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      De Blasio Owes City $475,000 for Bringing Police on Presidential Campaign

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      New York City’s Conflicts of Interest Board said the former mayor must reimburse the city for police officers’ travel, and pay a record fine.Bill de Blasio, the former mayor of New York City, must reimburse the city nearly $320,000 and pay a $155,000 fine for bringing his security detail on trips during his failed presidential campaign, the city’s Conflicts of Interest Board ordered on Thursday.The hefty fine and repayment — both the highest penalty and the largest amount the board said it has ever issued — may be the most lasting impact to date of Mr. de Blasio’s doomed run for president.The former mayor’s campaign lasted just four months in 2019 and damaged his standing with city residents, who griped that their mayor was making an ill-considered play for national relevance at the expense of addressing problems at home.According to the Conflicts of Interest Board, the city spent $319,794.20 in travel-related costs for members of Mr. de Blasio’s security detail to accompany either him or his wife, Chirlane McCray, on 31 out-of-state trips related to the campaign. The expenses included airfare, car rentals, overnight lodging, meals and other incidentals.Shortly before Mr. de Blasio launched his campaign, the board — an independent body with five members appointed by the mayor, comptroller and public advocate — told Mr. de Blasio that the city could pay for salary and overtime for his security detail. But it advised him that paying for the officers’ travel costs would be a “misuse of city resources,” it said.But Mr. de Blasio did not heed the board’s guidance, it said. His failure to do so was one of several issues addressed in a 47-page report by the city’s Department of Investigation, which found that Mr. de Blasio misused public resources for both political and personal purposes, including having a police van and officers help move his daughter to Gracie Mansion.Jocelyn Strauber, the investigations commissioner, said in a statement that the Conflicts of Interest Board’s order backed her department’s report and showed “that public officials — including the most senior — will be held accountable when they violate the rules.”The board, which still has two members appointed by Mr. de Blasio, ordered the former mayor to repay the expenses borne by the city and fined him $5,000 for each out-of-state trip.Mr. de Blasio’s presidential campaign reported having just $1,422.76 on hand in its last filing with the Federal Election Commission, in December 2020. A political action committee associated with Mr. de Blasio, Fairness PAC, last reported having more than $32,000 in debt and less than $3,000 on hand.Mr. de Blasio, who ran New York City from 2014 through 2021, was plagued by ethics questions during his time in office. He was the subject of a number of investigations into whether his fund-raising methods violated the city’s ethics law, a ban against soliciting contributions from people who had business in front of the city.In April, the Federal Election Commission fined his presidential campaign for accepting improper contributions from two political action committees he and others had set up.Since leaving his post, Mr. de Blasio made a short-lived run for an open House seat that ended after two months on the campaign trail. (His House campaign reported having roughly $156,000 in its coffers at the end of March, but it is not clear whether he could use that money to pay expenses associated with his presidential run.)Mr. de Blasio left politics behind and moved into academia, becoming a visiting teaching fellow at Harvard University and teaching a class at New York University.He has recently become more candid about his time in office. In an uncommonly frank interview with New York Magazine published on Wednesday, Mr. de Blasio opened up about criticisms he received as mayor, including an infamous moment when he dropped a groundhog in 2014. He also expressed some regret about seeking the presidency.“It was a mistake,” he said. “I think my values were the right values, and I think I had something to offer, but it was not right on a variety of levels.”Mr. de Blasio did not respond to a message seeking comment. One of his lawyers, Andrew G. Celli Jr., said in a statement that Mr. de Blasio’s legal team had already filed a lawsuit to appeal the ruling and block the board’s order. He accused the board of breaking “decades of N.Y.P.D. policy and precedent” and violating the Constitution.“In the wake of the January 6th insurrection, the shootings of Congress members Giffords and Scalise, and almost daily threats directed at local leaders around the country, the C.O.I.B.’s action — which seeks to saddle elected officials with security costs that the city has properly borne for decades — is dangerous, beyond the scope of their powers, and illegal,” Mr. Celli said. More

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      Justices Must Disclose Travel and Gifts Under New Rules

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      The change comes as members of Congress have called for the justices to be held to ethics standards similar to those for the executive and legislative branches.WASHINGTON — Supreme Court justices will be required to disclose more of their activities, including some free trips, air travel and other types of gifts, according to rules adopted earlier this month.Under the new rules, justices and other federal judges must report travel by private jet, as well as stays at commercial properties, such as hotels, resorts or hunting lodges.The move comes as members of Congress have called for the justices, who have long faced less stringent reporting requirements, to be held to ethics standards similar to those for the executive and legislative branches.“To the extent this becomes a model for further activity for the Judicial Conference to clean up the Supreme Court mess, I think that’s significant,” said Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat of Rhode Island who sits on the Judiciary Committee’s panel that oversees federal courts.Some advocates pushing for greater transparency on the court cautioned that the rules would be hard to enforce and that it would be nearly impossible to know whether a justice had failed to disclose a trip, flight or other perk.“The problem with any sort of transparency rule within the judiciary is the question of enforcement, the question of accountability,” said Gabe Roth, executive director of Fix the Court, an organization critical of the court’s transparency. Without additional requirements, including a quicker turnaround for disclosing travel and gifts and penalties for failures to comply, the new measures are likely to have a limited effect, Mr. Roth said.