Dems’ ‘Ethics’ Report On Thomas And Alito Is 93 Pages Of Lies

The Democrat-run Senate Judiciary Committee’s two-year partisan assault on conservative Supreme Court justices, especially Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, on baseless “ethics” allegations ended with a pathetic 93-page Democrat staff report replete with dishonest and false information. It was so bad it was issued the day after Congress left town for the year and right before the Christmas recess. 

This entire investigation was never about “ethics” but about trying to undermine the Supreme Court because it is no longer acting like a left-wing super legislature handing down opinions implementing the Democrats’ political agenda. 

The Democrats falsely accused Justices Thomas and Alito of violating ethics laws by not disclosing vacations with friends and not recusing from cases because of their spouses’ activities. They are wrong on both counts. 

Justices Thomas and Alito complied with the laws, regulations, advice, and Judicial Conference rulings regarding reporting trips with friends. They were not required to report these trips under the personal hospitality exemption outlined in the law, no matter what the leaders of this witch hunt, Democrat Sens. Dick Durbin and Sheldon Whitehouse, claim or wish. 

When the Judicial Conference, which was established by law to administer the ethics laws for the federal judiciary, changed its rules in March 2023 and excluded from the personal hospitality exemption trips on private planes and boats, Justice Thomas promptly reported such trips. 

In fact, in a humiliating rebuke to Whitehouse’s personal obsession with smearing Thomas, the Judicial Conference sent a letter to Whitehouse dated Jan. 2, 2025, rejecting his outrageous demand that the conference refer Thomas to the Department of Justice for investigation. With this action, the conference agreed that Thomas had done nothing wrong and had complied with the rules. It also found that where there were inadvertent omissions, Justice Thomas filed amended forms, as every justice and judge has done through the years. In other words, the Judicial Conference completely rejected Whitehouse’s frivolous attempt to smear our greatest justice. 

Ridiculous Recusal Claims

The staff report also falsely claims Justices Thomas and Alito violated the federal recusal law by not recusing from Jan. 6, 2021-related cases because of their wives’ activities. But the law only requires recusal if one’s spouse is a party to or lawyer in the case, has a financial interest, or there is a reasonable basis where the judge’s impartiality might reasonably be questioned. None of those factors are present here.

Ginni Thomas had concerns about fraud and irregularities in the 2020 elections. She expressed those concerns to a friend who was serving as White House chief of staff, and she also sent a prewritten form email to state legislators about election integrity concerns. Martha-Ann Alito flew iconic American flags at the Alitos’ home and summer home, including the historic Appeal to Heaven flag, which was created during the Revolutionary War period and has been flown by federal, state, and local governments through the years. But because some protesters carried this flag during the Jan. 6 demonstration, leftist critics claimed, without evidence, that Mrs. Alito was signaling support for the J6 defendants. 

A spouse’s opinion or activity is not a basis for a justice to recuse, and it’s sexist to argue otherwise. In fact, that’s what the Democrats and legal ethics experts argued when the shoe was on the other foot. 

In a seminal case in 2011, left-wing federal appellate Judge Stephen Reinhardt refused to recuse from a case concerning a challenge to California’s state ban on same-sex marriages, even though his wife’s ACLU chapter (where she was the executive director) had joined two amicus briefs in the court below arguing that the ban was unconstitutional, and she had publicly denounced the ban. 

Left-wing legal ethics expert Stephen Gillers filed a brief defending Reinhardt, stating that “a spouse’s views and actions, however passionately held and discharged, are not imputed to her spouse, and Judge Reinhardt is not presumed to be the reservoir and carrier of his wife’s beliefs. … No authority requires a judge to recuse based alone on the opinions of his or her spouse; only an ‘outmoded conception of the relationship between spouses’ would hold otherwise.” In stark contrast to Mrs. Thomas and Alito, who did not comment on any specific case in the court system, Judge Reinhardt’s wife’s group had joined two briefs in the case now before him. 

Neither Thomas nor Alito had any reason to recuse from any of these cases based on their spouses’ activities. Moreover, it’s astonishing that the Senate Democrats would criticize justices on recusal issues when Congress is not subject to any recusal laws. They are the only branch in our system not subject to such laws, and Durbin and Whitehouse have repeatedly taken official action to help their spouses’ clients. 

An Embarrassing Report

More generally, this Democrat staff report is an embarrassment. I served for 10 years as a chief counsel for oversight and investigations for a major congressional committee, managed nearly 200 investigative hearings, and issued several staff reports. Much of the information the staff received in response to letters sent to private citizens had already been reported in the press. The staff report here is based on very little investigative work itself and relies on shoddy work by discredited leftist-funded groups. It is a disgrace to the professionalism of congressional staff and the institution itself. 

For example, the staff report cites leftist-funded Fix the Court’s (FTC) absurd claim that Justice Thomas accepted $4.75 million in gifts when that figure has been completely discredited. FTC’s list has scores of trips Justice Thomas never even went on, preposterously values a trip to Indonesia as a $500,000 gift, calculating that Thomas chartered a private yacht for his own personal use, and absurdly values visiting friends at their summer home as a $280,950 gift. This source is a complete dumpster fire of false claims. 

