Latest Grifting by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas Is Just Tip of the Iceberg

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Latest Grifting by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas Is Just Tip of the Iceberg

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 1, 2023 ~

Virginia (Ginni) Thomas at the Swearing In of Her Husband, Clarence Thomas, as Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court in 1991. Former Associate Justice Byron White (right) Administered the Oath.

After the public interest news outlet, ProPublica, revealed more grifting by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas in April, the Supreme Court finally released the much delayed financial disclosure form for calendar year 2022 for Thomas yesterday. Thomas grudgingly provided details of some of that grifting involving billionaire Harlan Crow.

But this latest grifting saga is just the tip of the iceberg for Thomas and his wife, Virginia “Ginni” Thomas.

In 2011 the watchdog group, Protect our Elections, filed a bar complaint with the Missouri Supreme Court. At the time, Thomas was admitted to practice law in the State. The complaint asked for the disbarment of Thomas on the following grounds:

“Clarence Thomas breached his legal duty and violated the Rules of Professional Conduct by knowingly and willfully failing for 20 years to state truthfully on required AO 10 Financial Disclosure Forms that his wife Virginia earned non-investment income. Clarence Thomas further labored under a financial conflict of interest by failing to disclose $100,000 in support for his nomination by the Citizens United Foundation when he sat in judgment of a case involving Citizens United. Finally, he made rulings that his wife benefited from financially and professionally, and by extension, that benefited him. In short, this unethical and criminal conduct violates the Rules of Professional Conduct, and undermines the rule of law, respect for the law and confidence in the law.”

The Citizens United decision from the U.S. Supreme Court is the decision that corrupted political campaign financing in the U.S. by opening the spigots to unlimited corporate money flooding into political campaigns. That, in turn, effectively handed the will of the people over to billionaire kleptocrats – those that Clarence Thomas can’t seem to get enough of.

Wall Street On Parade previously reported that Thomas failed to report at least $1,051,214 that his wife Ginni Thomas had received in compensation from the Heritage Foundation from 1999 through 2007. Heritage, in turn, was heavily funded by billionaires Charles Koch, his late brother, David, and foundations or trusts tied to them.

Charles Koch is a major owner of Koch Industries, a fossil fuels juggernaut whose front group, Freedom Partners, played a major role in the Trump administration’s decision to pull out of the Paris Climate Accord. The Kochs have also been major funders of the climate change denial front groups and the invisible hand, full of political dough, in every major election. (See our detailed analysis of the Koch machine here.)

In 2008, the same year that the Supreme Court accepted the Citizens United case, Thomas dined with one of the Koch brothers, Charles, and his wife, Elizabeth, at the private Vintage Club in Indian Wells, California, during a four-day stay on the West Coast.

At the time of our reporting in 2011, we confirmed with a spokesperson for the Vintage Club that it restricts dining to members and their guests. Membership requires owning a home in the private, high security community, where homes run in double-digit millions of dollars. The spokesperson confirmed at the time that Charles Koch is a member of the Vintage Club and owned a home in the community. The Supreme Court would not reveal to us where Thomas stayed during this four-day visit to California.

While the Citizens United case was pending before the Supreme Court, Ginni Thomas created a tax-exempt organization called Liberty Central, Inc., with a former lawyer for the Charles G. Koch Foundation, Sarah Field, acting as her General Counsel. A former Koch lobbyist, Matt Schlapp, served on the Board of Directors of Liberty Central at inception.

From 2009 to 2011, Liberty Central raked in more than $1.5 million in donations from dark money donors. According to Liberty Central’s 2010 public tax filing, it paid Ginni Thomas $120,511 in compensation that year.

Virginia (Ginni) Thomas

Liberty Central appears to have morphed into “Liberty Consulting.” From 2011 through 2022, Clarence Thomas shows on his financial disclosure forms that his wife was receiving “salary and benefits” from Liberty Consulting. But there is no dollar amount or range of salary and benefits shown.

It is an outrage to the American people that Clarence Thomas’s wife – who played a role in the effort to undermine the peaceful transfer of power after the 2020 presidential election — does not have to report her income or the dark money donors who fund that income as part of a sitting Supreme Court Justice’s financial disclosure forms.

Something tells us that we have not heard the end of this story.

