How Have We Not Yet Hit The Bottom Of The Clarence Thomas Scandal?

Welcome to another edition of Thinking Like a Lawyer. I'm Joe Patrice. Thank you so much. Yeah, no, but that... Yeah. Okay. You welcomed me and I responded in kind. Mm-hmm. Yeah. So I'm Joe Patrice from Bubba Law. I am joined by... You lost my shoes? Yeah, yeah. Chris Williams and Katherine, is that how you pronounce it? Yes. Katherine Rovino. Yes, it is. Joe. Okay. I thought it was Patrice this whole time. We are here to discuss some of the big stories in the legal industry of the last week. And, you know, hopefully have some fun nuggets to drop along the way. But first, we will begin as we always do by having a little easy into the conversation by not jumping all the way into the heavy legal talk and have a little bit of... Small talk. Small talk. All right. So, small talk. I am still recovering from an illness, so I'm not feeling like that. It doesn't sound like fun. It does not feel very fun. I've renewed my lifelong relationship with NyQuil, which has always been there for me and continues. Maybe has anybody reached out to see if they're willing to sponsor the show? Anyway, yeah. So I'm... I have a quick recommendation. Oh, yeah? This might be outside of the musical wheelhouse, but the next time you pour us a NyQuil, I need you to play Cody and Crazy by a future. Nice. Yeah. I mean, there is not Cody in NyQuil, but fair enough. Well, you have the wrong NyQuil plug. Yeah. But yeah, so I'm not feeling the best. How's everybody else doing? I mean, I am 39 weeks pregnant, so that's how I feel. I feel that is descriptive in and of itself. So not going to be on next week's show, so you're thinking. That is the plan. Fair enough. Fair enough. We'll hold down the fort without you. So yeah, anything else? Anybody... I'm going phenomenal. Oh, good. Well, that's super. One out of three ain't bad. Yeah, I was like, I knew y'all were having shitty weeks. I figured I should live it up a little bit, carry the social load. Yeah. It's because I care. I did a cycling trip in Cambodia. It's awesome. I saw some fields, saw people growing taro, which is usually just a flavor that I get when I get bubble teas, like this purple thing. Right, right. But like seeing the actual root of it, I was like, oh, that looks disgusting. It's a tuber. I found it out today, but not of expecting that. Then earlier today, I went to a spin class because it's only felt like two years since I've been on a bike. After cycling, you absolutely would need a spin class. Yeah, I figured it's double down on the pain. There's a thing where it's like, growing up, I always thought, like, pirates talking about sea legs, that sounds dumb. But then after doing a cycling, I got like, bike butt. And now it just makes total sense. Like, I miss, I didn't have cows' on my ass, but I guess it was just like a spiritual padding that went away. So hopefully I can like, you know, pedal back to it. Nice. So, with all of our showing a little bit of personality aside, let's get into the real meat of the discussion. The story that we continue to wish would go away, but seems as though it never will. Since the last time we talked about it, there had been more Clarence Thomas ethics scandals. Jeepers, like literally, this is maybe our longest running story on this show. I was thinking that, actually, I haven't gone back to calculate whether or not we had to talk about Yale's stupid, FedSock inspired free speech, crisis, nonsense, or this. I think it's got to be this because they're keep on being new things. Just like, oh, well, more people are talking about it, which was a lot of the Yale thing, which is kind of new parties waiting into the existing controversy. Whereas this time, it literally seems like every other day we wake up and there's more data, there's more information, there's more revelations. Someone else is trying to, you know, turn the screws on Clarence Thomas. So let's take a step back and just catch folks up. So I believe the last episode where we talked about this, we already had the half million dollars in vacations and payments like that. That was early. Right, yes. And we'd already had the billionaire buys his Clarence Thomas' mom's house and lets her live there rent free while improving it. Right. As a friend does. As friends do. And all of that happening while not being disclosed and while the billionaires organizations had business in front of the court. So and Thomas had already said at this point that he just didn't know that you needed to disclose that stuff. And some friends of his had told him that it was okay. I believe that's where we left things as far as this shows coverage. What has happened since? There's a couple of things. Yeah, there are a few. Yes. Let me go ahead, people. Are you any of you? We also found out that Clarence Thomas, his grand nephew that he and Ginny Thomas are raising quote as a son, are raised. He's now in his 30s, got his tuition paid for by one Harlan Crow. Okay, so the same super friend was also paying private school tuition. Maybe all have a friend like Harlan Crow. I mean, yeah. Except you listening judges. Yeah. So, so that's happening. So that's the only thing. Surely, that's the only thing that happened. LOL. Okay. So not the only ethical thing that happened. So what else has happened? We also, there was more revelations that Leonard Leo, who was, you know, of Fed Sock fame or infamy at the case may be also directed additional payments to Ginny Thomas for her advocacy work for matters that were shortly to be before the court. And in that paper, in that effort specifically directed to leave off any mention of Ginny Thomas. So, so what happens here is that the former executive director of Federalist