“The bar is so low that you can get credit for doing the bare minimum,” he said. “Small but significant is where I’m at.”The new rules, which went into effect March 14, were adopted by a financial disclosure committee of the Judicial Conference of the United States, the policymaking body for the federal courts.At a meeting in January, the committee discussed whether judges and justices would be required to file disclosures when they are hosted at commercial properties, such as resorts, according to a letter to Mr. Whitehouse from Judge Roslynn R. Mauskopf, the director of the Administrative Office of the United States Courts, which provides support for the court system.By federal law, justices must file forms each year disclosing financial ties, including gifts. However, the rules for travel that is considered “personal hospitality” were not clearly defined, including for stays at commercial properties or trips in which a third-party pays.It is unclear precisely how oversight and enforcement would work for the justices. A court spokeswoman declined to comment.The most common enforcement mechanism stems from the Judicial Conduct and Disability Act, which describes “misconduct” as “knowingly violating requirements for financial disclosure.” If an allegation arose, the chief judge of a circuit could review it and determine whether a punishment is warranted, but the act does not apply to the Supreme Court.Questions around travel by the justices have persisted for years, particularly since the death of Justice Antonin Scalia in 2016. Justice Scalia died while on a hunting trip at a lodge in West Texas owned by a businessman involved in a case that the court declined to hear in 2015.Justice Scalia, who had been staying at the ranch for free, had taken more than 250 subsidized trips from 2004 to 2014.In 2014 alone, he went on at least 23 privately funded trips, including to Ireland, Switzerland and Hawaii. Justice Scalia had been invited to the ranch by John Poindexter, owner of a Texas manufacturing firm. One of Mr. Poindexter’s companies, the Mic Group, had been the defendant in an age discrimination lawsuit by a former employee who had unsuccessfully sought review by the Supreme Court the year before.But Justice Scalia was hardly alone in accepting privately paid trips. From 2004 to 2014, Justice Stephen G. Breyer took 185 such trips, according to a database by the Center for Responsive Politics.The issue of privately paid travel also emerged in 2011, a year after the landmark campaign finance case Citizens United, which allowed unlimited corporate spending in elections. A liberal advocacy group, Common Cause, argued that Justices Scalia and Clarence Thomas should have recused themselves from hearing the case because they traveled to a political conference in Palm Springs, Calif., sponsored by the businessman Charles G. Koch, one of the biggest donors to Republicans.Legal experts greeted this month’s move with cautious optimism.“In my world of transparency and judicial ethics, what we had until now was little more than a joke,” said Stephen Gillers, a professor emeritus at the New York University School of Law who specializes in legal ethics. “The rules were very lax and tolerated circumvention, and now we’ve taken a giant step away from that.”However, he said there was still a long way to go toward transparency and accountability, pointing to the lag time between when a gift is received and when it must be reported. Justices have until May 15 of the year after receiving a gift before they must report it.In theory, if a justice “knowingly and willfully” failed to comply with the rules, the attorney general could bring a case. In practice, though, he said, that has never happened. He added that it was also impossible to know how individual justices would respond to the stricter rules.“There’s no enforcement mechanism at the Supreme Court,” he said. “It will be up to each justice.” More

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      Gov. Kathy Hochul Seeks Donations From Cuomo Appointees

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      Gov. Kathy Hochul’s campaign says contributions from board and commission members and their families are fair game because she did not appoint them.ALBANY, N.Y. — On the road to building one of the largest campaign war chests the state of New York has ever seen, Gov. Kathy Hochul has been taking money from appointees of the governor — despite an executive order designed to prevent it.In her first year in office, Ms. Hochul has accepted more than $400,000 from appointees on boards from Buffalo to Battery Park City as well as the appointees’ spouses, a New York Times analysis of campaign finance data has found.The fund-raising has occurred despite the longstanding executive order — reissued by Ms. Hochul on her first day in office — that prohibits such transactions in order to avoid even the appearance of rewarding donors with jobs in exchange for contributions.Ms. Hochul’s campaign said it was appropriate to accept the contributions because they came from people appointed by her predecessor, Andrew M. Cuomo. The argument underscored a loophole in the ethics order that would seem to allow one governor to accept money from another governor’s board and commission appointees. In some cases, Ms. Hochul received donations from people Mr. Cuomo had appointed and then gave them new appointments.A spokesman for Ms. Hochul’s campaign, Jerrel Harvey, said that Ms. Hochul had not accepted money from people she appointed and emphasized that all of her fund-raising had been aboveboard.“We’ve been clear from the beginning of Governor Hochul’s term that people who are appointed by her are prevented from donating once they are appointed,” Mr. Harvey said. “We have followed that straightforward standard consistently and strictly.”But legal experts and good government advocates have called Ms. Hochul’s reasoning into question.