Clarence Thomas’s Clerks: An ‘Extended Family’ With Reach and Power

In late August, amid a rising outcry over revelations that Justice Clarence Thomas had obtained many years of undisclosed presents and free luxurious journey, a lawyer in Chicago fired off an e mail to her fellow former Thomas clerks.

“Many people have been requested not too long ago in regards to the justice,” wrote the lawyer, Taylor Meehan. “In response, there’s not at all times the chance to inform his story and share what it was prefer to work for him. And there’s not often the chance for us to take action all collectively.”

Ms. Meehan connected a letter in assist of Justice Thomas. Minutes later got here a reply. “I simply needed to bounce up immediately and say bravo for this,” wrote Steven G. Bradbury, a Heritage Basis fellow who served within the George W. Bush and Trump administrations. Inside days Fox Information viewers had been listening to in regards to the letter, now signed by 112 former clerks and testifying that the justice’s “integrity is unimpeachable.” Among the many signers was the favored Fox host Laura Ingraham.

In flip, the justice’s spouse, the conservative activist Virginia Thomas, quickly took to the clerks’ personal e mail listserv. “We really feel much less alone at present, due to you all!!! 🙏💕💕💕” she wrote, providing particular due to the letter’s coordinators and all “who stepped into our fireplace!!!”

Within the 32 years since Justice Thomas got here via the fireplace of his affirmation hearings and onto the Supreme Court docket, he has assembled a military of influential acolytes not like another — a community of like-minded former clerks who haven’t solely rallied to his protection however carried his idiosyncratic model of conservative authorized pondering out into the nation’s regulation faculties, prime regulation companies, the judiciary and the best reaches of presidency.

The previous clerks’ public protection of the justice was “unparalleled within the historical past of the courtroom,” stated Todd C. Peppers, a professor of public affairs at Roanoke Faculty and the writer of “Courtiers of the Marble Palace: The Rise and Affect of the Supreme Court docket Legislation Clerk.” “It’s frankly astonishing.”

For Justice Thomas, the letter got here at a time of each trial and triumph. He had turn into the face of long-simmering questions in regards to the excessive courtroom’s moral pointers. However he was additionally on the top of his affect. The courtroom’s senior justice, he had spent years on the shedding facet of circumstances, writing minority opinions grounded in his strict originalist interpretations of the Structure. Now that former President Donald J. Trump had given the courtroom a conservative supermajority, Justice Thomas was a guiding voice for a brand new judicial mainstream.

He was enjoying a protracted recreation, and his former clerks had been amongst its most vital gamers. The Thomases didn’t reply to requests for remark, however in a 2008 interview, the justice stated, “I inform my regulation clerks that we’re not writing present occasions — we’re writing for a for much longer interval,” including that his opinions had been based mostly on “ideas which might be locked down and that shall be right here when the tides flip” in 50 years.

Now the tides have turned, and at the very least 18 of these former clerks have served as state, federal or navy judges, almost three-quarters of them appointed by Mr. Trump to federal courts, the place they’ve dominated on points like voting rights and entry to the abortion tablet. Roughly 10 extra served in Mr. Trump’s administration; almost a dozen made his Supreme Court docket brief lists. Former Thomas clerks have argued, and gained, a number of of probably the most momentous Supreme Court docket circumstances of latest years.

The community additionally contains a variety of “adopted clerks” who by no means labored for Justice Thomas however are invited to occasions and obtain clerk communications. Amongst them are high-profile conservatives together with Leonard Leo, the judicial kingmaker of the Federalist Society, Senator Mike Lee of Utah and Alex Azar, a Trump cupboard secretary.

Supreme Court docket clerks are, by definition, the form of formidable legal professionals prone to wield vital affect of their post-clerk lives. What makes Justice Thomas’s clerks so outstanding, largely, is their success as loyal standard-bearers of his singular ideology. Certainly, an examination of what the justice and his spouse name Thomas Clerk World, based mostly on interviews with folks in and round it and a overview of personal emails and the Thomases’ public statements, reveals how meticulously the couple have cultivated the clerk community over the many years.

