The Center for Renewing America filed an ethics complaint against Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson over income disclosures.
According to the filing, Jackson “willfully failed to disclose required information regarding her husband’s medical malpractice consulting income for over a decade.”
“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,” the complaint reads. “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. 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.”
The complaint continues that Jackson “willfully violated § 13104(e)(1)(A) because she did not disclose this required information on her forms for several years.”
Jackson’s failure to disclose the information has “shielded potential conflicts of interest from public scrutiny and undermined the ability of the public, outside watchdog groups, and parties to scrutinize her recusal decisions,” the document asserts.
“Given the risk for these potentially willful omissions to create conflicts of interest and recusal issues, and the need to ensure equal application of the law, the Conference should refer Justice Jackson to the Attorney General for her failure to disclose her husband’s consulting income and open an investigation into the potential private funding of her investiture celebration,” the filing concludes.
Justice Clarence Thomas was also subject to an ethics complaint over his financial disclosures.
In September, Justice Thomas released his 2022 financial disclosure that refuted accusations of ethics violations.
The disclosure also includes material corresponding with new Judicial Conference rules.
One of the updated regulations was that “transportation that substitutes for commercial transportation” would not be considered in the personal hospitality exemption.
The disclosure corrects a company’s former name that was listed on Thomas’s earlier forms.
“Due to the similarity in names, filer inadvertently carried the old name on prior reports during the covered period,” the disclosure notes.
