Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson is facing an ethics complaint over alleged failures to disclose details about her income. A conservative group filed the complaint, bringing these allegations to light.
Yet, the mainstream press has almost completely ignored the story even after a laser-like focus on Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ alleged ethics violations.
Jackson’s complaint centers on her alleged failure to disclose her husband’s income.
The conservative Center for Renewing America expressed the complaint in a letter to the Judicial Conference. The complaint alleges that Jackson did not report some of her husband's income for more than a decade. The letter urges the group to refer the matter to Attorney General Merrick Garland to begin an ethics investigation.
The letter claims that Jackson "repeatedly failed to disclose that her husband received income from medical malpractice consulting fees."
"We know this by Justice Jackson’s own admission in her amended disclosure form for 2020, filed when she was nominated to the Supreme Court, that ‘some of my previously filed reports inadvertently omitted' her husband’s income from ‘consulting on medical malpractice cases,’" it continues.
The letter says that Jackson gave "the vague statement that 'some' of those past disclosures contained material omissions."
The crux of the matter lies in the rules mandating that justice disclose any income exceeding $1,000 under the Ethics in Government Act of 1978. The group notes that while she disclosed two of her husband’s clients in 2011, subsequent filings did not include this information. During her 2020 nomination to the court, the justice acknowledged that some of her husband’s income had been “inadvertently omitted” in prior disclosures.
Adding to the matter are concerns about Jackson’s reporting of the source of funding for her 2022 Supreme Court investiture celebration, according to the Center for Renewing America.
Second, there is reason to believe that Justice Jackson may have failed to report the private funding sources of her massive investiture celebration at the Library of Congress in her most recent financial disclosure. 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.
This development draws parallels with other reports homing in on Justice Thomas, scrutinizing him for his relationship with a wealthy real estate tycoon. These reports have prompted calls for the judge’s resignation from Democrats. Of course, it is worth noting that the reports and subsequent criticisms coming from the left are clearly motivated by politics, and their decision to ignore the complaint against Jackson essentially proves it.
If the media were truly concerned about ethics among members of the Supreme Court, they would have focused on both stories and given equal attention to other justices regardless of their ideological leaning. But, since Jackson is a progressive, they can’t bother to examine her with the same microscope they apply to Thomas or any other conservative justice.