Society was paying Ginny Thomas for consulting work, but wanted it not to be noticeable that he was doing this. So he said, no mention of Ginny, of course, and funneled these payments through a random pollster who happened to be. Kellyanne Conway. So, okay. So now we've got Kellyanne Conway as a bag man in between the head of the Federalist Society and giving money under the table to Ginny Thomas. That was not. I was just saying like, you know, just in terms of comedy factor, creating a paper trail in an effort to not create a paper trail is really that's a high level of difficulty. Fair enough. So, all right. So, before we get deeper, before we get deeper in the weeds, I just have an explain to me like I'm five question. So can we call it bribery yet or is everybody still buying the friend excuse? Well, I mean, the friend defense, the friend defense. Well, so, so nothing here is, I don't think anything here is bribery to the extent that Clarence Thomas is going to rule in all these people's favors. Anyway, what we have here though is some degree of politely referred to as something more like graft. We've got great ethics problems. Yes, ethics problems. We have disclosure violations. We have disclosure violations, which are the most important aspect of this because while you can't remove a justice from the Supreme Court without impeaching them, which I can not happen. I can count the House members and the number of senators involved and that's not happening. It is still, however, a at least a civilly, pursueable crime to for a government official to screw up their financial disclosures. So if you have a situation where somebody has failed to disclose something, they're legally required to disclose and they've done this in a willful manner, it's a $50,000 for the violation. I imagine that willful standard is going to be what folks grapple with moving forward. Right. So we already have had Thomas's excuse for all of this is that he had been told by, you know, his friends. He has friends told him, don't, don't, don't write that down. Friends who told him he didn't have to. So therefore it means that he didn't willfully do this. So surely that is all that's happened since the last time we talked about this, right? Dun dun dun. It is not the only thing that's happened since then. So now the following up on all of this. Now we have learned that in 2012, there was a complaint raised by a federal judge with the judicial conference in the United States, which is the entity that is supposed to investigate these issues. And this complaint was about the fact that the year before there had been reports raised with the financial disclosures committee of the judicial conference that Clarence Thomas was not reporting Ginny Thomas income that she was making. This becomes very relevant. So given that failure to disclose Thomas was investigated by the financial disclosures committee who then didn't report the results of that investigation up to the rest of the judicial conference. That doesn't seem great. By JN, yes. And so this was only discovered by one federal judge who was on the committee, or not on the committee, but on the judicial judicial conference at large because he was the chief judge of the district at the time. And he raised several complaints and protests with the committee saying, you don't get to just say you're blowing off this investigation. You have to report the results to the rest of the conference. He wasn't even going after Thomas. He's just like, propriety requires you to report. And they said they didn't have to report because they decided it wasn't willful. So as of 2012, so as of over a decade ago, Clarence Thomas was told that you have to report Jenny Thomas's, at least report Jenny Thomas's income that she's getting. And that he was allowed to skate on that failure under the argument that he didn't know any better, meaning from my perspective, that would seem to mean that he cannot 11 years later make the argument that he didn't know he was supposed to report it. If he already has used the excuse, I didn't know I had to report it. And that was his reason he didn't get slammed back that. Wait, this is a Deyschem Pelbitt. I think there was a stand up. I think I might have been killing him softly. Deyschem Pelo says that there was a white guy in his black friend driving down, driving down, white guy gets put over by the police, telling him he was speeding. White guy says, oh, I didn't know I can do that. Drives off, black guy in passenger seat is shocked. Didn't know you can do that. White guy is like, that's the thing. I knew the entire time. Yeah. So anyway, so this is, yeah. No, I was just going to say that it is interesting. And there is a slight difference, I suppose, in money that Ginny Thomas gets and may or may not have to report as a member of Clarence Thomas's household and the direct gifts that Clarence Thomas is receiving from Harlan Crow, whether they be tuition payments, luxury vacations, or a freehouse or his mom. Yeah. So there's also a timing issue. So putting aside the Wilfulness, how this complicates any, any Wilfulness defense, there's a timing issue that's a little curious because the issue that had brought this to the judicial conference in 2011, which then led to the judges complaints being lodged in 2012. The issue in 2011 was that Clarence Thomas had not reported Ginny's income. This is important because that Leonard Leo revelation was in 2012. Right. 