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FOCUS: David Sirota and Julia Rock | Clarence Thomas Has Long Fought to Kill Laws Requiring Transparency in Political Spending

 

 

12 April 23

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FOCUS: David Sirota and Julia Rock | Clarence Thomas Has Long Fought to Kill Laws Requiring Transparency in Political Spending
David Sirota and Julia Rock, Jacobin
Excerpt: "While receiving lavish gifts from billionaire Harlan Crow and then failing to disclose them, Clarence Thomas pushed to invalidate all disclosure laws, insisting that donors have a right to anonymously influence politics with unlimited amounts of cash." 

While receiving lavish gifts from billionaire Harlan Crow and then failing to disclose them, Clarence Thomas pushed to invalidate all disclosure laws, insisting that donors have a right to anonymously influence politics with unlimited amounts of cash.

While refusing to disclose lavish gifts from a billionaire, Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas pushed to invalidate all political spending disclosure laws in America, insisting that donors have a constitutional right to anonymously influence politics with unlimited amounts of cash.

The undisclosed gifts from billionaire Harlan Crow — who has links to groups that file amicus briefs lobbying the Supreme Court — were exposed by a ProPublica report last week. If Thomas now faces no investigation or consequences for potentially violating long-standing federal ethics laws, his actions could create a precedent effectively legalizing unlimited, unreported gifts in much the way he demanded for political donations.

In 2010, the Supreme Court issued its notorious Citizens United ruling, declaring that “independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption” — and therefore could be made limitlessly.

But that ruling, which unleashed billions of dollars in dark money election spending, did not go far enough for Thomas, who had previously insisted that there exists an “established right to anonymous speech.” He supported the Citizens United majority ruling, but issued a concurring opinion insisting that judges should overturn all rules that require transparency in political spending.

“This court should invalidate mandatory disclosure and reporting requirements,” Thomas wrote. He argued that donors could face retaliation and “ruined careers” when they disclose their political spending, citing an example from California in which supporters of a ballot measure ending same-sex marriage were allegedly harassed for donating to the ballot measure campaign.

Thomas decried the prospect of transparency empowering members of the public to come up with ways to try to shame donors and the public officials they bankroll.

“Disclaimer and disclosure requirements enable private citizens and elected officials to implement political strategies specifically calculated to curtail campaign-related activity and prevent the lawful, peaceful exercise of First Amendment rights,” he wrote.

The ProPublica report delineates numerous instances in which Thomas and his wife, Ginni, accepted gifts worth hundreds of thousands of dollars from Crow, a billionaire Republican donor, potentially violating a 1978 federal ethics law.

Should the Justice Department, Congress, and the Supreme Court now eschew any investigation or punishment, they could help Thomas achieve the vision he described in Citizens United: a political system that in practice allows billionaires and corporations to deliver unlimited anonymous cash to public officials, in total secrecy and with complete impunity.

“Letting wealthy donors engage in unchecked, private influence campaigns seems to be a core principle of Justice Thomas’s vision for our democracy,” Derek Martin, spokesperson for the government watchdog group Accountable.US, told the Lever. “But hardworking Americans who aren’t buddies with billionaire benefactors know that sunlight is the best disinfectant. Now that Clarence Thomas’s true priorities are out of the shadows, he needs to be held accountable.”

Citizens United “Does Not Go Far Enough”

The Supreme Court has famously refused to adhere to an ethical code, and Congress has not used its statutory power to write one for the highest court. Justices have declined to recuse themselves from cases in which they have financial interests as well as cases involving organizations that publicly supported their confirmation campaigns.

The justices have also maintained close ties with donor-funded groups such as Leonard Leo’s Federalist Society and the Supreme Court Historical Society.

But Thomas’s disdain for ethics rules stands out and shows in opinions he’s written in key campaign finance cases. Even in cases where Thomas joined the majority, he issued concurring opinions arguing that the court had not gone far enough in discarding political spending limits or disclosure laws — repeatedly asserting that the court had erred in its 1976 decision in Buckley v. Valeo, which upheld the constitutionality of contribution limits to federal candidates.

“By depriving donors of their right to speak through the candidate, contribution limits relegate donors’ points of view to less effective modes of communication,” Thomas wrote in 2000, dissenting from the court’s majority in Nixon v. Shrink Missouri Government PAC, which upheld contribution limits to candidates and committees in Missouri.

In 2004, Thomas broke with the majority in McConnell v. Federal Election Commission, which upheld key features of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, including a ban on limitless contributions to political parties.

“The court today upholds what can only be described as the most significant abridgement of the freedoms of speech and association since the Civil War,” Thomas wrote in a dissenting opinion.

In that dissent, he argued that the majority was “allowing the established right to anonymous speech to be stripped away based on the flimsiest of justifications.”

