Scandal-plagued Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas isn’t doing himself any favors. Starting subsequent time period, one among his 4 new legislation clerks can be Crystal Clanton, a recently-minted legislation faculty graduate who was pushed out of a conservative youth group in 2017 after a reporter uncovered virulently racist texts she despatched to a different worker.
The Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University, from which Clanton graduated in 2022 and which has cultivated intensive ties with the Supreme Court’s conservative justices, introduced the rent on Friday.
The racist feedback stem from Clanton’s work for the conservative youth group Turning Point USA, the place she served as nationwide subject director till the summer season of 2017. At the top of that yr, New Yorker investigative reporter Jane Mayer unearthed a textual content from Clanton to a different TPUSA worker wherein Clanton wrote, “I HATE BLACK PEOPLE. Like fuck them all . . . I hate blacks. End of story.” (At the time, Clanton advised the journal that she had “no recollection of these messages and they do not reflect what I believe or who I am and the same was true when I was a teenager.” Clanton would have been 20 when the texts had been despatched.)
Mayer additionally reported that, on one Martin Luther King Jr. Day throughout her tenure, Clanton fired a girl who claimed to be the group’s solely Black worker. On this yr’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day, it’s value noting, Turning Point founder and CEO Charlie Kirk, who has been cozying as much as white nationalists of late, introduced a marketing campaign to discredit the “mythical sainthood” of MLK.
Clanton resigned from the group—Kirk advised Mayer that TPUSA “assessed the situation and took decisive action within 72 hours of being made aware of the issue”—however she quickly discovered new work aiding Thomas’s spouse, Ginni Thomas, a conservative activist who would later play a necessary behind-the-scenes function within the try to overturn the 2020 presidential election.
Vanity Fair’s Caleb Ecarma, who reported on Clanton’s rent on the time for Mediaite, additionally uncovered further racist remarks Clanton had made to TPUSA staffers, which included one Snapchat picture of a person who seemed to be Arab with the caption, “Just thinking about ways to do another 9/11.”
Clanton’s closeness to the Thomas household obtained further scrutiny after she was employed to clerk for Judge William H. Pryor Jr., a conservative decide who ceaselessly sends clerks to the Supreme Court and was as soon as on Donald Trump’s shortlist of SCOTUS picks. In response, seven members of Congress demanded an investigation into Clanton’s hiring, writing that her clerkship threatened “to undermine the public’s faith in the judiciary seriously” and referred to as into query Pryor’s means to rule impartially “in cases where race, religion or national origin plays a role.”
The federal appeals court docket appointed to look into the matter in the end cleared Pryor—and a decrease court docket decide for whom Clanton additionally clerked—of wrongdoing, after Pryor claimed he’d discovered that Clanton had been the sufferer of a smear marketing campaign. In its ruling, the court docket stated it didn’t want to contemplate “whether the information the [judges] elicited and received regarding their hiring decisions was accurate.”
That prompted a rebuke from then-House Judiciary Chair Jerrold Nadler, who penned a letter arguing that the choice ignored a well-documented report of Clanton’s bigotry and that the court docket’s refusal to analyze the substance of the allegations went towards “the judicial misconduct statute’s core purposes of uncovering the truth.”
The appeals court docket’s investigation did, nonetheless, reveal some new particulars about Clanton’s relationship with the Thomases, courtesy of a letter Thomas submitted to the court docket {that a} reporter for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution uncovered. According to Thomas, Clanton lived with the couple “for almost a year” after “her controversial and public departure from Turning Point USA.” His spouse, Thomas wrote, “informed me of the horrible way in which she had been treated” on the conservative group.
According to the letter, Thomas wrote a legislation faculty advice for Clanton. He additionally really helpful her to Pryor for the clerkship, telling the decide that the allegations in Mayer’s reporting had been “grossly out of character and unfounded.”
“I know Crystal Clanton, and I know bigotry,” Thomas wrote. “Bigotry is antithetical to her nature and character.”
Thomas concluded the letter by declaring his “intention to consider her for a clerkship should she perform as I expect and excel in her clerkships.”
“I had high expectations for her on the Eleventh Circuit,” Judge Pryor stated, in accordance with Scalia Law’s announcement of Clanton’s new clerkship. “And she exceeded those expectations. Crystal is an outstanding law clerk.”