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🚀 Clarence Thomas’s Clerks: An ‘Extended Family’ With Reach and Power - The New York Times

In the 32 years since Justice Thomas came through the fire of his confirmation hearings and onto the Supreme Court, he has assembled an army of influential acolytes unlike any other — a network of like-minded former clerks who have not only rallied to his defense but carried his idiosyncratic brand of conservative legal thinking out into the nation’s law schools, top law firms, the judiciary and the highest reaches of government.

The former clerks’ public defense of the justice was “unparalleled in the history of the court,” said Todd C. Peppers, a professor of public affairs at Roanoke College and the author of “Courtiers of the Marble Palace: The Rise and Influence of the Supreme Court Law Clerk.” “It’s frankly astonishing.”

An email sent by Virginia Thomas, the conservative activist and wife of the Supreme Court justice, to a listserv of former clerks.

For Justice Thomas, the letter came at a time of both trial and triumph. He had become the face of long-simmering questions about the high court’s ethical guidelines. But he was also at the height of his influence. The court’s senior justice, he had spent years on the losing side of cases, writing minority opinions grounded in his strict originalist interpretations of the Constitution. Now that former President Donald J. Trump had given the court a conservative supermajority, Justice Thomas was a guiding voice for a new judicial mainstream.

He was playing a long game, and his former clerks were among its most important players. The Thomases did not respond to requests for comment, but in a 2008 interview, the justice said, “I tell my law clerks that we’re not writing current events — we’re writing for a much longer period,” adding that his opinions were based on “principles that are locked down and that will be here when the tides turn” in 50 years.

Now the tides have turned, and at least 18 of those former clerks have served as state, federal or military judges, nearly three-quarters of them appointed by Mr. Trump to federal courts, where they have ruled on issues like voting rights and access to the abortion pill. Roughly 10 more served in Mr. Trump’s administration; nearly a dozen made his Supreme Court short lists. Former Thomas clerks have argued, and won, several of the most momentous Supreme Court cases of recent years.

The network also includes a number of “adopted clerks” who never worked for Justice Thomas but are invited to events and receive clerk communications. Among them are high-profile conservatives including Leonard Leo, the judicial kingmaker of the Federalist Society, Senator Mike Lee of Utah and Alex Azar, a Trump cabinet secretary.

Supreme Court clerks are, by definition, the sort of ambitious lawyers likely to wield significant influence in their post-clerk lives. What makes Justice Thomas’s clerks so remarkable, in large part, is their success as loyal standard-bearers of his singular ideology. Indeed, an examination of what the justice and his wife call Thomas Clerk World, based on interviews with people in and around it and a review of private emails and the Thomases’ public statements, shows how meticulously the couple have cultivated the clerk network over the decades.

It is common for justices to maintain close ties with their clerks, but Stephen R. McAllister, a former clerk who served as the United States attorney for Kansas during the Trump administration, said Justice Thomas was “quite extraordinary in terms of keeping in touch with his clerks, helping clerks and having everyone be in touch with each other.”

The Thomases have tended to their network through monthly lunches at Morton’s The Steakhouse or the Capital Grille in Washington, open to any alumni who happen to be in town. They have hosted clerks and their families at ski resorts and summer retreats, complete with inside jokes stenciled on T-shirts and swag bags with Thomas-themed challenge coins, stress balls and playing cards. The justice has encouraged camaraderie through group screenings of the film version of Ayn Rand’s manifesto of individualism “The Fountainhead” and pilgrimages to the Civil War battlefield at Gettysburg.

At the heart of the organizing is Mrs. Thomas — jokingly designated “law clerk emeritus” — who manages the network’s discourse as a sort of den mother. Hers has been a particularly active role for a Supreme Court spouse — overseeing production of a directory with a page for each clerk, as well as the email listserv and a private Facebook group. All of it, she has said, is meant to build “connective tissue across and throughout this amazing community of leaders.”

Mrs. Thomas, whose right-wing political activism has included involvement in efforts to overturn Mr. Trump’s 2020 election defeat, has insisted that she and her husband operate in separate lanes. But some of her interactions with the clerk network show the degree to which theirs is, in fact, a shared ideological project. She cheered when Mr. Trump appointed members of the Thomas clerk roster as judges: “Thank God,” Mrs. Thomas told an interviewer, rattling off other appointments. “He used to tell them, ‘You’re going to be future leaders, it’s coming your way, you’re going to be next.’ And now they are.” Last year, she encouraged clerks to start an email thread in which participants shared articles celebrating the court’s decision overturning the constitutional right to abortion.

The network has found its own ways to celebrate Justice Thomas and his legacy. In 1998, one of the justice’s clerks hunted down and presented him with a memento from one of his first Supreme Court opinions: a mounted taxidermy lobster.

When Justice Thomas speaks of his clerks, he tends to refer to them as his “kids.” As he put it in a talk a decade ago at Harvard Law School, “I really love my clerks.”

It’s scary. #legal