Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas hired a recent law school grad who was accused of racism while working for a major conservative nonprofit in 2017 when she reportedly sent a text message to a colleague that said, “I hate Black people.”
Crystal Clanton graduated in 2022 from George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School in Virginia, which announced last week that she’d been hired as a law clerk for Justice Thomas.
Clanton briefly worked for Justice Thomas in the past, as well as Thomas’ wife, Ginni, in her work as a conservative activist.
After receiving a law degree in 2022, she was hired as a law clerk for two Republican-appointed federal judges, which sparked a firestorm on Capitol Hill as Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee were aware of the racist episode involving Clanton at her old job.
The controversy arose in 2017 when Clanton served as the national field director for the conservative student organization Turning Point USA.
At the time, an investigative report by The New Yorker about the nonprofit exposed Clanton’s text message in which she told a co-worker: “I HATE BLACK PEOPLE … I hate blacks. End of story.”
When confronted about the message, Clanton told the magazine she couldn’t remember writing it and asserted that the comments did not “reflect what I believe or who I am.”
Clanton resigned in disgrace over the incident, but she quickly landed on her feet by going to work for Ginni Thomas, with whom she began to help with media projects.
As part of the arrangement, Justice Thomas allowed Clanton to live in their Virginia home for almost a year.
Upon finishing law school, Clanton went to work as a law clerk for U.S. District Judge Corey Maze in Birmingham, Alabama, and from there, she took a job as a law clerk for Chief U.S. Circuit Judge William Pryor of the Atlanta-based 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, who has described her as “outstanding.”
“After Judge Maze recounted to me how well Crystal performed in her clerkship on the district court, I had high expectations for her on the Eleventh Circuit,” Judge Pryor wrote in a statement. “And she exceeded those expectations. Crystal is an outstanding law clerk.”
In 2021, however, lawmakers were less impressed as Reps. Jerrold Nadler and Hank Johnson called on the federal judiciary to investigate Maze and Pryor for misconduct amid concerns that Clanton’s hiring would breed distrust in the federal court system.
The misconduct complaint was dismissed in the 2nd U.S. Circuit Judicial Council, while Clanton quietly moved on from the debacle, continuing to work for Pryor before she was hired to perform work for the U.S. Supreme Court.
Justice Thomas defended Clanton in a 2022 letter that recommended her to Judge Pryor, according to previous reporting by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
“Bigotry is antithetical to her nature and character,” Thomas wrote at the time.
