A Republican activist who helped former president Donald Trump select judicial nominees arranged for thousands of dollars to be paid to the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas for what has been described as consulting work undertaken in the early 2010s, according to a report published in The Washington Post.
Leonard Leo, a conservative operative who runs a network of nonprofits that support Republican causes and push for conservative judicial nominees who have been vetted for their loyalty to the conservative movement, reportedly asked Kellyanne Conway, a GOP pollster who later served in the Trump administration, to invoice a nonprofit he advised and direct the payment her company received to Ms Thomas.
According to documents reviewed by the Post which date to 2012, Mr Leo told Ms Conway in a later email that he wanted her to “give” Ms Thomas “another $25k”.
He told the GOP pollster that the paperwork for the $25,000 payment should have “no mention of Ginni, of course”.
The polling firm operated by Ms Conway, The Polling Company, reportedly sent the nonprofit — the Judicial Education Project — a bill for $25,000 the same day as his email.
The invoice listed the payment as being for a “Supplement for Constitution Polling and Opinion Consulting”.
The Post reported that Ms Conway’s firm transferred $80,000 to Ms Thomas over a one-year period starting in June 2011 and ending in June 2012, but the report also noted that there’s no documentation of what work — if any — Ms Thomas did for either the nonprofit advised by Mr Leo or for Ms Conway’s company.
The report also notes that the nonprofit that indirectly paid Ms Thomas submitted friend-of-the-court briefs in a key voting rights case, Shelby County v Holder.
But In a statement to the Post, Mr Leo said the work undertaken by Ginni Thomas “did not involve anything connected with either the Court’s business or with other legal issues”.
He also said he asked for Ms Thomas’ name to be kept off payment paperwork because of “how disrespectful, malicious and gossipy people can be” in an effort to “protect the privacy” of the Supreme Court justice and his wife.
The report of Ms Thomas’ payments from Mr Leo’s nonprofit comes as her husband, Justice Thomas, is under increasing scrutiny after a series of reports exposing his history of accepting lavish hospitality and gifts from a Republican Party donor, Harlan Crow.
Prominent Democrats have called on Mr Thomas to resign from the court and have introduced legislation to place a binding code of ethics on the Supreme Court, which current does not have to abide by the same ethical rules as judges on circuit or district courts.
