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From LeverNews.com — Lever Time is the flagship podcast from the investigative news outlet The Lever. Hosted by award-winning journalist, Oscar-nominated writer, and Bernie Sanders' 2020 speechwriter David Sirota, Lever Time features exclusive reporting from The Lever’s newsroom, high-profile guest interviews, and expert analysis from the sharpest minds in media and politics.
[AUTO GENERATED TRANSCRIPT]
[00:00:00] David Sirota: Hey everyone. Welcome to another episode of Lever Time, the flagship podcast from The Lever, an independent investigative news outlet. I'm your host, David Sirota on today's show. We talk with Justin Elliot, one of the ProPublica reporters who broke open that explosive story about Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas accepting luxury gifts and having business deals with a billionaire real estate mogul over the last two decades, all while Thomas refused to disclose those gifts.
[00:00:38] David Sirota: We'll find out how those reporters broke open the story. We'll look at the ethics of the situation, and we'll talk about what we know about the billionaire Harlan Crowe, and his interest in the rulings of the Supreme Court and the rulings. Of Clarence Thomas for our paid subscribers. We're also dropping exclusive bonus episodes into our lever premium feed.
[00:01:00] David Sirota: Last week, for instance, we posted a lengthy interview with the economist Richard Wolff, about the escalating rivalry between . The US and China. and coming up this week we're gonna have a bonus interview about how tax breaks for rich people's 401k plans have become a huge drain on federal resources, and yet how that topic is never mentioned when politicians start demanding cuts to retirement programs like Social Security, so stay tuned for that in the Lever Premium feed. If you're not already a paying subscriber and want access to that premium content, head over to lever news.com right now. And become a supporting subscriber that'll give you access to the Lever Premium Podcast feed.
[00:01:41] David Sirota: With all of those extended interviews and that bonus content, plus as a paid subscriber, you'll have exclusive access to all of the in-depth reporting and investigative journalism that we do here at The Lever. Just hit the subscribe button at levernews.com to support. The work that we do. Also, if you like this podcast, we'd really appreciate your help.
[00:02:01] David Sirota: Tell your friends and family about lever time, leave a rating and review on your podcast player. Independent media will only grow and thrive because of passionate listeners and by word of mouth, and so we need all the help we can get to combat the inane bullshit that is corporate media. I'm here today, as always with Lever Times producer, Jared, what's up?
[00:02:21] Jared Jacang Maher: Hey, David, how you doing?
[00:02:23] David Sirota: All right, man. Big news week with the revelations about Clarence. Thomas. I'm super psyched to have Justin Elliot on. I mean, I think that story that, and really those two stories that they, that they broke, I mean, they have really dominated the news in a way. You rarely see corruption stories get in the news.
[00:02:41] Jared Jacang Maher: It really is. And it was a shocker, but at the same time, not a surprise at all the piece that, we published in the Lever this week pointing out how, Clarence Thomas has pushed to invalidate all political spending disclosure laws. While arguing that donors have a constitutional right to anonymously influence politics is right there in a lot of the rulings and dissents and concurrences that he puts down as a member of the Supreme Court, and it turns out he was living it in real life as well.
[00:03:18] David Sirota: I mean, I heard somebody say Clarence Thomas is now living his own truth or being the change he wants to be. I mean, Clarence Thomas has long argued that political spending disclosure laws that are supposed are, are designed to force private donors, to disclose what they are spending on public officials.
[00:03:41] David Sirota: He, Thomas has argued that those are wrong, those are unconstitutional, that effectively rich people have a First Amendment free speech, right, to anonymously influence politics. And so, in a sense, The revelations that Thomas didn't disclose the gifts he was getting from a billionaire who is connected to a number of groups that have been filing amicus briefs in front of Thomas's Supreme Court, That Thomas has been, basically, there's kind of a consistency there. There's a consistency in him saying he believes disclosure laws are unconstitutional and him not following the disclosure laws that are aimed at him and other judges. Now, obviously I'm not crediting Clarence Thomas for being consistent.
[00:04:30] David Sirota: But what I am saying is that in some senses, it shouldn't be a surprise that the guy who has taken the most extremist position on corruption, ha a a, and in saying that anti-corruption laws are bad, has. Acted in a private capacity as if those laws should be broken. I think the big question now is, well, what happens to him now that he, it sure looks like he has very explicitly and clearly broken the law.