It is not uncommon for justices to take care of shut ties with their clerks, however Stephen R. McAllister, a former clerk who served as the USA lawyer for Kansas in the course of the Trump administration, stated Justice Thomas was “fairly extraordinary when it comes to maintaining in contact along with his clerks, serving to clerks and having everybody be in contact with one another.”

The Thomases have tended to their community via month-to-month lunches at Morton’s The Steakhouse or the Capital Grille in Washington, open to any alumni who occur to be on the town. They’ve hosted clerks and their households at ski resorts and summer time retreats, full with inside jokes stenciled on T-shirts and swag baggage with Thomas-themed problem cash, stress balls and enjoying playing cards. The justice has inspired camaraderie via group screenings of the movie model of Ayn Rand’s manifesto of individualism “The Fountainhead” and pilgrimages to the Civil Warfare battlefield at Gettysburg.

On the coronary heart of the organizing is Mrs. Thomas — jokingly designated “regulation clerk emeritus” — who manages the community’s discourse as a form of den mom. Hers has been a very energetic function for a Supreme Court docket partner — overseeing manufacturing of a listing with a web page for every clerk, in addition to the e-mail listserv and a personal Fb group. All of it, she has stated, is supposed to construct “connective tissue throughout and all through this wonderful neighborhood of leaders.”

Mrs. Thomas, whose right-wing political activism has included involvement in efforts to overturn Mr. Trump’s 2020 election defeat, has insisted that she and her husband function in separate lanes. However a few of her interactions with the clerk community present the diploma to which theirs is, in reality, a shared ideological challenge. She cheered when Mr. Trump appointed members of the Thomas clerk roster as judges: “Thank God,” Mrs. Thomas informed an interviewer, rattling off different appointments. “He used to inform them, ‘You’re going to be future leaders, it’s coming your means, you’re going to be subsequent.’ And now they’re.” Final 12 months, she inspired clerks to start out an e mail thread through which individuals shared articles celebrating the courtroom’s choice overturning the constitutional proper to abortion.

The community has discovered its personal methods to rejoice Justice Thomas and his legacy. In 1998, one of many justice’s clerks hunted down and introduced him with a memento from considered one of his first Supreme Court docket opinions: a mounted taxidermy lobster.

When Justice Thomas speaks of his clerks, he tends to consult with them as his “children.” As he put it in a chat a decade in the past at Harvard Legislation Faculty, “I actually love my clerks.”

‘Making an attempt to Practice a Pig’

For a few years, Supreme Court docket clerkships had been thought of largely nonpartisan. Accomplishment — prime grades, regulation overview membership, suggestions — fairly than ideology was the foreign money required to win one of many coveted jobs. Aspirants normally labored first for a feeder choose, considered one of a small group of outstanding federal judges with shut ties to the justices and monitor data of sending clerks to the excessive courtroom. The justices didn’t uniformly choose from Democratic or Republican-appointed appeals courtroom judges, and potential clerks had been anticipated to use to all 9 of them.

Because the nation has turn into extra polarized, so, too, have the clerkship ranks. The present justices have overwhelmingly employed clerks from judges appointed by a president of the identical occasion because the one who appointed them.

Justice Thomas has totally embraced the pattern. In 2010, The New York Instances famous that each one 84 of his clerks had skilled with Republican-appointed appeals judges, and that sample has largely continued in recent times.

“I’m not going to rent clerks who’ve profound disagreements with me — that’s a waste of my time,” Justice Thomas stated throughout an interview in Dallas in 1999. “And somebody stated that’s like making an attempt to coach a pig. It wastes your time and aggravates the pig.”

