My newsroom colleagues Steve Eder and Abbie VanSickle have written an excellent report on Crystal Clanton, who is Justice Clarence Thomas’s new law clerk. She left Turning Point USA, a MAGA-aligned group, after she was accused of writing racist messages, including a text that said “I HATE BLACK PEOPLE.”
Clanton told The New Yorker that she doesn’t remember sending the message, and she’s been silent on the matter since. Since her firing, however, her former boss, Charlie Kirk, has claimed that the messages were fake and were created to smear her.
After Turning Point USA fired her, Clarence and Virginia Thomas took her in. They let her live in their home, and she worked for Ginni Thomas at her firm, Liberty Consulting. The Thomases have helped guide Clanton’s career since, and now Justice Thomas has hired her.
I have three distinct thoughts. First, I don’t think anyone should criticize the Thomases for taking her in. Even if she made a dreadful mistake, she should still be treated with love and compassion. In fact, extending a helping hand to someone who is in the center of a public firestorm is an act of grace that more people should emulate.
Second, there is an immense difference, however, between opening your home and opening up a public office. Clanton is now in a position of public trust, and no one should simply trust Kirk’s explanation. Her own silence is deafening. She will be working on civil rights cases, and the public needs to know if she actually did write that she hates Black people.
Third, I’m disturbed by the fact that she worked first for Ginni Thomas and then for Justice Thomas. Ginni Thomas urged the Trump administration to overturn the 2020 election and trafficked in the most bizarre conspiracy theories. It would be entirely fair to call her rhetoric unhinged.
Clarence Thomas’s defenders have rightly argued that we can’t judge a justice by his spouse, but that defense becomes harder to make when he hires one of his wife’s former employees.
Justice Thomas has a number of loyal defenders on the right, and for good reason. He’s a brilliant man who is known to be kind and generous to the people around him. In 2022, Justice Sonia Sotomayor went out of her way to compliment Thomas, saying that he is a “man who cares deeply about the court as an institution — about the people who work here.”
But one shouldn’t simply trust even those public officials one admires. Clanton’s hiring demands answers, and it’s now up to Clanton and Kirk to speak plainly.