[00:05:03] Jared Jacang Maher: Well, and a lot of the people that are pushing back on this report say things like, well, there's some ambiguity about what needed to be disclosed, which there wasn't. But when you actually look at his true belief that disclosure should not be a thing that anyone is required to do as part of being in government, and thenof course he doesn't until it comes out through this type of really in-depth deep investigative reporting. That's the only way that we even know about these connections.
[00:05:33] David Sirota: Right. I, I, I do think the fact that he's written these opinions does suggest some kind of actual motive here. That it wasn't just, oh, I forgot to file the form. You know, I, I, oh, I didn't know I had to file that form. I mean, that would be ridiculous unto itself, but it kind of suggests he made. A deliberate decision not to disclose the gifts he was taking because he doesn't ideologically believe. That anti-corruption laws, like disclosure laws should exist, and that's what we're gonna talk to Justin Elliot about specifically, what were the revelations, what do we now know, what do they mean, and what, if anything, is going to be done about that.
[00:06:21] David Sirota: That's coming up next, our interview with ProPublica's Justin Elliot. But first, let's take a quick break.
[00:06:26] David Sirota: /Welcome back to Lever Time. The news that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has been secretly receiving lavish gifts from a politically connected billionaire has been a huge story this week, to say the least, but it's been hardly surprising. We at the Lever have been covering this same group of corrupt donors and their connections to the Supreme Court for years, including working alongside ProPublica on some of those stories.
[00:06:55] David Sirota: So this week, the levers, Andrew Perez and I caught up with investigative reporter Justin Elliott, one of the ProPublica reporters that co-authored those stories. Clarence Thomas and that revealed all of those details about the relationship between Thomas and that billionaire. We talk with Justin about the latest to come out of that reporting.
[00:07:17] David Sirota: We look into the background of Harlan Crowe, that billionaire at the center of this, and we look at his dark money contributions to conservative political causes. We discuss the ethics of the situation, crow's specific interest in the Supreme Court, and we talk. What the future holds for Clarence Thomas.
[00:07:36] David Sirota: Here's our interview with Justin Elliot.
[00:07:40] David Sirota: Hey Justin, how you doing?
[00:07:41] Justin Elliot: Pretty good. Good to be here.
[00:07:42] David Sirota: Uh, Busy weeks for you guys over at ProPublica and a bombshell set of stories about justice Clarence Thomas.
[00:07:51] David Sirota: Let's first start with the, the very basics. Just lay out for us what revelations we've learned about Justice Clarence Thomas and why they are so important and so revelatory and, and what you think it reveals about the larger status, court.
[00:08:16] Justin Elliot: Yeah. So we, we've done a couple stories about Clarence Thomas' relationship with this real estate magnate and big Republican political donor named Harlan Crow who's based out of Dallas. And what we found is that Crow has been taking Clarence Thomas on sort of luxury vacations for over 20 years now, flying him on his private jet.
[00:08:43] Justin Elliot: Cruises on his super yacht. Crow owns this like essentially private hotel up in the Adirondacks in New York. And Clarence Thomas and his wife Ginni go there pretty much every summer. And so he, he's essentially been sort of subsidizing the, the. Luxury travel of Clarence Thomas. And then we after that story was published, Thomas and Crow both put out statements saying that, you know, we're dear friends and these are sort of family trips.
[00:09:12] Justin Elliot: And our second story was about actually a real estate deal between the two of them where Crow bought Clarence Thomas' mother's house down in Savannah, Georgia, along with two vacant lots from Clarence Thomas and some of his relatives. And a whole number of strange things around that, including the fact that Harlan Crow is now Clarence Thomas' mother's landlord, except the fact that he does not appear to be charging her rent.
[00:09:41] Justin Elliot: In terms of why it matters, I think there's kind of two issues. One, It's just, it's exceedingly unusual and for a public official will, for a public official to be accepting these kinds of gifts. And, and we're not talking like the, the trips we're talking about in some cases cost like hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars.
[00:10:00] Justin Elliot: I mean, Crow's private jet, it's a particularly nice private jet. It's a Bombardier Global 5,000. If you were to charter one of these things on the open market, you're paying like up to $15,000 per flight hour. So if you fly that to Indonesia, which they did you're pretty quickly just for the flight, getting it up into hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars.
