Author and former Senate Judiciary Committee counsel Lillian McEwen, whose memoir this year describes a five-year romantic relationship in the 1980s with Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, will deliver a lecture Oct. 26 calling for his resignation on grounds of corruption that is dangerous to the public.
“The mask he has worn for so long has slipped during the past 20 years to reveal dishonesty, greed, and abuse of the public trust,” she told me in an exclusive interview before her talk at the National Press Club at 7 p.m. (ET). “Fueled by self-hatred and resentment, Justice Thomas has allowed himself to be purchased.”
Update with my video interview: Clarence Thomas—perjurer, tax cheat, fanatic, party operative—has GOT TO GO, declares Judge Lillian McEwen (his former lover).
Her comments come during widespread concern among court scholars over its ethics, partisanship and the adverse impact on the public. "The Supreme Court," says the cover of the widely respected Closed Chambers analysis by former court clerk Edward Lazarus, "affects the life of every American every day." Part of the concern has been visible in many retrospectives this month on the 20th anniversary of the Thomas confirmation hearings before the Judiciary Committee, in which he denied sexually harassing his former staffer Anita Hill. But, as reflected below, the criticism recently has gone far beyond Thomas to reflect dismay about an unaccountable judiciary. Some on the bench accept money and gifts from those with interests before the courts and, recently in the case of Thomas, brag that they do not need to follow precedent if they want to change the law.
"This is going to be a big year for the Supreme Court," says Alliance for Justice President Nan Aron, whose group fought the Thomas nomination and, as described in a new column here, A Question of Integrity Hangs Over the U.S. Supreme Court, is launching a documentary next Tuesday portraying the court's failings. "This election cycle is going to remind everyone of the effects of its infamous Citizens United decision, as vast sums of corporate money flood the electoral system."
Thomas has ignored requests for comment aside from occasional and largely oblique denials of irregularities.
McEwen’s lecture will be the first time she provides a view on the justice’s overall fitness to serve based on her varied experiences with him and as part of Washington's legal community. The retired judge at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission earlier this year published a blunt memoir, DC Unmasked and Undressed. In a powerful narrative style that largely avoids politics and policy, it recounts her search for happiness in law and romance after a harsh childhood with cruel parents in then-segregated Washington, DC. She says she decided to break up with Thomas before his current marriage in 1987, his second, but before then had experiences with him that suggest to her that he perjured himself in his 1991 confirmation testimony about Hill.
The Senate committee chaired by Joe Biden failed to call witnesses who could have supported Hill publicly. The conservative group Citizens United had mounted a television ad campaign backing Thomas and targeting Biden and two other prominent Senate Democrats for what it called their past scandals.
The campaign,devised by Citizens United founder Floyd Brown following his 1988 successes with the notorious "Willie Horton" presidential ads, ridiculed Biden and his colleagues Ted Kennedy and Alan Cranston, with a headline, "Who Will Judge the Judge?" McEwen was by then a former counsel to the committee while Biden was chairman. She says Biden and others on staff knew during the confirmation battle that she had dated Thomas during the years he supervised Hill at the Reagan Administration's Equal Opportunity Employment Commission and Department of Education.
Her Oct. 26 lecture with Q&A, however, pertains primarily to what she describes as an overall pattern of Thomas deceptions that includes his family life, best-selling 2007 autobiography, My Grandfather's Son, and his search for wealth and approval among wealthy backers.
Those kinds of suspicions exploded into scandal earlier this year over the justice’s false statements on his annual federal judicial disclosure forms. As first documented by Common Cause in January, he failed to disclose what critics compute as at least $1.6 million in benefits to his household, much of it payments to his wife, Virginia. Year after year, the justice falsely denied on the simple, sworn forms that his wife received reportable income, according to the revised forms he submitted after Common Cause exposed the scandal in January, initially through a Los Angeles Times article. The non-partisan reform group has an updated chart here of allegations. The Alliance for Justice has a more general report on court ethics here.
Since then critics in Congress, public interest groups and the press have documented conflict of interest, false statement and bribery allegations involving at least two of the nation’s most important cases of the past century, each decided on 5-4 votes with Thomas casting a deciding vote.