This exposes Whitehouse and Durbin as pure hypocrites who don’t care about ethics. President Joe Biden and his family have taken more than 15 vacations at billionaires’ mansions, and he never once reported them on his form. These billionaires are not friends, they are donors, and they vacate their homes while the Bidens are there. 

In fact, Joe Biden decided to issue his sweeping and unprecedented pardon to his son, Hunter, while staying at a billionaire’s $34 million mansion on Nantucket Island. Joe Biden also vacationed over Christmas at a mansion in St. Croix Virgin Islands for the eighth time since 2014, and he has never reported these trips on his forms. Whitehouse and Durbin are fine with Biden grifting on billionaire donor homes but are outraged that Justice Thomas visits his friends at their homes and does not disclose it. 

The Democrats had no problem with Justice Stephen Breyer taking more than 230 trips paid for by third parties — 63 of these trips outside the United States and 17 of them funded by the Democrat Pritzker family. Never mind that Ruth Bader Ginsburg took more than 157 trips paid for by third parties, 28 of them international. RBG also received a $1 million gift from the Berggruen Institute, which she then secretly distributed to her favored charities.

Fix the Court is its own scandal center. Its CEO Gabe Roth reportedly violated federal law by failing to disclose that he was lobbying Congress on certain issues and was recently exposed for being paid a salary equivalent of 96 percent of FTC’s revenues, while running a deficit of nearly $46,000. Some experts believe this may violate federal law. FTC was also busted for failing to list several trips that liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor failed to disclose. FTC is a sloppy, partisan, noncredible source, but the Democrat staff report relies on its work for its findings. 

The staff report cites ProPublica’s dishonest reporting on the justices’ trips, despite ProPublica refusing to include for months in its reporting that similar claims about Thomas’ travel had already been raised in 2011 in a complaint filed by 20 Democrat members of Congress and that the Judicial Conference ruled in 2012 that Thomas had not failed to disclose any necessary information. When ProPublica was forced to write about this ruling, which blew up their entire false narrative that Thomas and Alito had violated the law, these left-wing activists sought to impugn the Democrat and Republican judges on the conference with smears from anonymous sources. This is their standard tactic. 

The staff report even lists a fictitious yacht trip around the Bahamas that Thomas never took with a friend, which was first falsely reported by ProPublica. The lawyer for the yacht owner confirmed in writing to the Senate that this trip never happened. But the lazy Democrat staff regurgitated ProPublica’s false story, which was based on unnamed anonymous sources, and apparently did no work itself to look into this matter. 

The Democrat staff report even shockingly cites Robert Schenk for his alleged claims about trying to manipulate justices through the Supreme Court Historical Society. But Schenk is a fabulist and liar whose credibility was destroyed in 2022 at a House hearing on Supreme Court ethics where he was exposed by Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, for totally fabricating a story about a Supreme Court case and also for repeatedly lying under oath in a federal trial. 

This is merely representative of the level of dishonesty in this report and a classic tactic of the left. Tell a lie, and when it is proven incorrect, keep spreading it, and rely on your media allies to insulate you from accountability. 

Finally, the staff report attacks the Judicial Conference, which is made up of 27 federal judges, including the chief justice and the chief judges of all the federal circuit, for its 2012 ruling that Justice Thomas complied with the disclosure rules and its modification of a recently adopted rule that had required judges to list as a gift staying overnight at the home of a friend or a family member (including a sibling or parent) if that home was held in an LLC simply for tax planning, estate, or security reasons. It was a stupid rule adopted in response to bullying by Whitehouse, and the conference wisely changed it. 

Utter Defeat

The Democrat staff report lies when it says the court has “allowed a culture of misconduct to metastasize into a full-blown crisis that has driven public opinion of the Court to historic lows.” On the day this report was released, the court’s approval rating of 48 percent is the highest it has been since March 2022, and its disapproval rating of 52 percent is the lowest it has been since March 2022. In stark contrast, Congress’s approval rating is at a stunningly dismal 17 percent, with a 71 percent disapproval rating. 

The Democrats’ entire assault on the court, and especially on Justices Thomas and Alito, has ended in utter defeat. The Democrats did not enact any “ethics” legislation and, in fact, could not even get a vote in the full Senate on their so-called Supreme Court ethics reform bill. They failed to pack the court and to force any binding code of ethics on it. 

The Democrats’ despicable smearing of the Supreme Court and these honorable justices earned them the wrath of the American people, and they are now in the minority in the House and Senate and President Trump is back in the White House.

I look forward to many more originalist opinions by this Supreme Court and especially two of the greatest justices of all time: Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. 

The author represented Ginni Thomas in the J6 Select Committee investigation and was on some of the trips with Justice Thomas mentioned in this article. 

Mark Paoletta served as a lawyer in the George H.W. Bush White House Counsel’s office and worked on the confirmation of Justice Thomas. He served as General Counsel of the Office of Management & Budget during the Trump Adminstration. He is a senior fellow at the Center for Renewing America.