“It’s a silly argument to say if I appointed you then you can’t contribute to me, but if my predecessor appointed you, then I can hit you up for donations,” said Bruce Green, a professor at Fordham University Law School and a former member of the New York City Conflicts of Interest Board. “Going forward, presumably, they’re both going to want to be reappointed.”Ms. Hochul has already raised some $35 million and set a goal of raising as much as twice that amount ahead of the general election in November. Cindy Schultz for The New York TimesThe donations that Ms. Hochul accepted from appointees represent just a small portion of her campaign’s huge haul ahead of the election in November. She has already raised some $35 million and set a goal of raising as much as twice that amount, people familiar with her plans said. Doing so would put the 2022 governor’s race at or near the most expensive in state history.Ms. Hochul, a Democrat who was sworn in as governor after Mr. Cuomo resigned amid a scandal last year, easily defeated two primary rivals this summer and is heavily favored to win against Representative Lee Zeldin, a Republican, in the fall.Although she has promised a clean break from the ways of her predecessor, Ms. Hochul’s willingness to raise money from appointees runs counter to that pledge. Mr. Cuomo was known for taking a hawkish approach to soliciting donations from the people he appointed, raising ethics concerns.Ms. Hochul’s campaign has not shrunk from accepting donations from Mr. Cuomo’s appointees, receiving more than $250,000 from them, records show.She got more than $56,000 from the real estate developer Don Capoccia, whom Mr. Cuomo appointed to the Battery Park City Authority in 2011 and who did not respond to requests for comment.She accepted more than $90,000 between October and May from a trial lawyer, Joe Belluck, who was chosen by Mr. Cuomo for two statewide panels, and his wife. Ms. Hochul appointed Mr. Belluck to the state’s new Cannabis Advisory Board in June.Mr. Belluck scoffed at the notion of any impropriety in his donation.“I receive no remuneration and do no business with the state, period,” he said. “I have no private interests related to these positions. I donate to Governor Hochul because I support her policies and admire her leadership, and I am honored to serve.”Ms. Hochul also received $45,200 from John Ernst, an heir to the Bloomingdale’s fortune, whom Mr. Cuomo appointed to the Adirondack Park Agency board in 2016, and Mr. Ernst’s wife. Less than three weeks after receiving those donations, she reappointed Mr. Ernst to the park agency’s board and made him chairman.Mr. Ernst said he initially turned down Ms. Hochul’s offer of the chairmanship, which comes with a $30,000 annual salary, and emphatically denied any connection between his donating and being appointed to the position.“If I had thought it was a conflict, I wouldn’t have done it — wouldn’t have made a contribution,” he said. “I did it independently as a citizen because I believed in Kathy Hochul.”A spokeswoman for the governor’s office, Julie Wood, said Ms. Hochul has applied the ethics order far more “broadly and strictly” than Mr. Cuomo did, saying his administration “violated their own rules.”“Governor Hochul holds herself to a higher ethical standard,” Ms. Wood said.Ms. Hochul has also accepted contributions and then appointed the donors to state boards and commissions. She received $3,000 from Robert Simpson, the chief executive of a Syracuse nonprofit that promotes economic development, in two donations and named him to the board of Empire State Development, New York’s economic development agency, less than a month after the second one.A spokeswoman for Mr. Simpson said that after he assumed the post he adopted policies to limit conflicts of interest and pledged to no longer contribute to or raise money for Ms. Hochul.Ms. Hochul accepted more than $7,800 from Janice Shorenstein, the mother of Ms. Hochul’s former transition director, Marissa Shorenstein, and Janice Shorenstein threw a fund-raiser for the governor in May. Marissa Shorenstein, who attended the event, was confirmed to the New York State Gaming Commission about two weeks later. Ms. Shorenstein and her mother did not respond to requests for comment left at their offices.And Ms. Hochul accepted another $5,000 in April from Sammy Chu, a Long Island businessman whose company also paid more than $2,100 for a Hochul fund-raiser in Plainview two days later. In late May, she tapped him for a spot on the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.Mr. Chu said he learned of the rules against governors’ accepting money from appointees only when The Times informed him of them in August.“There was certainly no quid pro quo,” Mr. Chu said. “Now that I’m appointed to the board, you know, I’ll be hypervigilant about it. But at that time, I was not a nominee or a board member.”Taken together, records show, Ms. Hochul accepted at least 40 donations totaling more than $475,000 from her nominees or Mr. Cuomo’s appointees and their family members. Those appointees are sitting on more than 20 boards, commissions and public authorities across New York, including the State University of New York board, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the New York Power Authority and the United Nations Development Corporation.Ms. Hochul’s campaign stressed that she had been careful not to take contributions from any person she appointed to a state position. In at least one case, The Times found, Ms. Hochul accepted contributions from a person appointed by Mr. Cuomo, appointed that person to a different commission and then declined to accept further contributions from him.While none of the donations accepted by Ms. Hochul’s campaign from her own appointees appeared to violate any rules, they nevertheless might create the appearance of impropriety, legal experts said.Some might feel pressure to give to an elected official with power over their appointed positions. Others who wish to be appointed might donate in hopes of getting the job, said Kathleen Clark, a Washington University law professor.“It may appear that the way to get appointed is to give money or to hold fund-raisers,” Professor Clark said, adding: “The scandal is what we allow rather than what we prohibit.”For her part, Ms. Hochul has dismissed any suggestion that her fund-raising practices might raise ethical concerns. When a reporter asked at a recent news conference if she worried about the optics of taking campaign money from people who are doing business with the state, she bristled.“I will say one sentence on this,” she said. “I follow all the rules, always have, always will.”Nicholas Fandos More

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      How Conflicts of Interest Are Hurting the Climate

