Clarence Thomas’s Tea Partier Wife Gets Financing For “Liberty Central”: Is There A Conflict Of Interest?

Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, is a conservative activist who founded a group called Liberty Central.

It is the most partisan role ever for a spouse of a justice on the nation’s highest court, and Mrs. Thomas is just getting started. “Liberty Central will be bigger than the Tea Party movement,” she told Fox News in April, at a Tea Party rally in Atlanta.

But to some people who study judicial ethics, Mrs. Thomas’s activism is raising knotty questions, in particular about her acceptance of large, unidentified contributions for Liberty Central. She began the group in late 2009 with two gifts of $500,000 and $50,000, and because it is a 501(c)(4) nonprofit group, named for the applicable section of the federal tax code, she does not have to publicly disclose any contributors. Such tax-exempt groups are supposed to make sure that less than half of their activities are political.

Raising this kind of money was enabled by the 5-4 Citizens United decision this past January with Clarence Thomas in the majority. And it is not necessary for them to reveal who their donors are. In fact, in the 2009 tax returns, the donors are redacted.

“It’s shocking that you would have a Supreme Court justice sitting on a case that might implicate in a very fundamental way the interests of someone who might have contributed to his wife’s organization,” said Deborah L. Rhode, a law professor and director of the Stanford University Center on the Legal Profession.