2012 was when Leonard Leo was like, no mention of Ginny. So, so in 2012, after Thomas has been put, you know, on notice that this is a problem, it is the year later that the response of the conservative legal movement is to try to just hide the money. Hide the money. Yes, under the table. I mean, this is a, this is a wild series of revelations and wild partially because it's taken so long to unravel and also partially to back to what you said earlier about creating paper trail, how completely terribly they did this. Like this is comically stupid. Oh, it took over a decade for it to come out. So maybe that was enough. Just because now we have a completely spineless Congress that won't do anything about it. So maybe they waited just long enough. I mean, well, put aside the Congress at this point, the judicial conference, the spotlight now has to be on the judicial conference, given that they didn't do anything 11 years ago and given that their reasoning then was, we assume he didn't know any better. They now don't really have any excuse not to refer this matter. And the proper procedures that if they have reason to believe that he did, he knew better and then didn't disclose this information. They are supposed to refer this matter to the Attorney General's office. So Merrick Garland should be getting a message from the judicial conference to begin an investigation and prosecution, a civil case, but of these claims. Will that happen? I mean, I'm certainly skeptical. I'm skeptical about everything at this point. I don't think anything will be done. And I think that that kind of just proves the utter impotency of our system. Yeah, impotency. Is that a word? Yeah, I guess it is. It's like, what do you mean? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I guess that's right. I just, I don't know. Like I just in my head, I was just like the, the, the impotence of the system. But yeah, I guess it would be infancy. Yeah. Anyway, I believe you certainly know what I'm talking about. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We've got a real bad system, folks. Yeah. Real bad. Yeah. So, but this, this does at least take it slightly out of the hands theoretically of Congress doing anything to the judicial conference now because they, it's, it's real hard for them to get out of it, given what's the revelation that the story was broken by Bloomberg. Zoe Tillman over there broke this, right, you know, right at the end of the week last week. And yeah, now, now the spotlights on them. I mean, the, the sort of minorly hopeful point in that story is that, you know, it was a Reagan appointee, right? Judge Wolf, who was really upset about it not being reported. And I do think that there is a certain extent to which these ethics issues are sort of nonpartisan, at least in sort of true believers. Or they certainly, they definitely should be. Okay. One definitely should be. I think that there are plenty of judges currently on the federal bench who believe that. Yeah. It's a matter of finding them. Yeah. I'll give you a hint. They were not appointed by Trump. Yeah. I mean, well, I mean, I'm not sure. I don't know, so you can paint that brush completely, but certainly there are a lot of them that, that wouldn't care as much about that. But, but you had any Supreme Court justices that have been sued civilly over things that happened while they were on the court? Yeah. I mean, not that I know of. I mean, so the most high profile ethics scandal of this nature was a Fortis stepping down. And that was a situation where he actively, you know, he took the initiative to step down to protect the court's reputation. We use good old fashioned shame. Yeah. And the really ridiculous thing is I'm not like, as the years go by, I'm not all together. They're sure everything he did wasn't all that bad, but still. That just suffers by comparison, right? Exactly. No, yeah. No, it totally agree. Yeah. It really gives. Yeah. If eight Fortis were here, it would be, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. 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Okay. So, let's talk about a law firm that is not had the best week. Yeah. Lewis Brisboy is losing over 120 attorneys. Yeah. Okay. So, the first I will give you sort of my perspective. Our colleague Stacey Izarecki broke this story. Over 100 and some odd lawyers are leaving the big law firm to go to a boutique. And I thought this was going to be really terrible for the firm, et cetera. And it's not great. But they have 1,700 attorneys. Yes. Yeah, it is a very big firm. This is not like a significant percentage of the attorneys at the firm. It is a big firm. That is fair. But you know, it is a firm that this is a real kick though. It is a firm that is California is its home base. This is where they are losing this labor and employment, massive amount of labor and employment attorneys. John Barber had left it. Barbara Renan is the new firm that's focusing on this. They have left this the fallout of this has been that the chair and co-founder has now stepped down to, you know, over all of this. Yeah. I mean, I think that probably signals how big a deal the firm does consider it. And I think you're right in that sense that the chair felt it was, you know, necessary to fall on their sword over it. Yeah. And I mean, there's continuing fallout. I did see that there's new reports of profitability problems. Sure. There's a practice. There's some rate issues. So it looks like there were some financial problems that need to be cleared up and that that probably is what motivated a lot of this. Sure. But, you know, it speaks to, you know, in a world in which we're talking a lot about, how do I put this? We're talking a lot about this fear of, fear of recession that people are continuing to wax about and concerns that, you know, layoffs are going to happen and so on. We just saw a bunch of people leave the relative safety of a large firm to strike out and create a fairly, a firm that moral, it's almost safe to say they