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In late August, amid a rising outcry over revelations that Justice Clarence Thomas had acquired a long time 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 lately concerning 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 help of Justice Thomas. Minutes later got here a reply. “I simply needed to leap up instantly 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 have been listening to concerning 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’ non-public e mail listserv. “We really feel much less alone at the moment, due to you all!!! 🙏💕💕💕” she wrote, providing particular due to the letter’s coordinators and all “who stepped into our hearth!!!”
Within the 32 years since Justice Thomas got here via the fireplace of his affirmation hearings and onto the Supreme Courtroom, he has assembled a military of influential acolytes in contrast to 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 colleges, high regulation corporations, 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,” mentioned Todd C. Peppers, a professor of public affairs at Roanoke School and the writer of “Courtiers of the Marble Palace: The Rise and Affect of the Supreme Courtroom Legislation Clerk.” “It’s frankly astonishing.”
For Justice Thomas, the letter got here at a time of each trial and triumph. He had turn out to be the face of long-simmering questions concerning the excessive courtroom’s moral tips. However he was additionally on the peak of his affect. The courtroom’s senior justice, he had spent years on the shedding aspect 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 sport, and his former clerks have been amongst its most necessary gamers. The Thomases didn’t reply to requests for remark, however in a 2008 interview, the justice mentioned, “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 have been primarily based on “rules 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 least 18 of these former clerks have served as state, federal or army judges, practically 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; practically a dozen made his Supreme Courtroom quick lists. Former Thomas clerks have argued, and received, a number of of probably the most momentous Supreme Courtroom circumstances of current years.
The community additionally contains plenty 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 Courtroom clerks are, by definition, the type of formidable legal professionals more likely to wield important affect of their post-clerk lives. What makes Justice Thomas’s clerks so exceptional, 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, primarily based 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 a long time.
It’s common 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 throughout the Trump administration, mentioned Justice Thomas was “fairly extraordinary by way of conserving in contact together 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 season 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 Struggle 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 type of den mom. Hers has been a very lively position for a Supreme Courtroom partner — overseeing manufacturing of a listing with a web page for every clerk, in addition to the e-mail listserv and a non-public Fb group. All of it, she has mentioned, is supposed to construct “connective tissue throughout and all through this superb group 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 truth, a shared ideological mission. She cheered when Mr. Trump appointed members of the Thomas clerk roster as judges: “Thank God,” Mrs. Thomas advised an interviewer, rattling off different appointments. “He used to inform them, ‘You’re going to be future leaders, it’s coming your approach, you’re going to be subsequent.’ And now they’re.” Final 12 months, she inspired clerks to begin an e mail thread during which members shared articles celebrating the courtroom’s choice overturning the constitutional proper to abortion.
The community has discovered its personal methods to have fun Justice Thomas and his legacy. In 1998, one of many justice’s clerks hunted down and offered him with a memento from one in all his first Supreme Courtroom opinions: a mounted taxidermy lobster.
When Justice Thomas speaks of his clerks, he tends to seek advice from them as his “youngsters.” As he put it in a chat a decade in the past at Harvard Legislation College, “I actually love my clerks.”
‘Making an attempt to Prepare a Pig’
For a few years, Supreme Courtroom clerkships have been thought-about largely nonpartisan. Accomplishment — high grades, regulation overview membership, suggestions — somewhat than ideology was the foreign money required to win one of many coveted jobs. Aspirants normally labored first for a feeder decide, one in all a small group of outstanding federal judges with shut ties to the justices and observe 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 have been anticipated to use to all 9 of them.
Because the nation has turn out to be 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 absolutely embraced the pattern. In 2010, The New York Occasions famous that each one 84 of his clerks had skilled with Republican-appointed appeals judges, and that sample has largely continued lately.
“I’m not going to rent clerks who’ve profound disagreements with me — that’s a waste of my time,” Justice Thomas mentioned throughout an interview in Dallas in 1999. “And somebody mentioned 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 typically mentioned 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 colleges like Harvard, the College of Chicago and Yale, he’s identified for making a degree of venturing past this pool. He has employed from George Mason College in Virginia and the College of Kansas, each public colleges, and church-affiliated colleges 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, “Hold egos right here.”
Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr., who died in 1998, famously mentioned the courtroom operated “like 9 separate regulation corporations,” every its personal small world with the justice on the middle. Justice Thomas eagerly debates circumstances together 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 Courtroom 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 basic 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 might help each other.
On the Supreme Courtroom, Mrs. Thomas has hosted girls’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 girls 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, one in all 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 together with his frequent benefactor, the billionaire conservative donor Harlan Crow, who had hosted “Clarence’s clerks for conferences, research 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 shocked the Thomases with a banner that learn “Liberty and Justice (Thomas) for All.” So many individuals got here to the retreat {that a} group photograph was shot from a drone.
Seeding the Area
As a microcosm of the radiating energy of the clerk community, take into account the profession of William Consovoy.
Whereas finding out regulation at George Mason within the early 2000s, Mr. Consovoy grew to become enamored of Justice Thomas’s originalist judicial pondering — a technique of decoding 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 a number of the signature authorized questions of the day. The regulation agency he helped construct earlier than his demise final winter, Consovoy McCarthy, has turn out to be a boutique go-to litigator for the correct.
In 2013, Mr. Consovoy was a key member of the staff that efficiently challenged a central provision of the Voting Rights Act, a regulation from the civil rights period aimed 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 way in which for 9 states, primarily within the South, to vary election legal guidelines with out federal clearance. Shock waves from the case are nonetheless being felt, together with in current 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 Courtroom.
Mr. Consovoy’s work additionally constructed on Justice Thomas’s harsh critique of affirmative motion — that such applications stigmatized Black folks whereas offering cowl to failures to deal with the true wants of deprived People and discriminated towards 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 Courtroom. The case didn’t achieve ending affirmative motion, however Mr. Consovoy would be a part of conservative teams in mounting one other assault, steering two challenges — at Harvard and on the College of North Carolina — to the Supreme Courtroom. 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 out to be regulation companions, many serving to lead influential corporations like Jones Day, Kirkland & Ellis and Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher.
Whereas many Thomas clerks have gone on to show, there are clusters at two colleges which might be facilities of conservative authorized scholarship — George Mason’s Scalia Legislation College and Notre Dame. Justice Thomas, who has co-taught with a number of former clerks, has been a visiting professor at each colleges.
He has crammed the judiciary together with his disciples, in far better numbers than Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, current 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-about a Supreme Courtroom 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 Courtroom introduced that it will hear the problem to federal approval of the drug. That case follows on the heels of the courtroom’s placing down Roe v. Wade — in a case argued efficiently by Mississippi’s solicitor basic, 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 have been hardly the one former Supreme Courtroom 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 — grew to become 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 Courtroom litigator whereas in non-public apply, served as principal deputy solicitor basic after which performing solicitor basic 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 non-public apply, Mr. Wall argued an admiralty case that targeted on a yacht that had run aground. The ethics questions surrounding Justice Thomas have 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 stuffed 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 one in all his first Supreme Courtroom opinions in a case that handled the usual courts ought to apply when reviewing states’ legal convictions, Justice Thomas had rejected the enchantment of a person who had burglarized the Cordova household’s summer season dwelling. 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 offered to Justice Thomas, to his amusement, at a clerk reunion.
Justice Thomas has ceaselessly mentioned he guarantees his clerks that they are going to 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 Avenue Journal reporters printed a greatest vendor in 1994 detailing sexual harassment allegations towards the justice and the politics of his affirmation, two former clerks, Ms. Ingraham and Stephen Smith, defended him in The Washington Submit. “The autumnal pounding of Supreme Courtroom 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 ceremonial dinner, his former clerk, Carrie Severino, wrote in Nationwide Overview, “I sit up for 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 e-book mission, aimed toward portraying “the true Clarence Thomas,” within the phrases of Mark Paoletta, an adopted clerk who helped with the mission.
However lately, 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 faux 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 Submit, Mr. Eastman mentioned he would proceed to problem the election, writing: “Relaxation assured that these of us concerned on this are working diligently to establish the reality.”
That provoked a pointy rebuke from Mr. Smith, a regulation professor at Notre Dame. “If by ‘fact’ you imply what truly occurred, versus a false narrative, then I agree,” he wrote. Others spoke up, too.
Mrs. Thomas later apologized. At the same time as 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.
“Expensive 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 for those who assault the integrity and sanctity of it,” she wrote. “We will disagree over points, however we’re a household, and CT has advised 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.
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