an awareness
that it at least appears corrupt
because you wouldn't work
that hard to hide the source of money
if you didn't worry
about how it was going to appear.
Now he talks about people
being malicious and gossipy.
I think the other way to spin
that is
the public
is concerned about who's paying members
of the Supreme Court
and their spouses
or rather or their spouses.
Yeah.
So we're in an era
now where there has been more scrutiny
of the US Supreme Court
probably in the last month or two
because of ProPublica
in the Washington Post and CNN, then,
you know,
it feels then it's history before then.
We now also have
there's been some stories
about how two Supreme Court justices,
Sonia Sotomayor and Neil Gorsuch,
did not recuse themselves from cases
that came
before the court over the past decade
involving a specific publisher
publishing company that has paid them
lots of money and lucrative book deals.
Former Justice Stephen
Breyer, who's also received royalties
from the same publisher,
he did recuse himself.
How do you see this?
Okay.
Well, this involves
a case, several cases where Penguin,
Random House, the conglomerate that both
all three,
Justice Stephen Breyer, Justice Sonia
Sotomayor and Neil Gorsuch,
all have
been contracts
with all contracts
that they have disclosed over time.
And two of them
did not recuse himself from cases
that were on the list of many,
many petitions coming to the court.
And this is something that fix the court,
a watchdog group.
And then The Daily Wire had talked
about, focused
more on two of the justices.
The reason, Stephen Breyer,
it could have been frankly,
I don't know why they didn't recuse
because they didn't say.
We tried to ask them, you know,
why didn't
you recuse yourself from cases?
They were cases
that were not heard by the court.
So it's
and they did record the report there.
I do want to mention, though,
Jake, that Stephen Breyer,
who did recuse,
likely didn't recuse
because he had gotten money from this.
You know, a subsidiary
of the publishing house.
It's because his family hit on
some stock in the in the publisher
so that this area is not of the magnitude
of other things. We've talked about.
But what we've tried to do
is bring all these things to public light
as they've come up,
because it is important to say
it's not just Clarence Thomas,
even though he's involved so much.
Right.
There are other justices
who have had concerns
because there's also this information
with Mr.
Crow,
who has been funding Thomas,
who's a friend of
his, finding his vacations,
buying land
from his family, and letting Clarence
Thomas, his mom, live there, helping
with a kid that a relative
that that the Thomas family
has been taking and taking care of.
Defenders of Thomas and Harlan Grove say
this is just a friend
doing a nice thing for another friend.
You know, here's the problem.
We are in a situation
when the Supreme Court
has no code of ethics whatsoever.
There's no rules on
what kind of gifts you can take.
And there's very little
oversight of their disclosure.
So they're not even complying
with the transparency law that there is.
Back in about 2011, just as Chief Justice
Roberts began pushing back
more aggressive of lay
against the idea of a code of ethics.
I think where we are
now is the inevitable result of that.
It's a proof of the axiom
that absolute power corrupts absolutely.
These individuals
are not subject to scrutiny.
They haven't subjected themselves
to a code of conduct.
I think this is the beginning,
not the end of these problems.
And I saw a tweet
suggesting that, you know,
one of the issues,
Joan, you know,
I think the best Supreme Court
reporter in the country,
I'm going on the record
for that for the last 22 years.
But Nina TOTENBERG,
who is very well respected,
long time Supreme Court reporter for NPR,
she was criticized
by NPR's public editor in 2020
for not disclosing
her decades long relationship
with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
And this might suggest
that one of the problems here
is a lot of the journalists
who have been covering the Supreme
Court, again, not you and
and not a bunch of other
really excellent Supreme Court reporters
like Jan Crawford and others.
But but some on the right
and the left have formed such close,
close relationships
that you really have to wonder
about their journalism sometimes.
Yeah,
it is a pretty intimate group of people.
I always kid that justices are appointed
for life.
Journalists are appointed for life, too.
We come to this beat
and we don't leave it.
But I mean, like anything else,
you want to be friendly
with the people you cover,
but you don't want to be deep friends.
And if you have deep friendships, then
then you try to,
you know, be careful with
with your coverage on that.
And I do think that
there has been an insularity
that we've we fight against.
And it's been important to always be able
to scrutinize these justices
in various ways, which, frankly,
I think many of us have.
But these recent stories,
they're coming from investigative teams
really strong.
And I want to give credit
where credit is due.
Really strong investigative teams,
especially at ProPublica.
Yeah.
You know, and we're those people
they may never have even set foot
in the Supreme Court
to cover a case
where someone like me
is going to be in there
reading the briefs all the time.
And again,
I think the more the more coverage
we have, the better.
Yeah, more coverage
and better and more transparent.
See, I don't know
if they're listening here at the US
Supreme Court.
More transparency.
Walter Sharp
and Joan Biskupic, thanks to both of you.