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      Bill McKibben, the environmental activist, explains.From “The Daily” newsletter: One big idea on the news, from the team that brings you “The Daily” podcast. You can sign up for the newsletter here.Conflicts of interest are, by their nature, often obscured. A financial tie here, a family connection there, concealed by the division of public and private life. But what happens when those conflicting interests inform national — and international — policy?In the executive branch, the Trump presidency was dominated by this question. In the judicial branch, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is under pressure to recuse himself from cases regarding the 2020 election and its aftermath after The Times revealed that Virginia Thomas, his wife, was involved in efforts to overturn the vote. And in the legislative branch, Senator Joe Manchin, Democrat of West Virginia, is facing increasing scrutiny of his financial ties to the coal industry.The influence of money and corporations in the federal government is a “growing problem,” said Aaron D. Hill, associate professor of management at the University of Florida. Nearly one in eight stock trades by members of Congress intersects with legislation, and research shows that members of the House and Senate generate “abnormally higher returns” on their investments. Still, Congress members are subject to less stringent (or, at times, unenforced) oversight on conflicts of interests than those in other branches of government.But what is the impact of this lack of oversight? As you heard on Tuesday’s show, at every step of his political career, Manchin helped a West Virginia power plant that is the sole customer of his private coal business. Along the way, he blocked ambitious climate action.So we reached out to Bill McKibben, environmental activist, professor and author, to ask him about the rippling effects of Manchin’s actions on the climate movement. His responses have been lightly edited.You recently wrote: “The climate movement has come very close — one senator close — to beating the political power of Big Oil. But that’s not quite close enough.” How have Manchin’s actions affected the broader climate movement?For Biden and his climate efforts, Manchin’s opposition seems to be excruciating. The Democrats can’t do anything to offend him for fear of forfeiting his vote. So they’ve largely given up executive authority on climate, but he never quite delivers the vote. Now he seems to be saying that if he gives some money for renewables, it has to come with money for fossil fuel as well. I’d say Big Oil has never made an investment with a higher rate of return.On climate, at least so far, we might have been better off without control of the Senate, because then at least we could have gotten what executive action could accomplish.In the case of Manchin, congressional conflict-of-interest loopholes have consequences well beyond American borders. What equity concerns does this illuminate?Ginni Thomas and the 2020 Presidential ElectionThe conservative activist and wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has come under scrutiny for her involvement in efforts to keep Donald J. Trump in power.A Long Crusade: The Thomases battled for years for a more conservative America. This is how far Ginni Thomas went after the 2020 election.Her Texts: Weeks before Jan. 6, Ms. Thomas sent a flurry of texts imploring Mr. Trump’s chief of staff to take steps to overturn the vote.Embracing Conspiracies: An examination of Ms. Thomas’s texts shows how firmly she was embedded in the fringe of right-wing politics.Will Justice Thomas Recuse?: Legal experts say Ms. Thomas’s texts are enough to require his recusal from election cases, but Chief Justice John Roberts cannot force it.We’re not just gutting America’s energy future to please one corrupt coal baron; he’s managed to upend global climate policy, too. The plan for Glasgow, I think, was for Biden to arrive with Build Back Better in his hip pocket, slam it down on the table and tell the Chinese and Indian delegations to match it. Instead he arrived with nothing, gave a limp speech — I’m not certain he went to sleep afterward, but the conference did.In 2020, fossil fuel pollution killed about three times as many people as Covid-19 did. This statistic can feel overwhelming. As an activist, what are the most effective strategies you see for generating momentum and a sense of urgency in addressing the climate crisis?The sad thing is, we’ve generated a ton of it. It was the biggest voting issue for Democratic primary voters, and the issue where polling showed Trump’s position was furthest off from the mainstream. But the desire of people doesn’t reliably translate into political action in our system anymore. There’s never been a purer case of vested interest thwarting necessary action. As the Exxon lobbyist told a hidden camera last summer, Manchin was the “kingmaker.” Or, alternately, the man who melts the ice and raises the sea.What is making you feel optimistic about climate action lately?Well, it’s the perfect moment for action, and some places we’re starting to see it. Vladimir Putin has reminded us that the daily carnage of pollution and the existential threat of climate damage are joined by the fact that fossil fuel underwrites despotism more often than not. It could be a pivot point, and, in the case of the E.U., may turn out to be. But so far here, Biden and his team haven’t really messaged it that way. They’ve been way more focused on carrying water for Big Oil.But I can tell you that more and more people are getting it, and not just the young people who have been in the lead of the climate fight. Our crew of over-60s at Third Act [a climate action group focused on mobilizing “experienced Americans”] are joining in large numbers this pledge to take on the banks that back the fossil fuel industry. After the record temperatures in the Antarctic combined with the missile strikes on Mariupol, people have had enough.From the Daily team: Remember cheap oil?In April 2020, we explored why the cost of a barrel of oil dropped into the negatives.Bing Guan/BloombergThis week, we sat down with Michael Simon Johnson, a senior producer, for our series in which we ask Daily producers and editors to tell us about their favorite episodes that they’ve worked on.Michael’s pick is “A Glut of Oil,” from the spring of 2020. It’s an episode that looks back at half a century of American foreign and energy policy to explain how, at the time, the price of a barrel of oil dropped into the negatives. And it’s one that has particular resonance today as parts of the world grapple with how to reduce reliance on Russian oil amid the war in Ukraine.What was “A Glut of Oil” about?It was an episode we did in April 2020, when oil prices dropped into the negatives. It required some context, so a huge portion of the episode ticked through history, starting with the Arab-Israeli War in the ’70s, the U.S. stepping in to provide weapons — not unlike the way we are with Ukraine right now — and Arab countries retaliating by cutting off our oil supply, causing an energy crisis. It felt important to start there because that is where it changes our foreign policy. The whole point of energy independence was so that we can exercise control over our foreign policy and not have other countries dictate who we help and why — or where we invade.We spent 50 years trying to solve that problem and we succeeded. Then the pandemic happened and we literally had the opposite problem — what happens when we have too much oil?Why is it one of your favorite episodes that you’ve worked on?What it did for me was take all of these aspects of American history that I don’t tend to think of as related and it drew a line