Bush v. Gore in effect awarded the 2000 presidency to the Bush administration by halting the Florida recount at a time when Thomas was arguably conflicted by his wife's work leading Bush transition planning for the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing advocacy group. Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission last year upended federal election law by removing restrictions on campaign contributions by corporations and unions under the majority’s theory that the law unduly burdens their First Amendment rights.
Apparently seeking to cash in on the forthcoming decision, Virginia Thomas obtained $500,000 in November 2009 from real estate mogul Harlan Crow, according to documents now public. The documents show that promptly after the court announced the decision in January 2010 she created Liberty Central, a 501 (c-4) organization that would pay her $495,000 in salary to lead a group that would help corporations perform effectively under the wide-open election system the court put in place nationally.
Forty-six House Democrats have called for an FBI and/or House impeachment probe. On Oct. 25, a progressive group called Protect Our Elections posted an ad headlined, "Clarence and Virginia Thomas...Bought by Billionaires," and shown below.

The explanatory text begins:
Virginia, Harlan, Clarence and David have been having a good laugh at our expense. How much longer will we let this go on? America’s citizens have had it with people in power who violate the law. That includes Clarence Thomas who has used his position as a Supreme Court Justice to flout the law and enrich himself, his wife and their cronies through corrupt backroom deals with billionaires Harlan Crow, and Charles and David Koch.
Also, the group posted a 12-page, single-space summary of false statement, bribery evidence against Clarence and Virginia Thomas, which it says it sent to the FBI in July as part of an ongoing dialogue with the FBI and members of Congress. Kevin Zeese, counsel for Protect Our Elections.org and an affiliated group, Accountability in Justice, says prosecuting Clarence Thomas should be the top priority for anyone concerned about ethics in government because Thomas is "corrupter No. 1" among all of the nation's high-level government officials in terms of documented evidence of crime. For months, Zeese has also been one of the main organizers preparing for an Occupy Wall Street offshoot now located at Freedom Plaza near the White House. He says the Freedom Plaza protests resulting in 19 arrests Oct. 15 at the Supreme Court are just the beginning of its campaign against Thomas and his court colleagues who fail to provide oversight against internal lawbreaking and corrupt rulings.
Kathleen Arberg, the court spokeswoman, told Huffington Post reporter Jennifer Bendery that the Thomas omissions on his disclosure forms were "inadvertent," as Bendery reported in Democrats Ramp Up Calls For Ethics Probe Of Clarence Thomas. Thomas declines comment, as does his friend and benefactor, Harlan Crow, heir to the Trammell Crow real estate fortune and an active advocate for extreme right-wing causes and donations benefitting the Thomas family and legacy. But Politico reported Thomas to have told a February meeting of conservative supporters at Liberty University closed to the media that he and his wife will continue to fight for liberty despite attacks, as described here: Defiant Clarence Thomas fires back.
Similarly, right-wing legal scholar John Yoo, author of notorious memos at the Bush administration justifying torture and now a professor of the Boalt Hall law school at the University of California, published an op-ed Oct. 22 in the Wall Street Journal, Twenty Years of Justice Thomas, applauding the career.
Justice Thomas's two decades on the bench show the simple power of ideas over the pettiness of our politics. Media and academic elites have spent the last 20 years trying to marginalize him by drawing a portrait of a man stung by his confirmation, angry at his rejection by the civil rights community, and a blind follower of fellow conservatives. But Justice Thomas has broken through this partisan fog to convince the court to adopt many of his positions, and to become a beacon to the grass-roots movement to restrain government spending and reduce the size of the welfare state.
Clarence Thomas set the table for the tea party by making originalism fashionable again. Many appointees to the court enjoy its role as arbiter of society's most divisive questions—race, abortion, religion, gay rights and national security—and show little desire to control their own power. Antonin Scalia, at best, thinks interpreting the Constitution based on its original meaning is "the lesser evil," as he wrote in a 1989 law journal article, because it prevents judges from pursuing their own personal policies. Justice Thomas, however, thinks that the meaning of the Constitution held at its ratification binds the United States as a political community, and that decades of precedent must be scraped off the original Constitution like barnacles on a ship's hull (Emphasis added).