[00:10:22] Justin Elliot: So the, the fact that Thomas Supreme Court Justice is, is accepting all this, all these gifts, A guy who's not only a businessman, but also somebody that has been very involved with sort of ideological efforts to shape the law in the courts it seems quite significant. The second issue is that Thomas is supposed to be disclosing gifts in real estate transactions, and he hasn't been disclosing any of this and talked to many, many ethics lawyers now who say this is just, it's simply a repeated violations of the law on that front.
[00:10:55] Justin Elliot: So I'd say those are the two main.
[00:10:57] David Sirota: Just as a, as a quick follow for, for folks to understand the context of this. I mean, there was a lot of new details here. some of this has been bubbling up around Clarence Thomas for a, a very long time. There was a story a long, long time ago about the friendship between Clarence Thomas and and Harlan Crow I think one question that comes up for me is this has captured the attention of the public in a way that previous Haven't, and, and I think that's, because of the detail in, in your reporting and kind of the, the, the salacious revelations here of the specifics of this with the, with the oil painting and the, I mean, whomst among us doesn't have an, a luxury Adirondack cabin and hotel and isn't whining and dining Supreme Court justices, right?
[00:11:59] David Sirota: I mean like just the sort. Sheer ridiculousness of it. I, I, I understand that that has captured the, the public's attention, but I, I think my, my follow up question is, is there anything that would explain why this go around on these kinds of revelations? Seems to be getting more attention and has captured more of the public's attention than perhaps stuff like this in the past. With regards to Clarance Thomas?
[00:12:31] Justin Elliot: Yeah, and you're absolutely right. I mean, the, about the previous coverage of this, I mean there, there was some coverage going back 20 years. I think the most interesting previous coverage was around 12 years ago. You know, Politico at the time reported that. Harlan Crow was pretty much the sole or almost sole funder of a nonprofit that was paying Ginni Thomas's salary, a tea party group.
[00:12:57] Justin Elliot: So essentially Harlan Crow through, essentially a pass through was paying Ginni Thomas's salary and then there, and then some details had come out in a New York Times story about like their Harlan and Harlan Crow and Clarence Thomas's friendship. You know, it's a good question about why it's sort of, why it's gotten more attention now.
[00:13:17] Justin Elliot: I mean, I'm, I'm no pollster, but it, it seems like maybe the public is, is more primed at this point to think about the Supreme Court, you know, correctly as like a political institution which obviously it always has been. But I think, you know, following. The leak of the Dobbs decision and the Dobbs decision and, you know, the Merrick Garland nomination and all of what's happened in recent years, maybe.
[00:13:47] Justin Elliot: And I think there's actually polling data showing there's been a shift in the kind of perceptions of the court. So that might be part of it. I mean, honestly, I don't know. Before we publish these stories, we, I mean, as you guys know, it's always hard to tell what's going to capture people's attention and sometimes stuff that you think is really important doesn't
[00:14:06] Andrew Perez: I guess, how did you guys break this story open? What led you down this path? You know, digging out these, these details you know, especially like this trip to Indonesia, like how, how'd you guys get onto this?
[00:14:18] Justin Elliot: Yeah. Well, the, the Thomas stuff started actually with US records, so something that I didn't know until this is that Supreme Court justices when they travel sometimes get security from the US Marshals, which is like, kind of like the Secret Service. It's, it's actually part of the Justice Department.
[00:14:41] Justin Elliot: And there were some records floating around just on the internet that somebody else had gotten through a public records request to the US Marshals. And just parenthetically, I think one of the reasons the Supreme Court has not historically gotten a. Sort of investigative coverage is that very conveniently it's exempt from all the public records laws.
[00:15:04] Justin Elliot: And I can tell you, and I'm sure you guys also know, the Supreme Court Press office is not exactly you know it doesn't exactly promptly return phone calls and grant interviews and that sort of thing, like you might get from another public official. So the Supreme Court, it's like a pretty close institution, but the, the Marshalls, because it's part of the doj.
