The Left Is Getting the Story on Crystal Clanton, Clarence Thomas’ Clerk, All Wrong

On June 9, 1954, a young lawyer named Fred Fisher was a junior member of the legal team that, under the leadership of Joseph Welch, was opposing Sen. Joe McCarthy in the televised Army–McCarthy hearings. It had been reported in the New York Times that Fisher, a World War II veteran, had been a member of the leftist National Lawyers Guild while a student at Harvard Law School. The National Lawyers Guild was founded in 1937, in response to the American Bar Association’s support for segregation, and had many Communists among the membership, which is why it was a means of attack for McCarthy and his team. (I was an NLG member throughout law school in the early 1970s, and for some years afterward.)

McCarthy, who deceptively styled himself “Tail Gunner Joe,” sensed weakness, attacking Fisher as a Communist in an attempt to discredit Welch and his colleagues.

Welch would have none of it. He famously defended Fisher in memorable terms:

The stunning rebuke, watched by millions who had tuned into the live hearing broadcast, pierced McCarthy’s seeming invulnerability, and has widely been credited as the beginning of his downfall.

When Welch said, “We all know he belonged to the Lawyers Guild,” he was standing up for the principle that careers should not be destroyed because of youthful associations.

But these sorts of character attacks are regrettably still with us, almost 70 years after Welch’s courageous stand, and they are not the exclusive province of the extreme right. Consider the case of Crystal Clanton, a young attorney who is still suffering the consequences of a vile text she authored before she ever went to law school.

At age 20, Clanton texted an alarmingly racist message to a co-worker that read, “I HATE BLACK PEOPLE. Like fuck them all … I hate blacks. End of story.” The text surfaced a few years later, when she was working as national field director for the right-wing outfit Turning Point USA. Without denying that she’d sent the text, Clanton somewhat implausibly claimed that she had “no recollection of these messages and they do not reflect what I believe or who I am and the same was true when I was a teenager.” She was promptly separated from her job.

Fortunately for Clanton, she had made an influential friend while working at Turning Point USA. Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, had been Clanton’s mentor. The young woman was soon living at the Thomases’ home in Virginia, and with the Thomases’ encouragement, Clanton eventually attended the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University. Thanks at least in part to the justice’s recommendation, she secured two prestigious federal court clerkships following graduation, including one with Judge William Pryor of the 11^th Circuit Court of Appeals, well known as a “feeder” to the Supreme Court.

Regardless of what you think of the Thomases’ specific politics, this should be an apparent success story. Whatever caused Clanton to send her deeply offensive text, she evidently overcame any prejudices to the satisfaction of Justice Thomas—the abhorrent text may even have been the result of a lapse that did not dictate the rest of her adult behavior. “I know Crystal Clanton and I know bigotry,” he later wrote. “Bigotry is antithetical to her nature and character.”

Instead, Clanton has become the target of political figures who begrudged her a fresh start on a promising career. Stories in the national media reported her clerkships as if they amounted to a scandal, rather than an achievement, with headlines often including variations on “I HATE BLACK PEOPLE.”

Most troubling, a group of seven Democratic legislators filed a judicial ethics complaint against the two judges who hired Clanton. Citing the infamous text, as well as several other alleged incidents of racist statements, the complaint asserted that placing her in “close proximity to judicial decision-making threatens to seriously undermine the public’s faith in the federal judiciary.”

Pryor defended both himself and Clanton in a letter to the judicial panel adjudicating the ethics complaints. He called the accusations a “smear [of] the reputation of an innocent law student.”

It is not a judicial ethics violation to give a young person a chance at redemption, and the complaint against the two judges was unanimously dismissed by a panel of judges from the U.S. 2^nd Circuit.

That cleared the way for Thomas to offer Clanton a clerkship at the Supreme Court, an otherwise unremarkable hiring decision that generated another round of national headlines, again branding Clanton the “I Hate Black People” lawyer.

In a classic demonstration of punching down, the Washington Post’s Ruth Marcus wrote a series of columns about Clanton—beginning when she was still in law school—that read like a campaign to make her an unemployable pariah. Thomas’ decision to hire Clanton, she said, is a “stain” on the entire federal judiciary.

Marcus got her metaphor backward. Thomas probably wasn’t intentionally channeling Joseph Welch, but he had gotten it right when he responded to the judicial ethics complaint. “We have reached a sorry state of affairs,” he said, “when a young adult can be indelibly marked with today’s ‘scarlet letter’ of defamation.”

Character attacks have been a recurrent feature of American politics since at least the time of Thomas Jefferson. They have often been effective, even if false (see: Clinton, Hillary, 2016), and they can be salutary when true (see: Moore, Roy, 2017). Office seekers know that character attacks come with the territory. But that should not be true of young people who find themselves involuntarily embroiled in controversies, and it is especially unfair when the attacks are based on youthful incidents, from years earlier, that have dubious bearing on whom they have become.

Donald Trump’s Republicans have abandoned decency as a value, with no concern for collateral damage. Liberals could set a far better example by allowing Crystal Clanton to get on with her life.