Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse (RI) and Ron Wyden (OR), both Democrats, have requested that the Department of Justice look into Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ purported receipt of gifts.
According to The Washington Post, the two senators made the announcement on Tuesday that they had “sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland last week demanding he hire a special counsel to explore whether Thomas broke ethics, false statements, and tax laws.”
“The move is a significant step forward in the Democratic senators’ efforts to confront the ethical scandals surrounding Thomas and the court in the past few years. According to Whitehouse’s staff, this was perhaps the first time a justice of the Supreme Court has been the subject of a special counsel investigation. Wyden is the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, while Whitehouse is a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. The Berkeley Judicial Institute’s executive director and former federal judge, Jeremy Fogel, stated that while the Justice Department is legally able to name a special counsel to look into Thomas, it is unclear if it will do so. He stated, “It would unavoidably be perceived as political retaliation for decisions the judges made that they disagreed with.” “I’m at a loss for how you managed to escape that box.”
Regarding the request, the Justice Department has not commented. Evidence demonstrates that Justice Thomas “committed repeated deliberate breaches of federal ethics and false-statement prohibitions,” according to Whitehouse and Wyden’s statement.
They stated, “We do not request this lightly.” “There are serious concerns regarding Justice Thomas’s and his rich patrons’ compliance with federal tax duties since the information shown thus far clearly indicates that he has broken many intentional statutes pertaining to false statements and federal ethics.”
Thomas “has always sought complete openness and conformity to the law, particularly with respect to what personal travel required to be recorded,” according to Elliot S. Berke, the justice’s counsel, who also stated that any disclosure gaps were “strictly unintended.”
According to the Post, the two senators explicitly requested that the Department of Justice look into a $267,00 loan that Thomas used to buy a luxury motor coach in 1999. They also stated that Thomas had not provided them with sufficient information on how he handled the situation.
According to Breitbart News, the judge revealed gifts he received after changes to financial disclosure laws last year.
Ken Klukowski noted that although left-wing Democrats’ hysterical assaults on Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s financial disclosures this week have fuelled their attacks, it is clear that their coordinated attempts against the lone black conservative on the country’s highest court are unfounded.
Following a revision in March to the financial disclosure guidelines for federal judges, Thomas revealed more information about gifts and hospitality he had previously received. His detractors, who fiercely disagree with his interpretations of the Constitution and the law, sprung into action, claiming that these revelations imply misconduct,” he said.
This, according to conservatives, is reverse court-packing. In order to add more liberal justices to the Supreme Court, several liberal Democrats advocated legislation to raise the court’s size. After that didn’t work, they launched focused efforts to convince the court’s most conservative justices to disqualify themselves from high-profile cases.
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