between them; they’re actually all part of a single continuum. I re-evaluated modern American history through the lens of oil, and I saw so many more connections because of that than I would have seen otherwise. Going back in history allowed us to go on this amazing journey through history and through archival tape.How important is it for there to be historical context in climate episodes?Historical context is one of the first tools we turn to when we’re making an episode in general, but it’s not specific to climate episodes. We are generally trying to arm listeners with the tools they need to understand and to have more context for what is happening. We want people to understand what is happening as some part of a continuum.On The Daily this weekMonday: The story of Iryna Baramidze, one of the millions of Ukrainians who have fled their country amid the war.Tuesday: Inside the investigation into Manchin’s conflicts of interest.Wednesday: How Justice Thomas and his wife, Ginni, came to be at the heart of the conservative movement.Thursday: Why this year’s midterms could have the fairest congressional map in a generation.Friday: What is happening inside the besieged Ukrainian port city of Mariupol?That’s it for the Daily newsletter. See you next week.Have thoughts about the show? Tell us what you think at thedaily@nytimes.com.Were you forwarded this newsletter? Subscribe here to get it delivered to your inbox.Love podcasts? Join The New York Times Podcast Club on Facebook. More

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      Real Justice: Justice Jackson

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      WASHINGTON — A snarling pack of white male Republicans ripping apart a poised, brainy Black woman at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, using sordid innuendos and baseless claims about race and porn to smear her, as her pained family sits behind her.It has been 31 years since I watched this scene, disgusted, when Anita Hill was questioned during confirmation hearings for Justice Clarence Thomas. Now Ketanji Brown Jackson has been cast into the same medieval torture chamber on Capitol Hill, with Democrats once more struggling to shield their witness from being mauled.This time, the male Torquemadas were joined by a female inquisitor, Marsha Blackburn. The Tennessee Republican is all magnolia Southern charm — until she spits venom.“Can you provide a definition for the word woman?” Blackburn asked Judge Jackson, invoking the controversy over a transgender swimmer from the University of Pennsylvania. Blackburn’s question inspired Tucker Carlson to later hold up a graphic of a woman’s reproductive system, along with a silhouette of a woman so shapely that Roger Ailes would have approved.What is a woman? Jackson shows that a woman is someone who stays cool in the face of calumny and is headed for the Supreme Court. And that will be justice for Justice Jackson.A better question might be: What is a senator?Is it a dolt who cares more about boosting unrealistic presidential ambitions with distorted information than making the Senate, for once, look like a dignified body?Feral Republicans took an exemplary record and twisted it to make Jackson look like an enabler of pedophiles. Tom Cotton all but accused her of lying, just as Arlen Specter accused Hill of perjury — based on nothing.Less than a year ago, Lindsey Graham voted to confirm Jackson for the D.C. Court of Appeals, calling her “qualified.” Now he berates her with odd questions and seems to blame her for Brett Kavanaugh’s grilling. If only John McCain could appear to him like Hamlet’s father’s ghost and slap him into shape.Perhaps Joe Biden sees his selection of Judge Jackson as a sort of expiation for his dismal performance as committee chairman for the Hill-Thomas hearings. Biden allowed the Republicans to run wild, and then he shut down the hearings before Hill’s backup witnesses testified. He cleared the path for Clarence Thomas, a liar and sexual harasser, to ascend to a lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court and impose his far-right views on the country.As Jill Abramson wrote in the Times Opinion section, the court’s 6-3 majority now “seems to be reshaping itself in Justice Thomas’s image.”In a speech at Notre Dame last year, Thomas lamented, “We have lost the capacity, even I think as leaders, to not allow others to manipulate our institutions when we don’t get the outcomes we like.”And yet manipulating institutions is exactly what his wife, Ginni, tried to do. As Bob Woodward and Robert Costa reported in a Washington Post-CBS News bombshell, the conservative activist worked frantically to overturn the results of the 2020 election, calling it an “obvious fraud,” as Donald Trump and his allies were vowing to go to her husband’s court to nullify Biden’s win.Ginni Thomas has had a chip on her shoulder since the Hill-Thomas hearings — she shamelessly left Hill a voice message in 2010 asking for an apology — and no doubt she thought if she could help claw back the presidency from Biden, that would be sweet revenge.In a cascade of text messages, she urged Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, to get Trump back into the Oval. “Help This Great President stand firm, Mark!!!” she pleaded, adding, “The majority knows Biden and the Left is attempting the greatest Heist of our History.” Ginni — who attended the Jan. 6 rally before the raid on the Capitol started — urged Meadows to “Release the Kraken.”The Republicans badgering Judge Jackson aren’t asking a single question about the explosive revelations regarding Ginni Thomas — and nor are the rest of their party. Did the justice know what his wife was doing? Was he OK with it? Does he accept that he must recuse himself from cases dealing with Jan. 6 and the election?Apparently not. “Justice Thomas has already participated in two cases related to the 2020 election and its aftermath, despite his wife’s direct involvement in the so-called Stop the Steal efforts,” Jane Mayer reported in The New Yorker.When the court rejected Trump’s request to prevent the Jan. 6 committee from getting his records relating to the attempt to overturn the election results, Thomas was the sole dissenter. Do the records implicate Ginni?Stephen Gillers, a judicial ethicist, told Mayer that it was Clarence Thomas’s duty to know about Ginni’s crusade: “‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’ is not an acceptable strategy for the Thomases’ marriage.”Thomas should never have been on the court. Now that we know his wife was plotting the overthrow of the government, he should get off or be thrown off. You can’t administer justice when your spouse is running around strategizing for a coup.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Justice Thomas Ruled on Election Cases. Should His Wife’s Texts Have Stopped Him?

