'Like laundering money': Court watcher says Clarence Thomas is flouting even the few ethics rules that exist

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is effectively able to "launder money" through his wife, argued Gabe Roth of the watchdog group Fix the Court on MSNBC Friday.

This comes amid new reporting that right-wing judicial activist Leonard Leo and eventual Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway arranged a secret payment to Virginia "Ginni" Thomas through an organization that successfully lobbied the Supreme Court to undermine the Voting Rights Act in a landmark 2013 decision — and further reporting on the gifts Thomas himself received from billionaire benefactor Harlan Crow.

"What appears to be happening in this great careful document sourced reporting in The Washington Post and the ProPublica reporting is that every document reveals that Clarence Thomas isn't abiding by the court's own disclosure laws," said anchor Nicolle Wallace. "Is that a fair assessment of where we are?"

"I would think so," said Roth. "Justices don't have to list clients of their spouses. I think they should if they're getting $100,000 from a single source. It's almost like laundering money. I'm not saying that I'm getting money from the Judicial Education Project and there was another source where she got over $200,000 from an interest that filed an amicus brief before the court, because we can't find out about it all it said under the disclosure is, just list Liberty Consulting, don't tell us who the clients are. That should change. That way he's following the letter of the law. Beyond [that] ... the number of gifts, private planes and yachts and sculptures, and tuition gifts to his grandnephew that Thomas has received, many of them, if not all, should have been reported, and it is unique that we have a justice that is so impacted or so — has received so much largesse from a single source who, by the way, also has interest before the court."

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Ultimately, Roth added, there is probably "a lot more that we don't know and a lot more coming out in the next couple of weeks."

"You mentioned drip, drip, drip, it is going to get super drippy if it hasn't already," said Roth. "And we've seen from the Thomas camp of excuses of parsing legislative text, and does a grandnephew count as a child, and does a flight to Indonesia consider hospitality. And that is beside the point. The law calls for impeachment and removal, that will never happen, or a $50,000 fine, which we're past the statute of limitations, you're liable for a fine and it is never happened in Supreme Court history. And what we need to learn in terms of entanglements, the sum total is unequaled and it is not normal, despite all of the excuses that Thomas or his family or friends might give to have a single individual giving so much money, gifts, trips, what have you, tuition, to a justice. And the public is obviously going to see that and think it is corrupt, because that is how it looks."

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