[00:15:26] Justin Elliot: Is you can file public records requests and somebody did that a few years ago and, and there were these highly redacted travel records from the Marshalls that don't tell you like Clarence Thomas is going to Indonesia, but they tell you you know, a Supreme Court justice was going from like New York to New Haven on a specific date.
[00:15:50] Justin Elliot: And sometimes they tell you, that that they were flying by private jet. So initially we got interested in one trip from the Marshall's records that we were able to like cross reference from some other stuff. We found that established pretty clearly that it was probably Clarence Thomas. Then we realized that it was on Harlan Crow's playing.
[00:16:12] Justin Elliot: We read, we read this previous coverage and decided like, you know, no one's really looked at this in like 12 years. Wonder what's been been going on. And it sort of snowballed from there. And we started talking to like, you know, people that have worked on the yacht. It, it turns out if you're, if you're traveling at like this level of crazy luxury, you actually, even though on, on one level it's quite private because like if you're flying a private jet, you don't go through the airport on another, on another level.
[00:16:41] Justin Elliot: Like you, you need like a large number of service workers to sort. take care of you. And you know, that turned out to be very helpful for the reporting.
[00:16:51] David Sirota: The, the, when you guys broke this story, there seemed to be an effort to paint the story as a kind of some say type of incident. Well, some say that the laws don't allow this lack of disclosures. Others say maybe there's some ambiguity. I think Clarence Thomas tried to, tried to shove it off on his colleagues and say, well, I, I talked to other justices and they said, not disclosing this stuff was, was totally cool. In your reporting, there any ambiguity really, in real life, not in the discourse, but in real life? Is there any ambiguity about whether Thomas did or did not violate disclosure laws, the ethics laws, by deciding, making a conscious choice to not report the gifts he was getting.
[00:17:40] Justin Elliot: There's no ambiguity barring some kind of revelations that would fundamentally change our understanding of everything that's happened. Like if he, if he turned out to be writing checks to Harlan Crow for hundreds of thousands of dollars to reimburse his costs, then, then there would be ambiguity. , but that does not appear to be the case.
[00:17:58] Justin Elliot: So we've talked to like probably 10 ethics lawyers at this point, and as you say, there was some confusion some of it probably intentionally sewn about this disclosure law, but if you look it up, you don't, I mean, again, we talked to many lawyers, but you don't actually have to be a lawyer to read it. It's not actually that confusing.
[00:18:18] Justin Elliot: And the text is very clear. I can go into it if you want, but it's, it's kind of boring. But no, these. These trips had to be disclosed and this, and the real estate transaction also absolutely had to be disclosed. CNN has a story based on anonymous source. I haven't confirmed it yesterday saying that Thomas is going to amend his forms which if that happens, obviously suggests that these things should have been disclosed. And it's, it's extremely unusual for these Supreme Court justices, any of them, to like respond to any kind of reporting. . And so if he, if he's actually gonna amend his forms, you know, that suggests that these, you know, that everyone that we talked to was correct.
[00:19:00] Andrew Perez: Tell us about Harlan Crow, the donor. What do we know about him and his interest in the Supreme Court?
[00:19:07] Justin Elliot: Yeah, it's really interesting. I mean, I, I honestly hadn't heard that much about him before getting into this, but he's, Like a really powerful guy. He comes from he was actually originally an heir to a real estate fortune. His father was also a, a wealthy Dallas guy who built this real estate empire.
[00:19:28] Justin Elliot: His name was Trammel Crow Trammel Crow and Harlan Crow. The Crow family have been close to the Bush family. In Dallas for a long time over, over multiple generations going back to hw. so yeah, Harlan was sort of the son that in that, that took the reins of like the family real estate empire.
[00:19:48] Justin Elliot: He's now in his seventies and he's given a lot of money in disclosed contributions over the years in Texas, politics and federally, like I. Well over 10 million, probably over 20 million in disclosed contributions. And he's also, it, it's come out in dribs and drabs over the years that he's also funded like dark money groups.
[00:20:08] Justin Elliot: Like he's, he's funded the Federalist Society. We don't quite know how much he's funded this, this Tea party group that was paying Ginni Thomas's salary. And. As you guys know better than anyone it, it's impossible to put a total number on how much money this guy has, has spread around over the years.