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      The nature of the text messages was enough to require recusal, legal experts said. But the Supreme Court has traditionally left such decisions to the discretion of the justice in question.WASHINGTON — The disclosure that Virginia Thomas, the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas, had sent a barrage of text messages to the Trump White House urging efforts to overturn the 2020 election brought into sharp focus the conflict of interest her political activism has created — and the lack of a clear-cut remedy.It is one thing, experts in legal ethics said on Friday, for the spouse of a Supreme Court justice to express political views, even ones shot through with wild conspiracy theories. That may not by itself require the justice’s recusal from cases touching on those views.But the text messages from Ms. Thomas, a longtime conservative activist who goes by Ginni, revealed something quite different and deeply troubling, experts said.The messages from Ms. Thomas to Mark Meadows, President Donald J. Trump’s chief of staff, sent during and just after the fraught weeks between the 2020 presidential election and the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, demonstrated that she was an active participant in shaping the legal effort to overturn the election.“I’m not sure how I would have come out if we just had a lot of texts from her saying that ‘this is terrible,’ said Amanda Frost, a law professor at American University in Washington.“But she wasn’t doing just that,” Professor Frost said. “She was strategizing. She was promoting. She was haranguing.”The texts were among about 9,000 pages of documents that Mr. Meadows turned over to the congressional committee investigating the Capitol attack. Democrats immediately seized on the disclosure to draw attention to the conflicts they said were presented by Ms. Thomas’s political activities and to press Justice Thomas to recuse himself from cases concerning the election and its aftermath. Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, said that Justice Thomas’s “conduct on the Supreme Court looks increasingly corrupt” and that he had been “the lone dissent in a case that could have denied the Jan. 6 committee records pertaining to the same plot his wife supported.”Justice Thomas, Mr. Wyden said, “needs to recuse himself from any case related to the Jan. 6 investigation, and should Donald Trump run again, any case related to the 2024 election.”But Justice Thomas, who was released from the hospital on Friday after being treated for the last week for flulike symptoms, has long been a pillar of the conservative establishment. Republicans, even those who have distanced themselves from Mr. Trump and the more extreme wing of their party, showed no interest in pressuring him to recuse himself.Ms. Thomas’s text messages were heated and forceful, urging Mr. Meadows to pursue baseless legal challenges. “Biden and the Left is attempting the greatest Heist of our History,” one said.Ms. Thomas’s activities should have prompted Justice Thomas to disqualify himself from cases related to them, said Stephen Gillers, a law professor at New York University.“He had an obligation not to sit in any case related to the election, the Jan. 6 committee or the Capitol invasion,” he said.Professor Frost agreed that the situation was “an easy case.”“When your spouse is conversing with people who have some control over litigation to challenge an election,” she said, “you shouldn’t be sitting on the Supreme Court deciding that election or any aspect of it.”But Justice Thomas did participate in a ruling in January on an emergency application from Mr. Trump asking the court to block release of White House records concerning the attack on the Capitol. The court rejected the request, in a sharp rebuke to the former president.Only Justice Thomas noted a dissent, giving no reasons.He also participated in the court’s consideration of whether to hear a related appeal, one in which Mr. Meadows filed a friend-of-the-court brief saying that “the outcome of this case will bear directly” on his own efforts to shield records from the House committee investigating the attacks beyond those he had provided.The Supreme Court last month refused to hear the case, without noted dissent. There was no indication that Justice Thomas had recused himself.In December 2020, around the time of the text messages, Justice Thomas participated in a ruling on an audacious lawsuit by Texas asking the court to throw out the election results in four battleground states. The court rejected the request, with Justices Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. issuing a brief statement suggesting the majority had acted too soon in shutting the case down.In February 2021, Justice Thomas addressed election fraud in a dissent from the Supreme Court’s decision to turn away a challenge to Pennsylvania’s voting procedures.Ms. Thomas’s messages urged Mark Meadows, President Donald J. Trump’s chief of staff, to pursue baseless legal challenges.Oliver Contreras for The New York Times“We are fortunate that many of the cases we have seen alleged only improper rule changes, not fraud,” he wrote. “But that observation provides only small comfort. An election free from strong evidence of systemic fraud is not alone sufficient for election confidence.”Justice Thomas did not respond to a request for comment on Friday.All federal judges, including Supreme Court justices, are subject to a federal law on recusal. The law says that “any justice, judge or magistrate judge of the United States shall disqualify himself in any proceeding in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned.”Judging by the nature of the text messages and the uproar over them, that provision alone is enough to require Justice Thomas’s recusal, legal experts said.A more specific provision concerning relatives, including spouses, might also apply to his situation. Judges should not participate, the law says, in proceedings in which their spouse has “an interest that could be substantially affected by the outcome of the proceeding.”Professor Gillers said the word “interest” was the key.“By writing to Meadows, who was chief of staff and active in the ‘Stop the Steal’ movement, she joined the team resisting the results of the election,” Professor Gillers said. “She made herself part of the team and so she has an interest in the decisions of the court that could affect Trump’s goal of reversing the results.”The Trump InvestigationsCard 1 of 6Numerous inquiries. More

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      Ginni and Clarence Thomas Are Making a Mockery of the Supreme Court