More generally, the allegations of criminal and ethics violations arise at time of rising concern about the power of judges and their lack of accountability. The Washington Post reported this week that six of eight leading GOP presidential candidates are calling for sharp new restrictions on the power of judges.
Commentator Glenn Greenwald, right, published an important new book this week, With Liberty and Justice for Some, describing how the courts have created a two-tiered legal system:
As intense protests spawned by Occupy Wall Street continue to grow, it is worth asking: Why now? It is now clearly understood that, rather than apply the law equally to all, Wall Street tycoons have engaged in egregious criminality -- acts which destroyed the economic security of millions of people around the world -- without experiencing the slightest legal repercussions. Today, it is glaringly obvious to a wide range of Americans that the wealth of the top 1% is the byproduct not of risk-taking entrepreneurship, but of corrupted control of our legal and political systems....
In lieu of the rule of law -- the equal application of rules to everyone -- what we have now is a two-tiered justice system in which the powerful are immunized while the powerless are punished with increasing mercilessness. As a guarantor of outcomes, the law has, by now, been so completely perverted that it is an incomparably potent weapon for entrenching inequality further, controlling the powerless, and ensuring corrupted outcomes (Emphasis added).
Into this debate comes McEwen, whom I got to know this summer from reading her compelling memoir and interviewing her Sept. 22 on my weekly public affairs radio show, Washington Update. This week I suggested her speaking invitation before the McClendon Group at the Press Club, which hosts newsmakers with important stories who may be overlooked by deadline-driven media. Previous speakers have included Congressman Ron Paul, former Ambassador Joe Wilson, and future Obama National Security advisor James Clapper.
The McClendon Group, named for longtime White house correspondent Sarah McClendon, has been chaired for many years by her former staffer John E. Hurley, whose many civic posts included membership on the Justice Integrity Project's board of directors. As usual, the discussion will begin with a "Dutch Treat" dinner at 6:30 and a lecture at 7 p.m. followed by Q&A. Club rules ban microphones or photo at these gatherings but note-taking is permitted for the on-the-record remarks.
My prediction is that the smallish room will be packed beyond its capacity of about 50, including those standing, and that this will be a landmark in the historic public debate about whether criminal law and related ethics considerations can apply to Supreme Court justices who feel free tochange the law to accommodate their supporters under the guise that only justices can imagine what Founders would decide.
McEwen has a unique perspective as not only a companion of Thomas for what she describes as five of his formative years in Washington, but also as a former federal prosecutor, defense litigator and law professor, at Howard University. As a further preview of her remarks, she told me that by the time she ended the relationship with him, she had introduced him to Plato's Retreat, threesomes, and sexual fantasies, and heard him talk about exactly the same porno star, Long Dong Silver, that he specifically denied in his confirmation hearing as ever mentioning to Anita Hill
“He transformed himself,” she says more generlly, “from a self-pitying alcoholic into a campaigner who gave speeches for Republican candidates and causes all over the United States. His reward would be a seat on the Supreme Court.”
But, in her words, “He had turned into a bully, a religious hypocrite, and a very angry man as a result of the masks that he had to wear in order to please the Republican conservatives and evangelicals who would support his nomination.”
The slogan, "To be continued," seems especially apt here.

Savannah Now / Savannah Morning News, A monumental day at Pin Point, Chuck Mobley, Nov. 20, 2011. With a powerful and poignant mixture of preaching and preservation, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and the community of Pin Point celebrated the unveiling of a historical marker and the dedication of a heritage museum Saturday. I am a son of Pin Point,” said Thomas, who was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1991.

Associated Press / Washington Post, Activist Cornel West among 19 people arrested for protesting on steps of Supreme Court, Oct. 16, 2011. Author, commentator, civil rights activist and Princeton University professor Cornel West has been arrested while protesting on the steps of the Supreme Court about corporate influence in politics. A Supreme Court spokeswoman says 19 people were arrested Sunday afternoon after they refused to leave the grounds of the court.