Thomas similarly defended that right to “anonymous speech” by campaign donors in the Citizens United case in 2010.

While he asserted that the Citizens United decision “does not go far enough” in rolling back federal campaign finance laws, the watchdog group Protect Our Election argued that Thomas should have recused himself from the case altogether because his own nomination to the court in 1991 had been boosted by six-figure spending from the Citizens United Foundation — the group that brought the case.

It was later revealed that Thomas and the late justice Antonin Scalia had attended conferences hosted by Koch Industries, which pours massive amounts of money into US politics.

“Citizens United provided a political advantage to Koch Industries and its corporate allies, many of which took part in a surge of corporate and other ‘independent’ political giving that pumped nearly $300 million into the 2010 midterm elections,” Common Cause wrote in a statement, asking the Justice Department to investigate Thomas’s and Scalia’s relationship with Koch Industries and vacate the Citizens United decision based on the conflict of interest.

An additional complaint from the group alleged that Thomas had claimed for twenty years on federal ethics disclosure forms that his wife, Ginni Thomas, had no “non-investment income” even though she had earned a salary for each of those years. (Those disclosure forms required Thomas to swear to the accuracy of the information.) From 2003 to 2009, her annual salary of at least $120,000 came from the Koch-backed Heritage Foundation.

Ginni Thomas told the Los Angeles Times in the wake of the Citizens United decision that her new conservative corporate lobbying group, Liberty Central, would be accepting donations made legal by the recent ruling. Crow donated the initial $500,000 raised by Liberty Central, according to Politico.

She now runs a consultancy that reportedly takes as clients conservative groups attempting to influence the outcomes of Supreme Court cases.

Clarence Thomas’s campaign finance crusade did not end with Citizens United. In 2014, when a Supreme Court majority struck down aggregate spending limits from individuals in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, Thomas again argued that his right-wing colleagues had not gone far enough.

“This case represents yet another missed opportunity to right the course of our campaign finance jurisprudence by restoring a standard that is faithful to the First Amendment,” he wrote in a concurrence.

In response to the ProPublica report, Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee are planning a hearing on the Supreme Court’s ethical standards — or lack thereof.

“[If] the Court does not resolve this issue on its own, the Committee will consider legislation to resolve it,” the lawmakers wrote in a letter to Chief Justice John Roberts, calling on him to investigate Thomas.

But if Thomas can engage in flagrantly corrupt behavior without consequences, he will have set an important precedent beyond his written decisions and votes. As political scientist Corey Robin, author of The Enigma of Clarence Thomas, put it, “His position is clear: ‘Influence peddling is the essence of citizenship.’”

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Meet Ken Klukowski, a Trump Administration Cooperating Witness in the Justice Department’s Criminal Investigation of January 6

 

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Meet Ken Klukowski, a Trump Administration Cooperating Witness in the Justice Department’s Criminal Investigation of January 6

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 2, 2022 ~

Ken Klukowski

Ken Klukowski is making a lot of people in the Charles Koch network of political operatives very nervous. According to a CNN report last Thursday, Klukowski “is cooperating in the DOJ’s January 6 criminal investigation, after investigators searched and copied his electronic records several weeks ago.” Those electronic records could open a lot of secrets that the Charles Koch network has kept behind a dark curtain for far too long.

Klukowski arrived at the U.S. Department of Justice just 35 days before Trump’s term ended. According to the January 6 House Select Committee, Klukowski was “parachuted” into the Justice Department to help an environmental attorney there, Jeffrey Clark, prepare a letter to state officials which falsely claimed that the Justice Department had “identified significant concerns” about the vote totals in those states and the states should consider sending “a separate slate of electors supporting Donald J. Trump.”

This is how Republican Congresswoman Liz Cheney, Co-Chair of the January 6 House Select Committee, described Klukowski’s involvement at the Committee’s June 23 hearing:

“Today, as Chairman Thompson indicated, we turn to yet another element of the President’s effort to overturn the 2020 election, this one involving the Department of Justice. A key focus of our hearing today will be a draft letter that our witnesses here today refused to sign.

“This letter was written by Mr. Jeff Clark with another Department of Justice lawyer Ken Klukowski, and the letter was to be sent to the leadership of the Georgia State legislature. Other versions of the letter were intended for other states.

“Neither Mr. Clark nor Mr. Klukowski had any evidence of widespread election fraud. But they were quite aware of what Mr. Trump wanted the Department to do – Jeff Clark met privately with President Trump and others in the White House, and agreed to assist the President – without telling the senior leadership of the Department who oversaw him.

