ProPublica, the left’s favorite “unbiased” investigative journalism group, spent the better part of 2023 harassing Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas over alleged ethics violations but was absent at the wheel when it came to investigating the real dirt hidden by “progressive” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Most will recall ProPublica’s savage campaign to accuse Thomas of corruption, taking “lavish” trips funded by court influencers, and spinning insider deals — all of which were later dismissed as superfluous claims meant to damage Thomas’ reputation.
Then the news broke in December that his colleague on the court, Justice Jackson, may have intentionally omitted payments to her husband on her past financial disclosures. ProPublica spent nearly a year dragging Thomas through the mud for a number of allegations but failed to expose any other “abuses of power” by leftist justices.
Why did ProPublica leave other justices who were presumably easy targets alone? Well, they are the attack arm of the Democrat Party and presumably shun friendly fire.
Recall that ProPublica claims to “expose abuses of power” on both sides of the political aisle. In reality, the group only hunts down abusers who hold conservative values, as I discuss in my recent deep-dive exposing ProPublica’s bias. My study puts a real figure to that long-held suspicion: ProPublica is 23 times more likely to target conservatives than liberals, after an exhaustive survey of the group’s political reporting. Just don’t expect them to admit it.
That complaint by the conservative Center for Renewing America alleges genuine corruption — claiming that Jackson “willfully failed to disclose” her husband’s malpractice consulting income for more than a decade while serving on the federal bench.
“The Conference should open an investigation to determine if Justice Jackson needs to remedy this potential omission. Given the need to ensure the equal application of the law and the tendency of these violations to create serious recusal issues and conflicts of interest, the Conference’s prompt attention is of paramount public importance,” the group wrote in the letter to the Judicial Conference.
Jackson deserves to be treated as innocent until proven guilty, a right many on the left failed to provide Thomas last year. But if true, it not only calls into question her trustworthiness, it’s a devastating blow to the left’s campaign for a new Supreme Court ethics code, which was always a partisan effort to boost Democrat power, anyway.
In practice, that means targeting Thomas to pressure him to recuse from key cases or resign from the court entirely, paving the way for a new “progressive” majority to do the left’s bidding. That includes ProPublica’s far-left financial backers, who’d probably be furious if the group fired upon a Democrat-appointed justice.
ProPublica’s top donor, after all, is the Sandler Foundation, which also bankrolls the American Constitution Society and Campaign Legal Center, two left-wing groups coincidentally cited as “experts” in ProPublica’s Thomas exposé.
And what about the other left-leaning justices?
By ProPublica’s own reporting, both Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan have reaped lucrative investment returns during their tenures on the nation’s top court. Sotomayor is estimated to have between $1.6 and $6.6 million in investments, and Kagan is estimated to have between $1.6 and $3.6 million in investments. (In contrast, Thomas is only estimated to have investments valued at $1.2–$2.7 million.)
Yet ProPublica has ignored these facts in favor of a partisan witch hunt against the left’s favorite “villain.” Anyone who’s followed court dealings over the past year knows it’s a desperate bid to remove Thomas before forcing Democrats to follow through on their pledge to pack the Supreme Court with leftist judges.
That idea, by the way, was birthed by the same activist group responsible for pushing last year’s ethics code: Demand Justice, led by ex-Clinton crony Brian Fallon and spawned by Arabella Advisors’ multibillion-dollar dark-money network.
It was a classic inside-the-Beltway scheme — and the plot would’ve been impossible without the investigative groundwork laid by ProPublica.
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