Tipsheet

Powerful Democrats Ignore Legal Violations by Liberal Supreme Court Justice

As powerful Democrats continue their assault on the Supreme Court by attacking conservative justices for failing to disclose gifts, which they aren't required to do, they've conveniently failed to hold liberal justices to the same standard. 

Last week it was revealed Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was gifted concert tickets directly from Beyonce and did not disclose them. 

Now, it's being reiterated that Jackson failed to comply with legally required disclosures as a judge.

Despite an ethics complaint being filed against Jackson, Democrats leading the charge against conservative Supreme Court Justices are nowhere to be found. From the complaint, which was filed by the Center for Renewing America: 

Federal law requires judicial officers to disclose the “source of items of earned income earned by a spouse from any person which exceed $1,000 . . . except . . . if the spouse is self-employed in business or a profession, only the nature of such business or profession needs be reported.”1 As part of her nomination to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, Justice Jackson disclosed the names of two legal medical malpractice consulting clients who paid her husband more than $1,000 for the year 2011.

On her subsequent filings, however, Justice Jackson repeatedly failed to disclose that her husband received income from medical malpractice consulting fees. We know this by Justice Jackson’s own admission in her amended disclosure form for 2020, filed when she was nominated to the Supreme Court, that “some of my previously filed reports inadvertently omitted” her husband’s income from “consulting on medical malpractice cases.”3 Compounding the omission and further demonstrating willfulness, Justice Jackson has not even attempted to list the years for which her previously filed disclosures omitted her husband’s consulting income. Instead, in her admission of omissions on her 2020 amended disclosure form (filed in 2022), Justice Jackson provided only the vague statement that “some” of those past disclosures contained material omissions. 

Given that she was aware of this provision when she filed her first form in 2012, it would appear the Justice Jackson willfully violated § 13104(e)(1)(A) because she did not disclose this required information on her forms for several years.