Senator John Kennedy railed against what he called an "assault" on the Supreme Court during a hearing to review concerns about the 2011 ethics review of Justice Clarence Thomas.
The hearing came after a ProPublica report revealed that the senior Supreme Court justice received lavish vacations from billionaire GOP donor Harlan Crow and that Crow purchased three properties in Georgia from Thomas. Those reports led to renewed calls for officals to review Thomas's previous failures to disclose that his wife was employed by a conservative think tank and and that he and his wife had received travel arrangements from Crow.
Sen. Kennedy (R-Louisiana) defended Thomas, attacking the credibility of Judge Mark Wolf, a committee witness he accused of launching a "witch hunt" against Justice Thomas.
“For the last dozen years, a lone federal judge, who is with us today, has been obsessed with complaining that the judicial conference got it wrong,” Sen. Kennedy said during his remarks. “Judge Wolf wasn’t getting his way from the head of the judicial conference or from Chief Justice Roberts himself.
Sen. Kennedy also accused Judge Wolf of leaking information to further the story.
"As of two weeks ago, you can read the play-by-play of how Judge Wolf repeatedly and unsuccessfully pressed the Judicial Conference to bend to his will in a Bloomberg article written a decade after the fact. By the way, the Judicial Conference says judges should not discuss pending or impending cases, confidential information, or controversial matters with the media. The media revelation is interesting not because it demonstrates any wrongdoing of Justice Thomas or Chief Justice (John) Roberts, but because it implies wrongdoing of its possible source. The information leaked to this reporter is highly confidential, and if it was leaked by a sitting judge, it was unethical."
Sen. Kennedy and other Republicans on the committee left the meeting room before Judge Wolf, and appointee of President Ronald Reagan, began his testimony. Wolf said the full Judicial Conference, of which he was a member in 2011 when the initial allegations against Justice Thomas surfaced, did not receive notice of the complaints against Thomas. Wolf said as a result, the conference's leaders couldn't decide what they should do about them.
“Pursuant to established conference policies and procedures, if the committee (on financial disclosures) had considered the letters, my colleagues on the Judicial Conference and I should have been informed of them in its reports to the Conference, even if the committee was not recommending any action by the Conference,” Judge Wolf told the remaining members of the Senate committee. “Such information would have afforded me and the other members of the conference the opportunity to discuss and decide whether there was reasonable cause to believe Justice Thomas had willfully violated the act and, if so, to make the required referral to the attorney general."
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