Clarence Thomas Assailed For Alleged Ethical Lapses By More House DemsMike Sacks - HuffPo
First Posted: 11/18/11 03:41 PM ET Updated: 11/18/11 05:05 PM ET
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On Friday, Slaughter submitted a new letter, this time addressed to Chief Justice John Roberts in his capacity as the presiding officer of the Judicial Conference, to update and clarify the September letter. At issue is the fact that Thomas repeatedly checked a box titled "none" on annual financial disclosure forms in response to a question about the source's spousal income. Yet during those years, his wife, Virginia Thomas, worked for the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation and for the Tea Party lobbying group Liberty Central, which she helped found.
The first letter asserted that Thomas' nondisclosures persisted "
hroughout his entire tenure of the Supreme Court," which began in 1991. It was fair to infer from his "high level of legal training and experience," Slaughter wrote, that the justice's failure presented the type of "willful" behavior that federal law requires the Judicial Conference to refer to the Department of Justice for investigation.
Friday's letter, however, states that Thomas actually did report his the sources of his wife's income until 1997, therefore heightening the inference that the justice had not "misunderstood the reporting instructions," as he asserted in January when he filed seven pages of addenda correcting his omissions over a six-year period. Citing information obtained by the left-leaning watchdog groups Common Cause and Alliance for Justice, Slaughter wrote that "Justice Thomas accurately filed his financial disclosure forms, including his wife's employment, for as many as 10 years beginning in 1987 when he was Chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission."
Noting in the new letter that the accurate filing continued through Thomas' tenure as a federal appeals court judge and his first five years as a Supreme Court justice, Slaughter wrote that "it is very difficult for Justice Thomas to make a credible argument that he understood the filing instructions for ten years but then misunderstood them for the next thirteen years."
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More: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/18/clarence-thomas-ethics-louise-slaughter-letter_n_1101854.html
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