(PatriotWise.com) — Conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas hired a law clerk the media previously smeared as racist, Reuters reported.
In a news release last week, George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School announced that law school graduate Crystal Clanton had been selected to serve as Justice Thomas’ law clerk.
Clanton, who graduated from George Mason in 2021, previously clerked for 11th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge William Pryor Jr. and Judge Corey Maze from the US District Court for the Northern District of Alabama.
According to the news release, Judge Pryor described Clanton as “an outstanding law clerk” whose work “exceeded” his high expectations.
But because Clanton sent a controversial text when she was a college student working with the pro-Trump group Turning Point USA, the media smeared her as a racist.
In 2017, New Yorker reporter Jane Mayer wrote an expose on Turning Point USA’s alleged racism. In her report, Mayer, who also targeted Justice Brett Kavanaugh during his confirmation, wrote that a Turning Point colleague claimed that Clanton sent a text in which she wrote that she hated black people.
Clanton told Mayer that she didn’t remember sending the text and said the comment didn’t “reflect what I believe or who I am.”
After leaving Turning Point USA, Clanton worked with Justice Thomas’s wife, Virginia “Ginni” Thomas. During that time, she lived with the Thomases for about a year.
After it was reported that Judge Pryor planned to employ Clanton as a law clerk, Democrat members of the House Judiciary Committee demanded an investigation into both Judge Pryor and Judge Maze, claiming that by hiring someone who allegedly sent a text message in college saying she hated black people, the judges were undermining “the public’s faith in the federal judiciary.”
However, a federal court dismissed the Democrats’ misconduct complaint.
Justice Thomas at the time defended Clanton, saying in a letter to the court investigating the misconduct complaint that he was the one who recommended her to Judge Pryor. Thomas wrote that, as someone who knew Crystal Clanton and bigotry, he could state that bigotry was “antithetical to her nature and character.”
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