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      What did Justice Clarence Thomas know, and when did he know it?The question usually gets directed at politicians, not judges, but it’s a fair one in light of the revelation on Thursday that Justice Thomas’s wife, Ginni, was working feverishly behind the scenes — and to a far greater degree than she previously admitted — in a high-level effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election.As The Washington Post and CBS News first reported, Ms. Thomas, a supremely well-connected right-wing agitator, was in constant communication with the White House in the weeks following the election, strategizing over how to keep Donald Trump in office despite his incontrovertible loss. “Do not concede,” she texted to Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s chief of staff, on Nov. 6, the day before the major news networks called the election for Joe Biden. “It takes time for the army who is gathering for his back.” (To date, Mr. Trump has not conceded.)In dozens of messages with Mr. Meadows over several weeks, Ms. Thomas raged over baseless allegations of voter fraud and shared unhinged conspiracy theories, including one that the “Biden crime family” was in the process of being arrested and sent to Guantánamo Bay for “ballot fraud.”“Help This Great President stand firm, Mark!!!” Ms. Thomas wrote at one point. “The majority knows Biden and the Left is attempting the greatest Heist of our History.”Ms. Thomas had already acknowledged some involvement in the fight over the 2020 election count, recently confirming that she attended the Jan. 6 Stop the Steal rally in Washington, but she said she went home before Mr. Trump spoke to the crowd and before a mob of hundreds stormed the Capitol in a violent attempt to block the certification of Mr. Biden’s Electoral College victory. The texts reveal that her efforts to subvert the election were far more serious than we knew.Now recall that in January, the Supreme Court rejected Mr. Trump’s request to block the release of White House records relating to the Jan. 6 Capitol attack. Mr. Meadows had submitted a brief in the case supporting Mr. Trump. The court’s ruling came as an unsigned order, with only one noted dissent: from Justice Thomas.Perhaps Justice Thomas was not aware of his wife’s text-message campaign to Mr. Meadows at the time. But it sure makes you wonder, doesn’t it?And that’s precisely the problem: We shouldn’t have to wonder. The Supreme Court is the most powerful judicial body in the country, and yet, as Alexander Hamilton reminded us, it has neither the sword nor the purse as a means to enforce its rulings. It depends instead on the American people’s acceptance of its legitimacy, which is why the justices must make every possible effort to appear fair, unbiased and beyond reproach.That may seem naïve, particularly in the face of the crippling assaults on the court that Mitch McConnell and his Senate Republicans have carried out over the past six years in order to secure a right-wing supermajority that often resembles a judicial policy arm of the Republican Party — starting with their theft of a vacancy that was President Barack Obama’s to fill and continuing through the last-second confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett while millions of voters were already in the process of casting Mr. Trump out of office.And yet the public’s demand for basic fairness and judicial neutrality is not only proper but critical to the court’s integrity, as the justices, whoever nominated them, are well aware. Partly in response to the court’s tanking public-approval ratings, several of them have grown increasingly outspoken in defense of their independence. (Though not all of them.)The most obvious way for justices to demonstrate that independence in practice, of course, is to recuse themselves from any case in which their impartiality might reasonably be questioned. It does not matter whether there is, in fact, a conflict of interest; the mere appearance of bias or conflict should be enough to compel Justice Thomas or any other member of the court to step aside.Many of them have over the years, out of respect for the court as an institution and for the public’s faith in their probity. Just this week, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson vowed that if confirmed she would recuse herself from an upcoming case challenging Harvard’s affirmative-action policies, because of her multiple personal and professional connections to the university. Legal-ethics experts are not even in agreement that her recusal would be necessary, but Judge Jackson is right to err on the side of caution.Justice Thomas has paid lip service to this ideal. “I think the media makes it sound as though you are just always going right to your personal preference,” he said in a speech last year. “That’s a problem. You’re going to jeopardize any faith in the legal institutions.”Bench memo to the justice: You know what jeopardizes public faith in legal institutions? Refusing to recuse yourself from numerous high-profile cases in which your wife has been personally and sometimes financially entangled, as The New Yorker reported in January. Especially when you have emphasized that you and she are melded “into one being.” Or when you have, as The Times Magazine reported last month, appeared together with her for years “at highly political events hosted by advocates hoping to sway the court.”Ms. Thomas’s efforts, and her husband’s refusal to respond appropriately, have been haunting the court for years, but this latest conflagration shouldn’t be a close call. “The texts are the narrowest way of looking at this,” Stephen Gillers, a New York University law professor and one of the nation’s foremost legal-ethics experts, told me. “She signed up for Stop the Steal. She was part of the team, and that team had an interest in how the court would rule. That’s all I need to know.” He said he has over the years resisted calling for Justice Thomas’s recusal based on his wife’s actions, “but they’ve really abused that tolerance.”Yes, married people can lead independent professional lives, and it is not a justice’s responsibility to police the actions of his or her spouse. But the brazenness with which the Thomases have flouted the most reasonable expectations of judicial rectitude is without precedent. From the Affordable Care Act to the Trump administration’s Muslim ban to the 2020 election challenges, Ms. Thomas has repeatedly embroiled herself in big-ticket legal issues and with litigants who have wound up before her husband’s court. All the while, he has looked the other way, refusing to recuse himself from any of these cases. For someone whose job is about judging, Justice Thomas has, in this context at least, demonstrated abominably poor judgment.If Justice Thomas were sitting on any other federal court in the country, he would likely have been required by the code of judicial ethics to recuse himself many times over. But the code does not apply to Supreme Court justices, creating a situation in which the highest court in the land is also the most unaccountable.This is not tolerable. For years, Congress has tried in vain to extend the ethics code to the Supreme Court. For the sake of fundamental fairness and consistency, the code must apply to all federal judges; it would at the very least force the hand of those like Justice Thomas who seem unmoved by any higher sense of duty to the institution or to the American people who have agreed to abide by its rulings.The court is in deep trouble these days, pervaded by what Justice Sonia Sotomayor recently called the “stench” of partisanship — a stench arising in no small part from the Thomases’ behavior. It is hard to imagine that the other justices, regardless of their personal politics, aren’t bothered.No one should have to choose between their devotion to their spouse and their duty to the nation. But Justice Thomas has shown himself unwilling or unable to protect what remains of the court’s reputation from the appearance of extreme bias he and his wife have created. He would do the country a service by stepping down and making room for someone who won’t have that problem.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      In North Carolina, a Pitched Battle Over Gerrymanders and Justices