[00:20:29] Justin Elliot: But it, it's pretty clear, I mean, it is clear that he's, he's funding dark money stuff as well as disclosable campaign contributions. And, and he, he has given money specifically to groups that do that focus on like the. Federalist Society Tort Reform Groups. He's a longtime board member of a e i, which obviously does work on a lot of issues, but they do a ton of work on like conservative, legal, advancing conservative legal theories.
[00:21:00] Justin Elliot: They even file amicus briefs or they have historically. So he you know, the, the oil painting that David mentioned that. is is a painting that portrays Clarence Thomas Harlan Crowe. and Leonard Leo, along with a couple other guys sitting at this Adirondacks resort that that crow owns under like a statue of a Native American guy for reasons that are not still not clear to us.
[00:21:34] Justin Elliot: And they're just sitting there talking and we don't really know what they're talking about, but but you know, . The only, the only thread that we could find that connects Harlan Crow, Clarence Thomas, Leonard, Leo, and the other guys in the painting is like conservative legal politics. Crow actually gave an interview, the Dallas Morning News.
[00:21:54] Justin Elliot: He hasn't talked to us, but a couple days. It came out a couple days ago. And he was asked like, what do you talk to Thomas about? And he said, like, Thomas asked me about my kids a. I'm not sure if that was like supposed to cover it completely given that they've been vacationing together for like 25 years.
[00:22:12] Justin Elliot: But it's a big open question
[00:22:13] David Sirota: but I wanna drill down a little bit more on some of the, again, some of the pushback. There's been, I, I've seen an argument also that well, listen, Harlan Crow has not had a direct case in front of the Supreme Court. yeah, he may be whining and dining Clarence Thomas, if he doesn't have direct business in front of Clarence Thomas, then this is, okay.
[00:22:44] David Sirota: So I, I think I would ask you the question of is it really true that Harlan Crow. Doesn't have in front of the Supreme Court, or is that a narrow definition? In other words, Harlan Crow himself may personally not have a piece of business in front of the court. Is that too narrow a definition to really properly understand whether billionaires, donors like Harlan, the wealthy, writ large, have business before the Supreme Court.
[00:23:16] Justin Elliot: Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, so I would say a few things. One is that it, it, it is true in the narrowest sense that Harlan Crow's company real estate company, has not had a case at the Supreme Court. One thing we realized when we started writing about this is that. Actually, very few companies have cases before Supreme Court.
[00:23:34] Justin Elliot: Supreme Court doesn't take that many cases. So even when like, you know, you have a massively important case, like the Obamacare case, it's not like the, it's not like insurance companies are like the named litigants in that. So there's just not that many people that have cases for the Supreme Court.
[00:23:52] Justin Elliot: Harlan Crow again, his family made its money from real estate and it is not difficult to find many, many cases where real estate trade groups that Crow's company is part of, like, groups like the Real Estate Roundtable are, are, do, have cases that they're getting involved in at the Supreme Court on like all kinds of issues.
[00:24:17] Justin Elliot: So Supreme Court regularly. Rules on like cases that affect the real estate industry in a, in a, and tax issues that affect Harlan crow's wealth in a way that is far more significant than they, you know, that it would affect an ordinary person like us. But I think the kind of arguably more relevant thing here is that Crow clearly has like all kinds of ideological interests directly related to the court.
[00:24:46] Justin Elliot: I mean, again, he's funding. And we don't know how much, but he's funding groups that are pushing particular conservative legal theories. And so it, you know, and it's very hard to get at this, and we're sort of still reporting on this, all this in general, but like, , it clearly matters who any Supreme Court justice is spending time with.
[00:25:09] Justin Elliot: I mean, if you're if, if you go on a cruise with somebody from a e i, who's, you know, and over drinks or cigars starts like me mentioning some legal theory or something like you're, you know, that that time in front of a Supreme Court, justice is valuable. I mean, there's a reason we have lobbying disclosure laws for Congress because like lobbying works to some degree.
[00:25:34] Justin Elliot: And I think another thing that was revelatory for us you know, as people that were not steeped in sort of the Supreme Court before doing this reporting, my, my co reporters and I, is that. We were thinking about Supreme Court Justices in kind of a binary way as liberal or conservative. But of course when you start looking into it, that's not really the right way to think about it.