The justice, like his friends, usually hires 4 clerks per time period, a course of he has likened to “deciding on mates” for “a foxhole.” He has usually stated he seeks clerks from modest backgrounds that mirror his personal — who haven’t had “the skids greased for them,” aren’t “jerks” and present they’ve the “horse energy” to work lengthy hours. Whereas lots of his clerks come from elite regulation faculties like Harvard, the College of Chicago and Yale, he’s recognized for making some extent of venturing past this pool. He has employed from George Mason College in Virginia and the College of Kansas, each public faculties, and church-affiliated faculties like Creighton College in Nebraska, the place his spouse studied regulation. Justice Thomas has spoken of 4 locker-room-style hooks on a door in his chambers with an indication studying, “Cling egos right here.”

Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr., who died in 1998, famously stated the courtroom operated “like 9 separate regulation companies,” every its personal small world with the justice on the middle. Justice Thomas eagerly debates circumstances along with his clerks. His clerks assist overview the hundreds of petitions filed annually, summarizing the requests and making suggestions to grant or deny them, they usually work with the justice on pending circumstances. For Supreme Court docket clerks, the relationships shaped with justices are sometimes described as familial, a membership membership that lasts a lifetime.

The Thomas clerk community started to take form early within the justice’s tenure on the courtroom. Mrs. Thomas used her grass-roots-organizing expertise to arrange a e-newsletter and small dialogue group for clerk spouses. The e-mail listserv emerged out of heartbreak. In 2010, Greg Coleman, a former clerk who had served as solicitor normal of Texas, was killed in a airplane crash. Mrs. Thomas and Mr. Coleman’s widow, Stephanie Coleman, created the Thomas Clerk World listserv so clerks may assist each other.

On the Supreme Court docket, Mrs. Thomas has hosted ladies’s occasions and included previous feminine clerks on the visitor checklist. In 2013, she invited a number of to a luncheon about parenting challenges, headlined by a polarizing speaker: Gayle Trotter, a self-described “liberty-loving and tyranny-hating conservative lawyer” who had simply gained notoriety for her congressional testimony that “weapons make ladies safer.”

“Congratulations for being on the IN checklist!” Mrs. Thomas wrote in an e mail.

The couple’s view of the clerks as household is on show of their shiny, photo-filled Christmas letters. The 2006 version talked about two gatherings of clerks, considered one of which celebrated Justice Thomas’s first 15 years on the courtroom. “We LOVE this prolonged household,” the Thomases wrote. The 2015 letter confirmed the justice — in a leprechaun hat — at a Dallas gathering along with his frequent benefactor, the billionaire conservative donor Harlan Crow, who had hosted “Clarence’s clerks for conferences, examine and enjoyable.” Later that 12 months, dozens of former clerks and their households traveled to Park Metropolis, Utah, for one of many community’s retreats — multiday affairs that may embrace continuing-education programs taught by former clerks, typically with appearances by the justice.

As Justice Thomas reached his thirtieth anniversary on the courtroom in 2021, the Thomases hosted a clerk retreat on the Greenbrier resort in West Virginia. For one occasion, the clerks stunned the Thomases with a banner that learn “Liberty and Justice (Thomas) for All.” So many individuals got here to the retreat {that a} group picture was shot from a drone.

Seeding the Discipline

As a microcosm of the radiating energy of the clerk community, contemplate the profession of William Consovoy.

Whereas finding out regulation at George Mason within the early 2000s, Mr. Consovoy turned enamored of Justice Thomas’s originalist judicial pondering — a way of deciphering the Structure that claims judges should apply the Founders’ understanding of the textual content. After clerking for the justice in 2008, Mr. Consovoy carried that philosophy into battle on among the signature authorized questions of the day. The regulation agency he helped construct earlier than his loss of life final winter, Consovoy McCarthy, has turn into a boutique go-to litigator for the proper.