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      A fight over who is fit to hear a redistricting case highlights what experts say is the growing influence of ideology and money over state supreme courts nationwide.It is the state that put the hyper in partisan politics, setting the blunt-force standard for battles over voting rights and gerrymanders that are now fracturing states nationwide.So it is unsurprising that North Carolina’s latest battle, over new political maps that decisively favor Republicans, is unfolding in what has become an increasingly contested and influential battlefield in American governance: the State Supreme Court.The court meets on Wednesday to consider whether a map drawn by the Republican-dominated legislature that gives as many as 11 of 14 seats in the next Congress to Republicans — in a state almost evenly divided politically — violates the State Constitution. Similarly lopsided state legislative maps are also being contested.But for weeks, both sides of a lawsuit have been waging an extraordinary battle over whether three of the court’s seven justices should even hear the case. Atop that, an influential former chairman of the state Republican Party has suggested that the legislature could impeach some Democratic justices, a move that could remove them from the bench until their fates were decided.The central issue — whether familial, political or personal relationships have rendered the justices unfit to decide the case — is hardly frivolous. But the subtext is hard to ignore: The Supreme Court has a one-justice Democratic majority that could well invalidate the Republican-drawn maps. Knocking justices off the case could change that calculus.“I think we’re at the brass-knuckles level of political fighting in this state,” said Michael Bitzer, a scholar of North Carolina politics at Catawba College in Salisbury, N.C. “It is a microcosm of the partisan polarization that I think we’re all experiencing. It’s just that here, it’s on steroids.”It also is a reminder that for all the attention on the U.S. Supreme Court this week after Justice Stephen G. Breyer announced his retirement, it is in Supreme Courts in states like North Carolina, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Ohio that many of the most explosive questions about the condition of American democracy are playing out.State Supreme Courts have become especially critical forums since the U.S. Supreme Court said in 2019 that partisan gerrymanders were political matters outside its reach.In North Carolina, the justices seem likely to reject calls for their recusal. The court said last month that individual justices would evaluate charges against themselves unless those justices asked the full court to rule.But the high stakes reflect what may happen elsewhere — and in some cases, already has. In Ohio, Justice Pat DeWine of the State Supreme Court rebuffed calls last fall to recuse himself from redistricting lawsuits in which his father — Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican — was a defendant. Days later, the state Republican Party urged a Democratic justice, Jennifer Brenner, to recuse herself because she had made redistricting an issue when running for office.Nationwide, 38 of 50 states elect justices for their highest court rather than appoint them. For decades, those races got scant attention. But a growing partisan split is turning what once were sleepy races for judicial sinecures into frontline battles for ideological dominance of courts with enormous sway over peoples’ lives.The U.S. Supreme Court issued 68 opinions in its last term. State Supreme Courts decide more than 10,000 cases every year. Increasingly, businesses and advocacy groups turn to them for rulings on crucial issues — gerrymandering is one, abortion another — where federal courts have been hostile or unavailing.Campaign spending underscores the trend. A new report from the Brennan Center for Justice, at New York University, concluded that a record $97 million was spent on 76 State Supreme Court races in the most recent election cycle. Well over four in 10 dollars came from political parties and interest groups, including the conservative nonprofit Judicial Crisis Network, which has financed national campaigns backing recent Republican nominees to the U.S. Supreme Court.Most interest group spending has involved so-called dark money, in which donors’ identities are hidden. Conservative groups spent $18.9 million in the 2019-20 cycle, the report stated, but liberal groups, which spent $14.9 million, are fast catching up.The money has brought results. In 2019, a $1.3 million barrage of last-minute advertising by the Republican State Leadership Committee was credited with giving the G.O.P.-backed candidate for the Wisconsin Supreme Court, Brian Hagedorn, a 6,000-vote victory out of 1.2 million cast.Liberal groups have not matched that success. But they have outspent conservatives in recent races in Michigan and North Carolina.“Two things are happening,” said Douglas Keith, a co-author of the Brennan Center report. “There are in-state financial interests that know these courts are really important for their bottom lines, so they’re putting money toward defeating or supporting justices to that end. And there are also national partisan infrastructures that know how important these courts are to any number of high-profile issues, and probably to issues around democracy and elections.”How important is easy to overlook. It is well known, for example, that President Donald J. Trump’s legal efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election were rejected by every court where he filed suit, save one minor ruling. But when Russell Wheeler, a Brookings Institution scholar and president of the nonpartisan Governance Institute, analyzed individual judges’ votes, he found a different pattern: 27 of the 123 state court judges who heard the cases actually supported Mr. Trump’s arguments.Twenty-one of the 27 held elected posts on State Supreme Courts in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Both Michigan and Wisconsin are among the top five states in spending for Supreme Court races, the Brennan Center study found.Mr. Keith called that a red flag, signaling the rising influence of money in determining which judges define the rules for political behavior.North Carolina is another top-five state. Of $10.5 million spent on the state’s Supreme Court races in 2020, $6.2 million was devoted to a single race, for chief justice. Both figures are state records.The court has become increasingly partisan, largely at the Republican legislature’s behest. Legislators ended public financing for Supreme Court races in 2013, and made elections partisan contests in 2016.Anita Earls is one of three justices accused of conflict of interest in the redistricting case.Julia Wall/The News & Observer, via Associated PressBut Dallas Woodhouse, a former state Republican Party chair and columnist for the conservative Carolina Journal, said blame for the current tempest lay not with Republicans, but their critics. They kicked off the recusal battle last summer, he said, when the state N.A.A.C.P. sought to force two Republican justices to withdraw from a case challenging two referendums for constitutional amendments.Mr. Woodhouse crusaded against the demands in his columns, and the Supreme Court left the decision up to the justices, both of whom said this month that they would hear the case.How U.S. Redistricting WorksCard 1 of 8What is redistricting? More