[00:25:56] Justin Elliot: First of all, there's a spectrum. As you guys have reported, Clarence Thomas often will write concurring opinions even on the kind of conservative decisions where he says the court should have gone further. But the thing that's even more surprising, Clarence Thomas has actually changed his position on several issues during his tenure on the Supreme Court.
[00:26:18] Justin Elliot: The most notable example of this was a couple of years ago, he did a complete 180 on this legal doctrine called Chevron, which I'm no expert on, but essentially it relates to the power of like executive branch agencies to interpret laws so they can issue regulations. and there's been a move in like the kind of conservative legal world which used to be friendly to, to the Chevron doctrine, to to to become hostile to it.
[00:26:51] Justin Elliot: And which would in effect disempower regulatory agencies and empower the courts. Thomas himself wrote a decision like 15 years ago called Brand X that was sort of endorsing the Chevron doctrine. And then a couple years ago he said he did a new opinion and said, I was wrong. I've done a complete 180.
[00:27:12] Justin Elliot: And so when you look at that and like, we don't know how his mind got changed on that, but I think we can be confident in saying like, his mind didn't get changed by sitting in a room and staring at the Constitution. Like something. . And so the, the idea that some people have, you know, been advancing in response to our story that, oh, like you really believe that Clarence Thomas especially, or any Supreme Court justice is, is you know, subject to influence and their mind is gonna be changed.
[00:27:41] Justin Elliot: And I'm like, well, yeah, I do believe that. I mean, like, they're human beings, so obviously this matters. So that's, that's why we think this is like a matter of public concern, and I think it's beyond Clarence Thomas. I would say this about all
[00:27:52] Andrew Perez: Well, you know, so one thing we noticed here, some, some of the conservatives who are sort of making the, the, like, you know, these arguments that like, oh, you know, show us the quid pro quo, you know, show us the very specific quid pro quo. you know, they, a lot of them like tend to work for think tanks that have, personal or have financial ties to the Crow family.
[00:28:12] Andrew Perez: Obviously you mentioned the American Enterprise Institute. There's also the Manhattan Institute where, you know, Ilia Shapiro has been one of the most vociferous defenders of Thomas in the news these days. Kathy Crow Harlan's wife serves on the board of of the Manhattan Institute and they're filing, you know, amicus brief after amicus brief trying to influence the court. Like, you don't get one of those board seats right, without, without some cash, right? Like, that's just not how it works.
[00:28:40] Justin Elliot: Yeah, I mean, I think the, those board seats in general, like yeah, you have to be as, you have to be like a major donor. I mean, I think one of the frustrations about. Trying to establish whether or not there's quid pro quos, although I think that we probably all agree that that's far too narrow away to think about influence, and that's not how lobbyists think about, you know, sophisticated lobbyists. Think about it either. But one of the frustrating things about like trying to do that reporting is thanks in part to the Supreme Court. There's like all kinds of dark money sloshing around. So Harlan Crow or anyone else could be. funding groups that file Amicus briefs could be funding Supreme Court cases in one way or another, and it would be extremely difficult, short of like a leak to establish that. And so you know, we would welcome Harlan Crow like opening up his books to us and we, and so we can have a, so we can have a complete conversation about this. But yeah, I mean yeah, ,
[00:29:43] David Sirota: The, the final question that I have for you is, where this is going.
[00:29:50] David Sirota: Clearly, the public in polls has lost a lot of confidence in the Supreme Court, but the Supreme Court seems to be wholly insulated from any accountability at all. And I just wanna, articulate one of my slightly far-fetched fears, but I, I, I'm not sure it's all that far-fetched in this, in this era, which is that Clarence Thomas has repeatedly argued that political spending disclosure laws are unconstitutional. He has insisted that Citizens United didn't go far enough. And the core of his argument is that essentially rich people have the right to spend anonymously in politics and. In conjunction with public officials. He also voted for that unanimous decision in a, in a ruling, the McDonald ruling that effectively legalized gifts to public officials.
[00:30:48] David Sirota: And, and what I fear is that if Clarence Thomas ever actually got prosecuted, which I'm almost eye-rolling thinking because we don't prosecute in this country, very many powerful people. But if Clarence Thomas actually got prosecuted here, there's a reality in which he makes the argument that he didn't follow the disclosure laws because the disclosure laws are unconstitutional and that this ultimately gets up to the Supreme Court.
