The prestige that comes with the Supreme Court clerkship cannot be overstated. This job is a golden ticket that is awarded to just 36 people each year, or about 1 in 1,000 law graduates, or someone of high caliber. Big law firms are luring Supreme Court clerks with $500,000 signing bonuses. Clanton, a 2022 graduate of George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia School of Law, will be the university’s third Superior Court clerk since 2021.
Jane Mayer of The New Yorker unearthed Clanton’s writing in 2017 in an article about Turning Point USA, a conservative youth organization run by Charlie Kirk. Notably, Clanton, the group’s field director, did not deny writing the document. “I have no recollection of any of these messages and they do not reflect what I believe or who I am, nor were they when I was a teenager,” she wrote to Mayer. I wrote in an email.
“Turning Point assessed the situation and took decisive action within 72 hours of becoming aware of the issue,” Kirk told Mayer in a separate email. Kirk’s publicist, Andrew Corbett, reaffirmed the New Yorker’s account when I wrote about Clanton in 2021, saying in a 2022 conversation that she was “a turning point due to the discovery of the problematic text.” “I was fired from my job,” he repeated.
It appears that the “I hate black people” message was not an isolated incident. Mediaite, a website that reported on Clanton’s hiring by Ginny Thomas in 2018, said the Snapchat message included a photo of a man who appeared to be Arab and a message that Clanton wrote, “9/11 Again.” “We’re thinking of ways to do this,” the caption read. ”
After leaving Turning Point, Clanton was hired by Ginny Thomas and lived with her in Virginia for almost a year before enrolling at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School.
Thomas then recommended Clanton to Chief Judge William H. Pryor Jr. of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. Mr. Pryor is one of the most conservative members of the federal judiciary. He was on President Donald Trump’s shortlist for the high court, but was deemed too conservative to pass Senate confirmation, making him a reliable “feeder judge” for the high court, especially Thomas. .
Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee filed an ethics complaint with the 11th Circuit after news reports that Pryor had hired Clanton as his law clerk. The matter was transferred to the Second Circuit, where Chief Judge Debra Ann Livingston ruled that Pryor and U.S. District Judge Corey Mays, who hired Clanton before taking Pryor’s clerkship, “conducted due diligence and “No illegality was committed in the decision to hire Clanton,” it said, dismissing the issue. Decide on candidates based on prior information. ”
Letters filed by Clarence Thomas and Pryor with the Second Circuit and obtained by Bill Rankin of the Atlanta Journal Constitution detail the relationship between Clanton and the Thomases and Pryor’s employment of Clanton. Ta. “I know Crystal Clanton and I know her prejudices,” Thomas wrote. “Her prejudices are the exact opposite of her nature.”
Thomas said his wife “informed me about the poor treatment she received at Turning Point and asked me to allow her to live with us.” He told how he encouraged Clanton, who was “understandably distraught and depressed,” to attend law school. I recommended her when she applied to her law school. and recommended her to Pryor as her clerk and informed him of her “grossly unfounded and unsubstantiated allegations against her.”
Mr. Thomas concluded, “If she performs up to my expectations and excels in office work, I am certainly willing to consider her for office work.”
The Second Circuit’s dismissal raised a new defense. Quoting an anonymous Turning Point executive, presumably Kirk, Mr. Clanton himself claimed to be the victim of a rogue employee who was fired for creating fake text messages disparaging his co-workers..
Pryor’s letter said Clanton did not dispute the racial discrimination allegations because he was bound by a non-disclosure agreement. He cited a letter Kirk sent him and claimed the media reports were “completely false.” In fact, Kirk claimed that the anonymous employee “was fired after the organization learned that this person had created the fake text messages.” His purpose was to make it appear as if his colleague had committed fraud when he had not.
This alone cannot be trusted. That doesn’t match what Clanton and her attorney told Mayer at the time. This is inconsistent with what Kirk told Mayer about taking “decisive action” after the texts were revealed. That doesn’t match what Corbett told me about Clanton being “fired.”
To its credit, the U.S. Judicial Conference’s Committee on Judicial Conduct and Disability, which oversees the federal judiciary, understands this. In July 2022, the Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ordered the creation of a special committee to further investigate the Clanton matter, stating that “an appropriate evaluation of the judge’s conduct cannot be accomplished without factual findings regarding: (1) Whether the candidate has done the following. Statements (or content thereof) attributed to her. (2) What the candidate said [Pryor and Maze] About them. ”
The committee said Clanton “has never publicly denied the allegations” and noted that “there are numerous individuals with direct knowledge of the candidate’s alleged conduct.” At a minimum, the committee said, “the task force should attempt to interview the candidates and the witnesses identified in the media reports we cite.”
You might think that if Pryor and Mays had been so confident in Clanton’s character, they would have welcomed a closer investigation. Instead, it argued that the Judicial Conference Committee had no authority to tell the Second Circuit what to do. This is because federal law governing judicial ethics states that the presiding judge’s order to remove the judge is “final and conclusive and is not subject to judicial review.” whether to appeal or not. ” This appears to be a rule designed to deter frivolous accusers from persisting, but it is not a mechanism to prevent the Judicial Council from acting.
In response to Pryor and Mays’ claims, the Second Circuit asked the Judicial Conference Executive Committee for guidance on what to do. We don’t know what that guidance was — welcome to the black hole of judicial ethics proceedings — but we do know the outcome: The Second Circuit stuck its head in the sand. It refused further action in October 2023.
The incident has been resolved. Mr. Clanton was hired. This episode is a stain – and not just on Clanton and Thomas. It taints the entire federal judiciary, which has proven institutionally unable and unwilling to enforce basic ethical rules.