If you keep tabs on possible corruption at the Supreme Court, you likely know that the last month has involved a constant, comical stream of revelations about Clarence Thomas and his GOP sugar daddy, Harlan Crow. First, we learned that Crow had spent years treating the justice and his wife to lavish gifts, luxury vacations, and yacht/private jet rides—none of which Thomas felt the need to disclose. Then, it came out that Crow had purchased multiple properties from Thomas and his family, including one from the justice’s mother. (Again, none of these sales were disclosed.) And just yesterday, it emerged that Crow paid the private school tuition of the grand-nephew Thomas raised as a son. Obviously all of this is completely ridiculous, as is the fact that there will very likely be no repercussions whatsoever for Thomas, despite the fact that basically every other government employee would be fired for much less.

But if you thought ethics concerns in the Thomas marriage started and ended with the guy in the robes, you thought wrong!

Here’s a fun one from The Washington Post:

Conservative judicial activist Leonard Leo arranged for the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to be paid tens of thousands of dollars for consulting work just over a decade ago, specifying that her name be left off billing paperwork, according to documents reviewed by The Washington Post. In January 2012, Leo instructed the GOP pollster Kellyanne Conway to bill a nonprofit group he advises and use that money to pay Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, the documents show. The same year, the nonprofit, the Judicial Education Project, filed a brief to the Supreme Court in a landmark voting rights case.

Leo, a key figure in a network of nonprofits that has worked to support the nominations of conservative judges, told Conway that he wanted her to “give” Ginni Thomas “another $25K,” the documents show. He emphasized that the paperwork should have “No mention of Ginni, of course.”

According to the Post, Conway’s firm, the Polling Company, sent Leo’s Judicial Education project a bill for $25,000 and, per Leo’s directive to keep Ginni’s name off of it, listed the description as “Supplement for Constitution Polling and Opinion Consulting.” In total, documents show the Polling Company paid Ginni Thomas’s firm, Liberty Consulting, $80,000 between June 2011 and the same month the following year, with plans to pay another $20,000 before 2012 was up. Incidentally, in 2001, Clarence publicly complained about his salary on the Court, reportedly saying, “The job is not worth doing for what they pay.” That year, he made $178,300 per year; in 2022, his salary was $274,200. So an additional $80,000 to $100,000 would not have been anything to sneeze about!

Meanwhile, if you’re wondering if the nonprofit organization Leo advises had business before the Supreme Court the very year he was directing tens of thousands of dollars into Ginni Thomas’s pocket, wonder no longer. In December of 2012, per the Post, “the Judicial Education Project submitted an amicus brief in Shelby County v. Holder, a case challenging a landmark civil rights law aimed at protecting minority voters. The Court struck down a formula in the Voting Rights Act that determined which states had to obtain federal clearance before changing their voting rules and procedures. Clarence Thomas was part of the 5-to-4 majority.” Thomas also wrote a concurring opinion favoring “the outcome the Judicial Education Project and several other conservative organizations had advocated in their amicus briefs,” though he did not cite the Judicial Education Project’s brief.

Washington University law professor Kathleen Clark told the Post that Thomas should have, quite obviously, recused himself from the case. And while NYU law professor Stephen Gillers said the current interpretation of recusal laws would not have necessitated such a move, it’s more than obvious that the Court’s ethics and disclosure rules are a joke.

For his part, Leo naturally issued a series of statements defending the whole arrangement as totally proper and not at all corrupt. “I have known Clarence and Ginni Thomas since 1990,” he told the Post. “They are dear friends and are people of tremendous good will and integrity. Anybody who thinks that Justice Thomas is influenced in his work by what others say or do, including his wife Ginni, is completely ignorant of who this man is and what he stands for. And anybody who thinks Ginni Thomas would seek to influence the Supreme Court’s work is completely ignorant of the respect she has for her husband and the important role that he and his colleagues play in our society.”

Of his directive to keep Ginni Thomas’s name off of documents, he wrote, “Knowing how disrespectful, malicious and gossipy people can be, I have always tried to protect the privacy of Justice Thomas and Ginni.” Because what else is he going to say? I knew how bad this looked and I wanted to avoid it coming out in public?

Neither Thomas responded to requests for comment.