In 2013, Mr. Consovoy was a key member of the workforce that efficiently challenged a central provision of the Voting Rights Act, a regulation from the civil rights period geared toward insulating Black People from makes an attempt to dilute their voting energy. The 5-to-4 ruling within the case, Shelby County v. Holder — with Justice Thomas within the majority — largely gutted the laws, clearing the best way for 9 states, primarily within the South, to alter election legal guidelines with out federal clearance. Shock waves from the case are nonetheless being felt, together with in latest fights over voting maps in Alabama, Georgia and Louisiana. And final month, one other Thomas clerk, David R. Stras, a Trump appointee to the appeals courtroom in Minneapolis, wrote an opinion that might additional weaken the Voting Rights Act. The ruling is sort of sure to be appealed to the Supreme Court docket.

Mr. Consovoy’s work additionally constructed on Justice Thomas’s harsh critique of affirmative motion — that such packages stigmatized Black folks whereas offering cowl to failures to handle the true wants of deprived People and discriminated in opposition to different candidates. Mr. Consovoy labored on a case difficult race in faculty admissions, Fisher v. College of Texas, which started in 2008 and twice got here earlier than the Supreme Court docket. The case didn’t reach ending affirmative motion, however Mr. Consovoy would be part of conservative teams in mounting one other assault, steering two challenges — at Harvard and on the College of North Carolina — to the Supreme Court docket. With Mr. Consovoy battling most cancers, two of his law-firm colleagues argued the circumstances, each former Thomas clerks. Final June, the courtroom struck down race-based admissions insurance policies, with Justice Thomas within the majority.

At Consovoy McCarthy, 5 companions are Thomas clerks. Over all, greater than a 3rd of the justice’s clerks have turn into regulation companions, many serving to lead influential companies like Jones Day, Kirkland & Ellis and Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher.

Whereas many Thomas clerks have gone on to show, there are clusters at two faculties which might be facilities of conservative authorized scholarship — George Mason’s Scalia Legislation Faculty and Notre Dame. Justice Thomas, who has co-taught with a number of former clerks, has been a visiting professor at each faculties.

He has stuffed the judiciary along with his disciples, in far larger numbers than Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, latest justices with an analogous size of service.

After clerking for Justice Thomas, educating at Scalia Legislation and serving within the Trump administration, Neomi Rao was appointed to the federal appeals courtroom in Washington, thought of a Supreme Court docket feeder. In 2019, she solid the lone dissenting vote on a three-judge panel that allowed congressional investigators to hunt Mr. Trump’s monetary data.

Within the New Orleans-based Fifth Circuit, James C. Ho is without doubt one of the three judges who upheld a part of a Texas choice to restrict entry to the abortion tablet mifepristone. This month, the Supreme Court docket introduced that it will hear the problem to federal approval of the drug. That case follows on the heels of the courtroom’s putting down Roe v. Wade — in a case argued efficiently by Mississippi’s solicitor normal, Scott G. Stewart, a 2015 Thomas clerk.

When the Trump administration wanted conservatives to fill key positions, it pulled from the Thomas community. Whereas they had been hardly the one former Supreme Court docket clerks to signal on, the ideology nurtured by Justice Thomas proved a match with the administration’s concentrate on government energy, skepticism of welfare and social advantages and pushback at gun regulation. A second Trump administration would in all probability once more draw on the Thomas clerk roster.

Three Thomas clerks — Patrick F. Philbin, John Eisenberg and Kate Todd — turned deputy White Home counsels. Two extra — Heath Tarbert and Sigal Mandelker — held excessive posts within the Treasury. Steven Bradbury had a number of jobs within the Transportation Division, together with, briefly, performing secretary.

Jeffrey B. Wall, a 2004 clerk and star Supreme Court docket litigator whereas in personal follow, served as principal deputy solicitor normal after which performing solicitor normal within the Trump administration, the place he argued on behalf of the president’s journey ban and his plan to incorporate immigration standing on the 2020 Census.

In October, again in personal follow, Mr. Wall argued an admiralty case that targeted on a yacht that had run aground. The ethics questions surrounding Justice Thomas had been in full flare.

Throughout oral arguments, the justice jokingly requested if the yacht’s engines nonetheless labored after the accident.

Later, throughout his rebuttal, Mr. Wall answered: “Justice Thomas, to your central query, the boat is accessible on the market on-line when you’ve got a half-million {dollars}.”