[00:31:15] David Sirota: And the Supreme Court ends up agreeing with him, a precedent that all political spending disclosure laws are in fact illegal. Something the Clarence Thomas has argued. So I, I'm like afraid this is gonna end up going in exactly the wrong direction. I wanna be clear, I'm not saying I don't think Clarence Thomas should be held accountable out of fear that it might create, you know, some horrible legal doctrine, but I, I definitely am nervous that whatever comes out of this could either not fix the problem or actually make it worse.
[00:31:48] David Sirota: I mean, it's even worth saying that if nothing comes out of it, does this end up in practice legalizing this behavior by saying, Hey, listen, anybody in these positions of power can break any laws they want, and rest assured nothing is gonna happen. So I realize I've asked like two questions here, but I'll just restate them. Is this going and is there a chance that it may go in exactly the wrong direction?
[00:32:16] Justin Elliot: Yeah. Well, to take the second one first, I mean, sure. I think there's a chance of that. I mean, my, my baseline expectation whenever I publish a story is that nothing will happen. But, you know sometimes it could go in multiple directions. I absolutely think there's a chance of that. I mean, I think it, it's interesting on the Constitutionality question, John Roberts, actually, after a previous Clarence Thomas kind of mini scandal, back in 2011 wrote publicly about this disclosure law and, and sort of raised the question of, well, we've never looked at whether this is actually constitutional.
[00:32:51] Justin Elliot: The Congress requiring us to do these, you know, bare bones, financial disclosures. And although the fact remains that these Supreme Court justices have been filing these things for decades and they sign them, and the signing page says like, you know, you're subject to civil and criminal penalties if you will fully falsify them.
[00:33:09] Justin Elliot: So I don't know how you argue. , I'm no lawyer, so I'm, I don't know how you argue that something's unconstitutional and you've just been sort of following it anyways for decades, and I'm sure that, I'm sure one could make the argument. But what we're looking at is because the Supreme Court is so opaque and seems to be operating on under, you know, something close to impunity, at least internally, but what I'm really curious about is Congress because the Senate Judiciary Committee has said they're gonna have some kind of hearing, we don't know much about it.
[00:33:41] Justin Elliot: But there's nothing stopping Congress as I understand it from you know, investigating all of this. And, and they, you know, they have something that we all don't have, which is subpoena power. And there's all kinds of ways you could you know, if I had. If we had subpoena power as you know, we could do all kinds things that that wouldn't even involve you know, subpoenaing Supreme Court justices. There's all kinds of ways of getting at
[00:34:07] David Sirota: Justin Elliot is an investigative reporter at ProPublica. I should mention, the Lever has worked with Justin Elliot on our reporting series a few months ago about Leonard, Leo Justin and the ProPublica team broke that huge set of stories about Clarence Thomas, which will be linked in the description of this podcast.
[00:34:27] David Sirota: Justin, as always, thank you so much for taking the time with us, and thanks for your terrific work.
[00:34:31] Justin Elliot: Thanks so much.
[00:34:32] David Sirota: That's it for today's show. As a reminder, our paid subscribers who get lever time premium get to hear a bonus interview about how the 401K system uses tax breaks to subsidize the very wealthy and how politicians are always talking about cutting social security. But never talking about ending.
[00:34:50] David Sirota: Those tax giveaways that exclusive bonus episode will post early next week, so stay tuned for that. In the Lever Premium feed. Listeners can subscribe to Lever Time Premium by heading over to lever news.com. When you subscribe, you get access to all of the levers website, our weekly newsletters, and our live events.
[00:35:08] David Sirota: And that's all for the criminally low price of just eight bucks a month or 70 bucks for the whole. One last favor, please be sure to like, subscribe and write a review for Lever time on your favorite podcast app on the app you're listening to this podcast in. And make sure to head over to lever news.com and check out all of the incredible reporting our team has been doing. Until next time, I'm David Sirota, rock the Boat.
[00:35:31] David Sirota: / The Lever Time Podcast is a production of The Lever and the Lever Podcast Network. It's hosted by me, David Sirota. Our lead producer is Jared Jacang Maher. You can find all of our past episodes at or on all of the major podcast players.