A Watchdog Set Up to Fail

There was a fair amount of coverage of Clarence Thomas's many financial improprieties earlier this year. At some point, there was a claim that the facts had been investigated by a judicial review body of some sort or other and he was cleared, at least to someone's satisfaction.

ProPublica has a new story about that review body, called the Judicial Conference, and other than on the former Twitter — where I follow one of the ProPublica reporters — I haven't seen any coverage of that story, unless you're a person who reads ProPublica itself, as we all should.

It turns out the Judicial Conference never did any investigation of the private jet flights or money Thomas or his wife got from billionaires. Two different chairs of the Conference decided, by fiat, that Thomas had done nothing wrong. No problem!

The new ProPublica story is not getting the kind of notice that the sexier stories early in the year got, but this kind of rot at the core is just as important. The administrative structure described is set up to sound complicated, with office layered upon committee until you want to fall asleep, but in addition to the conference chairs who blatantly waved Thomas's wrongs aside, this is the gist of it:

Most of that daily work is farmed out to an obscure government agency known as the Administrative Office [which] had only about 12 full-time staffers in its financial disclosure division in 2022 and a rotating crew of temps. They review more than 4,000 disclosure reports each year. Instead of closely scrutinizing those disclosures, staff relies on the “honor system,” several of the people said.

Former officials at the Administrative Office say the unit is so mismanaged that a program assistant who orders office supplies and furniture has been tasked with helping review disclosures; staffers without law degrees have routinely given legal advice to judges; and some employees, including temps, have opted to simply fill out judges’ disclosures for them before signing off on those very same reports.

Wendy Smith, a former top attorney at the Administrative Office’s financial disclosure division, said the agency was structured to give the judiciary the appearance of complying with transparency laws, when it actually doesn’t. “They do not have a functioning financial disclosure and ethics program,” Smith said, “and I don’t believe they want one.”

So this "watchdog" is set up to fail at the job it's charged with, and the judges and justices in charge can't help but know it. Attorney Smith quit her job with the Administrative Office "because she wasn’t allowed to do her job as an ethics attorney, and when she tried to make changes to the financial disclosure program, she was stripped of her duties."

The ProPublica story contains a list of recommendations that would solve these problems. I hope more people read this story (despite all the other burning problems around us!) and changes are made, beyond the gutless ethics policy the Supreme Court came up with recently.