A conservative think tank has filed an ethics complaint against U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, alleging failure to disclose required financial information connected to her husband’s income and funding sources for Brown’s inauguration ceremony.
The Center for Renewing America sent a letter Monday addressed to the Judicial Conference Secretary, claiming that Brown “willfully failed to disclose required information regarding her husband’s medical malpractice consulting income for over a decade.”
Led by a former White House official under former President Donald Trump, the complaint also accuses the justice of failing “to report the private funding sources of her massive investiture celebration at the Library of Congress in her most recent financial disclosure.”
Russ Vought, president of the conservative group, is urging the federal government to open an ethics investigation into whether Brown violated a federal law called the Ethics and Government Act of 1978.
“The Conference should refer Justice Jackson to the Attorney General [Merrick Garland] for her failure to disclose her husband’s consulting income and open an investigation into the potential private funding of her investiture celebration,” Vought said.
Brown was sworn in as an associate justice in June 2022, making her the first Black woman to serve on the nation’s highest court. During his campaign, President Joe Biden promised to nominate the first Black woman to the Supreme Court.
Only two Black justices currently serve on the Court, including Brown and Clarence Thomas, who has been under scrutiny after reports revealed he had received expensive gifts from several billionaire Republican megadonors, including Dallas real estate tycoon Harlan Crow.
Senate Democrats urged Thomas to recuse himself from an upcoming decision on Trump’s immunity in a federal case linked to election interference. They cited a conflict of interest due to his wife, Ginni Thomas’, alleged involvement in a scheme to maintain Trump’s presidency post-election. Her involvement was tied to events surrounding Trump’s false claims of election fraud and the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
Meanwhile, federal judges are required to report the “source of items of earned income earned by a spouse from any person which exceed $1,000…except…if the spouse is self-employed in business or a profession, only the nature of such business or profession needs be reported,” according to the letter.
The letter notes that “since 2012, Brown has not disclosed these sources” of earned income by her husband, surgeon Patrick Jackson. “Jackson’s failure to disclose her husband’s medical malpractice clients, the public and parties are left without the opportunity to ensure that she has no conflict of interest in a particular case,” Vought wrote.
Ginni Thomas’ earnings from parties that actually have had business before the high court have been a subject of scrutiny since her husband amended years of financial disclosures in 2011.
Clarence Thomas, responding to criticism from liberal watchdogs, claimed that year that disclosures his wife had been paid some $700,000 over six years by the Heritage Foundation had been “inadvertently omitted due to a misunderstanding of the filing instructions.” The conservative think tank routinely files amicus briefs in support of cases that go before the Supreme Court.
It is unclear what will come from the CRAs complaint. At the time of Thomas’ incident, Steven Lubet, an expert on judicial ethics at Northwestern University School of Law, said failure to disclose spousal income “is not a crime of any sort.” Adding that he’s not aware of “a single case of a judge being penalized simply for this.”
Neither Brown nor the Supreme Court has yet to respond to the allegations.