Guardian, Clarence Thomas's conservatism: The first 20 years, Jason Farago, Oct. 13, 2011. The enigmatic judge keeps a low profile; yet, time is very much on the side of the supreme court's most reactionary justice
National Public Radio, The Ripple Effect, Nina Totenberg, Oct. 11, 2011. Twenty years ago Tuesday, the nation was spellbound by a political and sexual drama that played out before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Following an NPR report, the committee was forced to hold a second round of confirmation hearings to examine allegations it had previously ignored about Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas. University of Oklahoma law professor Anita Hill said she had been sexually harassed by Thomas when she worked for him at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission; the hearings probing that charge would change America's political, judicial and cultural landscape forever. But, while the Thomas confirmation hearings would have a profound effect on the country, Justice Clarence Thomas has proved to be a lightning rod, an enigma and, perhaps, a justice of prophetic vision.
Daily Beast, Surviving Clarence, Leslie Bennetts, Oct. 3, 2011. On a balmy Indian-summer afternoon in Waltham, Mass., a slender, attractive 55-year-old professor welcomes a visitor to her modest office at Brandeis University to talk about the historic scandal that transformed the national debate over sexual harassment two decades ago. Calm and as cheerful as her bright tomato-red cardigan, Anita Hill smiles wryly when asked if she suffered from posttraumatic stress after testifying at Justice Clarence Thomas’s 1991 Supreme Court confirmation hearings, where she was pilloried for revealing the way she said he behaved as her boss in two different jobs. “It was traumatic,” acknowledges Hill, who teaches public policy, law, and women’s studies at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management. “It hurt, and it hurt people I cared about. But I was determined not to be defeated by people who tried to make me out to be something I wasn’t.”
Washington Post, For Anita Hill, the Clarence Thomas hearings haven’t really ended, Krissah Thompson, Oct. 7, 2011.Twenty years ago, when Anita Hill returned home from the contentious Senate hearings during which she accused Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment, people told her not to worry — her name would be forgotten in a matter of months. But two things have become clear this week as she has re-entered the debate: The raw tensions over race, gender and politics raised by the hearings have not been forgotten. And Anita Hill is acting like a woman who wants her name remembered.
Huffington Post, Clarence's Questions, Part 1: The Case Of The Burning Cross, Oct. 7, 2011. Justice Clarence Thomas has not asked a question at a Supreme Court oral argument since Feb. 22, 2006. Many have commented on the meaning of his reticence, and Thomas himself -- who is as loquacious in speaking engagements as he is mum on the bench -- has put forward several explanations for his opting out of the lively back-and-forth among his eight colleagues and the lawyers who appear before them. But this series is called "Clarence's Questions," and not "Quiet Clarence," for a reason: As his sixth anniversary of self-imposed silence approaches this term and his third decade on the Court begins, it's worth examining the moments when Justice Thomas felt compelled to step into the fray.
Justice Integrity Project, Common Cause CEO Ramps Up Call for Thomas Probe, Andrew Kreig, Oct. 6, 2011. Common Cause President and CEO Bob Edgar Oct. 6 ramped up his group's call for a Justice Department probe of Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas on ethics issues. Speaking on the Washington Update weekly radio show I host Scott Draughon, Edgar cited new evidence to argue that federal judicial authorities should refer the matter to the DOJ.

Huffington Post, Democrats Ramp Up Calls For Ethics Probe Of Clarence Thomas, Jennifer Bendery, Oct. 5, 2011. House Democrats are ratcheting up the pressure for a formal investigation into Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas for failing to disclose information relating to his wife's earnings -- as much as $1.6 million over the past 13 years -- on his annual financial disclosure forms. House Rules Committee ranking member Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.), right, and Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) on Wednesday sent a letter to the House Judiciary Committee calling for hearings "on the pattern of potential ethical lapses" by Thomas, who, after years of filing his financial forms properly, stopped disclosing his wife Ginny's employment status every year between 1997 and 2011. During that time, the letter states, his wife made at least $1.6 million, based on reports from outside groups. "Public records clearly demonstrate that Justice Thomas has failed to accurately disclose information concerning the income and employment status of his wife, as required by law," reads the letter to House Judiciary Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas) and ranking member John Conyers (D-Mich.). "In addition, news reports indicate that Justice Thomas may have also failed to report gifts from wealthy supporters and inappropriately solicited donations for favored non-profit organizations."