“As you will see, this letter claims that the U.S. Department of Justice’s investigations have ‘identified significant concerns that may have impacted the outcome of the election in multiple States, including the State of Georgia.’ In fact, Donald Trump knew this was a lie.

“The Department of Justice had already informed the President of the United States repeatedly that its investigations had found no fraud sufficient to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

“The letter also said this: ‘In light of these developments, the Department recommends that the Georgia General Assembly should convene in special session’ and consider approving a new slate of electors. And it indicates that a separate ‘fake slate of electors supporting Donald Trump’ has already been ‘transmitted to Washington, D.C.’ ”

An outgrowth of the Clark-Klukowski letter was a meeting in the Oval Office on January 3, 2021 – just three days before the attack on the Capitol. According to Cheney at the June 23 Committee’s hearing, “Donald Trump offered Mr. Clark the job of Acting Attorney General, replacing Mr. Rosen, with the understanding that Clark would send this letter to Georgia and other states, and take other actions the President requested.” After Trump was advised by acting Attorney General Jeff Rosen and others that top officials at the Justice Department would resign, Trump dropped the plan.

Klukowski had been a writer at the right-wing outlet, Breitbart, which was formerly led by Trump White House advisor, Steve Bannon – who is now facing sentencing in October after being found guilty by a jury of defying a subpoena from the January 6 Committee to testify. Klukowski did not arrive in the Trump administration until August of 2019.

Klukowski was “parachuted” into the Justice Department from the Office of Management and Budget, where he was working under the General Counsel, Mark Paoletta. Today, both Paoletta and Klukowski are employed at the law firm, Schaerr Jaffe LLP. (Gene Schaerr is a registered lobbyist as is his law partner, Erik Jaffe.)

Paoletta is now serving as legal counsel for Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. The testimony of Ginni Thomas is being sought by the January 6 Committee with a threat to subpoena her if necessary. Emails between Ginni Thomas and White House officials have turned up, showing that she was actively pushing for the White House to fight Biden’s election win. Both Clarence Thomas and Ginni Thomas have a long, problematic history with the Koch network.

In January 2008, sitting Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas had been treated to a four-day luxury trip to the Palm Springs area of California to attend the semi-annual gathering of big money campaign donors hosted by Charles Koch and his brother, David. (David Koch died in 2019.) According to the 2008 financial disclosure form filed by Justice Thomas, his expenses for that trip were paid by the Federalist Society, a conservative nonprofit to which Koch foundations had donated millions of dollars.

Charles Koch has been co-owner, Chairman and CEO of Koch Industries, a privately-owned fossil fuels conglomerate, for the past 55 years. Forbes puts Charles Koch’s net worth at $56.6 billion. Justice Thomas’ trip to the Koch event occurred in the same year that the Citizens United case was accepted by the Supreme Court. That was the Supreme Court decision that opened the floodgates to corporate funding of political campaigns in America.

In 2011, Wall Street On Parade broke the news that during Justice Thomas’ trip to speak at the Koch event in January 2008, he was hosted for dinner by Charles Koch and his wife, Elizabeth, at their private club, the Vintage Club in Indian Wells, California.

While the Citizens United case was pending before the Supreme Court, Ginni Thomas created a tax exempt, Tea Party advocacy group, Liberty Central, Inc., with a former lawyer for the Charles G. Koch Foundation acting as her General Counsel in 2010 (Sarah Field) and a former Koch lobbyist serving on her board at inception (Matt Schlapp).

Ginni Thomas ran Liberty Central out of a post office box in a UPS building in Virginia. According to IRS tax filings, Liberty Central, Inc. received $550,000 from anonymous donors in 2009 and was anticipating the receipt of $2,014,000 in 2010.

The Citizens United case before her husband at the Supreme Court was decided on January 21, 2010. Eight days later, Cleta Mitchell, then a partner with the law firm Foley & Lardner, filed the application on behalf of Ginni Thomas’ nonprofit group, Liberty Central, Inc. with the IRS. But Mitchell was not an impartial attorney; she had filed an Amicus brief in the Citizens United Case.

Today, Cleta Mitchell is mired in the January 6 controversy and has resigned her longstanding position with the Foley & Lardner law firm. The controversy stems from the fact that Mitchell was on the phone call with Donald Trump, acting as his attorney, on January 2, 2021 when Trump urged Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes” – the number of votes Trump needed to make him the winner of the state in the 2020 election.

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