skip the whole boutique phase that are moving directly into being their own kind of big law firm. And in comments that the founder of Barbara gave, they look to continue to expand even after this. Sure. I mean, I will say though, you know, despite the kind of comments that we've heard in the press about profitability and concerns that folks had about Lewis Brisboy, I will say it's still, you know, the Amla 100 numbers have come out for last year, still a firm ranked in the top 100. I think they fell slightly from 66 to 70, not a big tumble, wouldn't call it a tumble. So you know, it's still a profitable firm by a lot of measures, but there are obviously some internal disputes there. Yeah. It's one that you can lose like 8% of your people and still be that big. Well, yeah, me look, they do have a lot of folks. They have a lot of offices. It's really a question of like how critical is, because you can have a lot of offices and a lot of people and they, you know, not all partnerships are made equal. And how much is this labor employment practice of basically up and down the West Coast matter to the core of what Lewis Brisboy is doing, you know, and that's what we're going to find out. And obviously this now signal, this is going to trigger an instance where I think the first order of business of the leadership now is to find some labor and employment groups. And so yeah, it's going to be, it's going to be because they're going to need to shore that up and try to hold on to as much business as they can in that area. Today's legal news is rarely as straightforward as the headlines that accompany them. On lawyer to lawyer, we provide legal perspective. You need to better understand the current events that shade our society. Join me, Craig Williams and a wide variety of industry experts as we break down the top stories. Follow lawyer to lawyer on the legal top network or wherever you subscribe to podcasts. Workers Comp Matters is a podcast dedicated to exploring the laws, the landmark cases, and the true stories that define our workers compensation system. I'm Judd Pearson together with Alan Pierce. We host a different guest each month as we bring to life this diverse area of the law. Join us on Workers Comp Matters on the Legal Talk Network. All right, so closing us out today, Chris, you covered a new law that the folks in Florida were pushing. But while it had general government, general political overtones, you kind of zeroed in on there are some legal industry aspects to the latest DeSantis laws. Yeah, so there was a part of the law that specifically targeted DACA attorneys saying, I think it kicks in going off memory. I want to say 2025 or so. Well, wait, it will just step back. What it does is it's a law that they passed as an attempt to lash out an anti-immigration law that's going to lash out saying that people who are in the United States by virtue of the DACA protection, so children who came to the country without not of their free will necessarily, but were brought here undocumented and have worked their way through the DACA program, it says that those folks aren't allowed to get professional licenses or work in the state of Florida. And part of that then is the legal aspect. So go forward from that. I'm just providing more overarching context. Okay. So are you not saying the part where there's like lawyers who? That's your story. That's your story. That's your story. The law is general. I'm giving that context so people know that. Then the part that you actually zeroed in on that makes your story interesting is that there's a lawyer thing. I thought that's what I was saying. I was going to say it was confusing. Yeah, so I wish to viewers could see the frustration. Anyway, so that happened. That happened. Would you like to say what happened, Joe? No, if you do, that's what you're here for. I don't want to say it wrong. I don't want to say it wrong. So Rhonda Santas doing a ploy to get popularity. She wants to do a presidential run because he has to just have something in the back pocket to be Trump. He's like, how Republicans have this go hard on crime thing which lapses into being hard on immigrants. That's basically what's happening here. So there's a lawyer who went through the suffering of going through tort and contract law and all that BS that we'll have to do, highly qualified. And by virtue of being here under DACA, they're like, no, you can't work here. And it's ridiculous because it's happening at a time when Florida is a need of lawyers. You think they wouldn't cut out an entire class of capable attorneys because somebody might want to do a presidential run. It just doesn't make sense to me. And the basic, like this law is fairly sweeping. I mean, it says that they're not even going to honor drivers licenses issued in other states. Good luck with the full faith and credit issue there. But yeah, no, we already have a problem with licensing regimes across this country anyway. Now this attempt to try and say that people who have already fulfilled all of the pre-existing requirements not be allowed to have their license, which is how this seems to read. It's difficult to understand how you can retroactively do what take away somebody's license that way that seems very expos facto. If the argument is just that you're not letting people do this go forward, that, I guess, kind of works. But then it raises questions. What happens when they get licensed in states that have reciprocity with Florida? Are they not going to honor that? That seems like an equal protection problem. It's real difficult to see how they get around this in any kind of legal way, not that as you pointed out, it really matters. It's not like DeSantis is doing this as a policy matter, as