OpEd News, Reform Teams Must Fight for the Dream, But Do It Much Better, Andrew Kreig, Oct. 4, 2011. As the Supreme Court begins its annual term on Oct. 3, I'd like to share suggestions below on how legal reformers -- our team, in other words -- can be much more effective in achieving results. That's the dream. But reformers face huge challenges that require new approaches to fight due process violations and other wrongdoing that appears to extend high into the legal system.
Justice Integrity Project, Reform Teams Must Fight for the Dream, But Much Better, Andrew Kreig, Oct. 3, 2011. As the Supreme Court begins its annual term today, Oct. 3, I'd like to share suggestions below on how legal reformers -- our team, in other words -- can be much more effective in achieving results. That’s the dream. But the reality is that we face huge challenges that require new approaches to fight due process violations and other wrongdoing that appears to extend high into the legal system.
Legal Schnauzer, The Road from Clarence Thomas to Harlan Crow Runs Close to Home, Roger Shuler, June 27, 2011. Mounting evidence indicates Justice Clarence Thomas is so ethically compromised that he should be removed from the U.S. Supreme Court. The latest evidence comes from a New York Times piece about Thomas' ties to a Texas real-estate baron named Harlan Crow. We have discovered that the Thomas/Crow story, in a roundabout way, links to one of our storylines here at Legal Schnauzer. In fact, our story is about judicial chicanery in Alabama, the kind that favors the wealthy over regular citizens. That theme should sound familiar if you have been following the trail of Clarence Thomas' numerous ethical lapses. And it raises this question: How far will some wealthy Americans go to buy justice? The answer, in the case of Harlan Crow, appears to be "pretty darned far." When you examine the actions of another wealthy titan, a man whose family has ties to Harlan Crow, you get the same answer.
New York Times, Thomas' ties to a Texas real-estate baron named Harlan, Mike McIntire, June 27, 2011. The two men met in the mid-1990s, a few years after Justice Thomas joined the court. Since then, Mr. Crow has done many favors for the justice and his wife, Virginia, helping finance a Savannah library project dedicated to Justice Thomas, presenting him with a Bible that belonged to Frederick Douglass and reportedly providing $500,000 for Ms. Thomas to start a Tea Party-related group. They have also spent time together at gatherings of prominent Republicans and businesspeople at Mr. Crow’s Adirondacks estate and his camp in East Texas. In several instances, news reports of Mr. Crow’s largess provoked controversy and questions, adding fuel to a rising debate about Supreme Court ethics. But Mr. Crow’s financing of the museum, his largest such act of generosity, previously unreported, raises the sharpest questions yet — both about Justice Thomas’s extrajudicial activities and about the extent to which the justices should remain exempt from the code of conduct for federal judges.
Slate, Clarence Thomas writes one of the meanest Supreme Court decisions ever, Dahlia Lithwick, April 1, 2011. Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas are at pains to say that New Orleans District Attorney Harry Connick was not aware of or responsible for his subordinates' unconstitutional conduct, except—as Justice Ruth Ginsburg points out—that Connick acknowledged that he misunderstood Brady, acknowledged that his prosecutors "were coming fresh out of law school," acknowledged he didn't know whether they had Brady training, and acknowledged that he himself had 'stopped reading law books … and looking at opinions' when he was first elected District Attorney in 1974." And Connick also conceded that holding his underlings to the highest Brady standards would "make [his] job more difficult."
Washington Post, Clarence Thomas's wife calls Anita Hill, stirring an old controversy, Karen Tumulty and Kevin Merida, Oct. 20, 2010. Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas: An enduring mystery. Virginia Thomas's phone call to her husband's accuser adds another strange twist to a nearly 20-year-old controversy The decision by the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to confront the woman who accused him of sexual harassment two decades ago has stirred up old and painful questions that have never fully been put to rest.
