Conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has been subjected to a series of leftist media attacks and smears that have been seized upon by leftist activists and politicians to demand that Thomas resign or face impeachment and removal from office.
In the face of the constant barrage, however, more than 100 of Thomas' former clerks have come to his defense via an open letter published in his support, according to the Daily Wire.
In the open letter that was first obtained by Fox News, a total of 112 of Justice Thomas' former clerks shared some of the details of his impoverished upbringing in segregated Georgia as a descendant of West African slaves who lived with his grandparents after his father abandoned the family and his young mother was unable to care for him or his brother.
As Thomas came of age he once considered the priesthood but instead pursued a legal career following the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and eventually ended up working with Republicans in Washington D.C. prior to becoming a judge and ultimately a Supreme Court justice.
"This is the story of Justice Clarence Thomas. It is a story that should be told in every American classroom, at every American kitchen table, in every anthology of American dreams realized," the former clerks wrote. "Justice Thomas is a man of greatest intellect, of greatest faith, and of greatest patriotism. We know because we lived it."
"He is a man of unwavering principle. He welcomes the lone dissent. He is also a man of great humor and warmth and generosity. Walk the halls, and you’ll hear his laugh. Call, and he answers. His grandfather’s sayings become our sayings. His chambers become our chambers -- a place fueled by unstoppable curiosity and unreturned library books, all to get every case just right," they continued.
'And yet, the stories most often told of Justice Thomas are not these. The Justice is ever the subject of political headlines taking aim at his character, his judicial philosophy, his marriage, even his race. They attempt to write over his actual story," the former clerks wrote.
"Lately, the stories have questioned his integrity and his ethics for the friends he keeps. They bury the lede. These friends are not parties before him as a Justice of the Court. And these stories are malicious, perpetuating the ugly assumption that the Justice cannot think for himself," the letter continued. "They are part of a larger attack on the Court and its legitimacy as an institution. The picture they paint of the Court and the man for whom we worked bears no resemblance to reality."
"As his law clerks, we offer this response," they added. "Different paths led us to our year with Justice Thomas, and we have followed different paths since. But along the way, we all saw with our own eyes the same thing: His integrity is unimpeachable. And his independence is unshakable, deeply rooted seven decades ago as that young child who walked through the door of his grandparents’ house for a life forever changed."
The New York Post reported that the open letter from the former clerks was quite clearly written in response to a series of overtly partisan hit piece articles against Justice Thomas, predominately from leftist media outlet ProPublica.
Those articles breathlessly smeared the jurist with lurid allegations of ethics violations and other improprieties, including that he often accepted free transportation and lodging on vacations from a personal friend, Texas-based real estate billionaire Harlan Crow, that he failed to properly disclose.
Other allegations of undisclosed matters include Crow purchasing a house in Georgia previously owned by Thomas and paying the private school tuition of one of Thomas' grandnephews that he is helping raise.
Of course, as has been explained repeatedly over the past several months by Thomas and others, he had no obligations whatsoever under the ethics guidelines in place at the time of all of the things highlighted in the ProPublica articles to publicly disclose them, and now that those guidelines have been altered in recent months to now require such disclosures, he has vowed to abide by the new rules in place.
Unfortunately for Thomas, that won't stop progressive Democrats from continuing to demand that he resign or face impeachment and potential removal from the high court, especially since those demands are actually based less on his alleged improprieties and more on his ideological stance and devotion to the Constitution that cannot be swayed.