much as a signaling matter. Right. Isn't it not enough? Yeah, I mean, right? That's exactly what I was going to say. He's not doing things for the benefit of Floridians. Otherwise, he wouldn't be going for one of the largest employers in the state. He's already signaled he doesn't care about Floridians. He cares about his own personal nationwide reputation and his ability to run for a nationwide office, which has its own problems. Yeah. I will say, I did see earlier just a few minutes ago, I saw somebody say that the Wall Street Journal has now come out against DeSantis, calling him weak. It strikes me as though once you've lost them, you've certainly lost that Trump alternative mouthpiece. Yeah. Yeah, that's fine. They were supporting Clarence after his 20 years of law breaking. So for them to be like, DeSantis is not enough. That's wild. Yeah. But no, that is something to be looking at. And it's also something that has broader implications too, because while DeSantis may be floundering in his own presidential ambitions, this seems troublingly like a blueprint for somebody who is trying to shore up what they want to do. And so these sorts of future restrictions on folks who have actually gone through the legal process to be licensed does matter. I don't know if this is anybody else, but whenever I see Trump and say, Ron DeSantis, wherever it's trying to appeal to the alt-right and religious zealots, I just think about Mitt Romney. I hope he's doing well. He seems to have some common sense. And it's like, that's how quickly things have gotten super bad. Not long for the days of Mitt Romney. Remember people started to wonder what- Republican standard bearer. Right. People started to wonder what George Bush was doing at parts of the Trump presidency, the younger one. Right, right, right. It is an ongoing struggle to figure out where the bottom is. We'll see. We'll get there. I think- Will we? I don't know. If not, we've got shovels. Yeah. Speaking of DeSantis and Disney, just kind of as a random aside, did anybody see that their latest assault on that? Is there going to try to not nationalize whatever the state equivalent of state-atize the monorail at Disney World? Jesus. Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? What is safer and gets more inspections than actual state transportation? Yeah, they're going to try to seize control of the monorail as an effort. Yeah. That's the tradition of being the, like, epitome of Disney Transpo. But now that the Skyliner is back at Disney World, that's not even the coolness anymore. Yeah, but it doesn't go to as many places, so you've got to- Well, it goes to as many parks, right, because you can get to both Hollywood Studios and EPCOT by Skyliner. And I think it's two different sets of hotels it goes to versus the three, but they're all the luxe, whereas the Skyliner has a moderate- Yeah. Okay. You don't care. I mean- I'll say it, because it is hard for me to miss out on a chance to slander St. Louis. Disney has a better transit system than some states. Yeah. Crest. Like, I will take the monorail over, you know, light rail, whatever St. Louis has. I try to repress most of it, but I stand by it. I stand by it. Yeah. I mean, and it could have been even- it could have been better. I gather- I saw something a few years ago that Walt Disney actually offered the state of Florida that he would just build the monorail to the city so that you can go directly from Orlando in and like, he would replace their whole public transit system there with monorails, and they said no. So- I mean, that wound up probably being for the best for Walt Disney Corporation because now they have a small army of different hotel options- Yeah, that's fair. It's a benefit to staying on Disney property versus all properties you have. I guess. You have all these transpo. I guess, but it also would have made it much easier to stateize, not that it seems like they have any blockades to it now. All right. Well, anyway, that will conclude this weird, weirdly Disney-focused podcast there. You need the end? Just yeah. I mean, but it got way, way more into the weeds than anybody cares about. So we'll conclude for now and say thanks everybody for listening. You should subscribe to the show. Get new episodes when they come out. You should leave reviews, stars, write something. It helps. You should be listening to other shows on the Legal Talk Network. You can check out the Jibo show that Catherine hosts. You can check out the Legal Tech Week journalist roundtable, which I'm a panelist on. You can follow above the law and read all of the stories that we write, these and others and hear about them before we talk about them. You can follow us on social media. The blog is at ATL blog. On Twitter, I'm at Joseph Patrice, Catherine's at Catherine 1, which is the numeral one, Chris's at rights for rent, which is rights as in put pen to paper, not legal rights. And you should be, you know, what else? Anything else? No, I think I did that. Yeah, I did that out of order. So I think we're done. Bye. If you're a lawyer running a solo or small firm and you're looking for other lawyers to talk through issues you're currently facing in your practice, join the Unbillable Hours Community Roundtable, a free virtual event on the third Thursday of every month. Lawyers from all over the country come together and meet with me, lawyer and law firm management consultant, Christopher T. Anderson, to discuss best practices on topics such as marketing, client acquisition, hiring and firing, and time management. The conversation is free to join, but requires a simple reservation. The link to RSVP can be found on the Unbillable Hour page at legaltalknetwork.com. We'll see you there.