The courtroom crammed with laughter.

Deploying the Community

In February 1998, Christopher Landau, a Thomas clerk in each the appeals and Supreme courts, wrote to a Virginia man named Angelo Cordova. Mr. Landau hoped to purchase a lobster.

A number of years earlier, writing considered one of his first Supreme Court docket opinions in a case that handled the usual courts ought to apply when reviewing states’ prison convictions, Justice Thomas had rejected the enchantment of a person who had burglarized the Cordova household’s summer time house. Among the many stolen gadgets — the crustacean in query, a lobster from the Philippines, preserved, stuffed and mounted.

The Cordovas gladly handed over the lobster, which Mr. Landau introduced to Justice Thomas, to his amusement, at a clerk reunion.

Justice Thomas has steadily stated he guarantees his clerks that they’ll go away their jobs with “clear fingers, clear hearts, and clear consciences.” Through the years, the clerks haven’t solely bestowed tokens of loyalty just like the lobster — a number of clerks additionally purchased him batteries for his R.V. — however defended him and his legacy in making an attempt instances. When two Wall Road Journal reporters printed a greatest vendor in 1994 detailing sexual harassment allegations in opposition to the justice and the politics of his affirmation, two former clerks, Ms. Ingraham and Stephen Smith, defended him in The Washington Publish. “The autumnal pounding of Supreme Court docket Justice Clarence Thomas has resumed,” they wrote, including, “The maligning of him as an individual has been each heart-wrenching and irritating.”

When allegations surfaced in 2016 that Justice Thomas had groped a girl throughout a 1999 banquet, his former clerk, Carrie Severino, wrote in Nationwide Overview, “I look ahead to the day when the Left has had sufficient of making an attempt to destroy this worthy and admirable man.”

Within the wake of an HBO sequence that 12 months dramatizing the affirmation hearings, some members of the clerk community started engaged on a flattering documentary movie and ebook challenge, geared toward portraying “the true Clarence Thomas,” within the phrases of Mark Paoletta, an adopted clerk who helped with the challenge.

However in recent times, fissures have shaped within the community.

The conflicts got here to the fore after Mrs. Thomas and John Eastman, a 1996 clerk, attended the “Cease the Steal” rally on Jan. 6, 2021. Mr. Eastman, who spoke on the rally, was a chief architect of the scheme to create slates of pretend electors and strain Vice President Mike Pence to refuse to certify the election. (Mrs. Thomas’s broader activism to overturn the election would emerge later.)

In a message to the listserv, first reported by The Washington Publish, Mr. Eastman stated he would proceed to problem the election, writing: “Relaxation assured that these of us concerned on this are working diligently to determine the reality.”

That provoked a pointy rebuke from Mr. Smith, a regulation professor at Notre Dame. “If by ‘reality’ you imply what really occurred, versus a false narrative, then I agree,” he wrote. Others spoke up, too.

Mrs. Thomas later apologized. Whilst she bemoaned the lack of the election, she wrote, “Let’s pledge to not let politics divide THIS household, and study to talk extra gently and knowingly throughout the divide.”

That wasn’t the tip of the dialogue. After the State Bar of California introduced an ethics investigation of Mr. Eastman in March 2022, Wendy Stone Lengthy, a 1997 clerk, wrote to the Thomas community.

“Pricey Clerk Household, John Eastman is being put via a sham disbarment continuing by the bar of the state of California,” she wrote, encouraging fellow clerks to talk out on his behalf and offering a hyperlink to donate to his protection fund.

She added a postscript warning the group to not leak the e-mail. “This household was created by Ginni and CT, and you might be hurting them greater than anybody should you assault the integrity and sanctity of it,” she wrote. “We are able to disagree over points, however we’re a household, and CT has informed us to assist one another and take care of one another.”

Jodi Kantor contributed reporting, and Julie Tate contributed analysis. Produced by Jonathan Corum and Rumsey Taylor.