The move represents a notable increase in the Democratic senators’ push to confront ethics issues surrounding Thomas and the Supreme Court.
Whitehouse’s team noted that this may be the first instance of someone requesting a special counsel to probe a Supreme Court justice.
Whitehouse is a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Wyden leads the Senate Finance Committee.
Jeremy Fogel, formerly a federal judge and now the executive director of the Berkeley Judicial Institute, stated that while the Justice Department has the legal power to assign a special counsel to investigate Thomas, it remains uncertain whether they will do so.
“Inevitably it would be seen as political retribution for rulings the justices made that they don’t like,” he said. “I just don’t know how you get out of that box.”
The Justice Department has declined to comment on the request. Whitehouse and Wyden stated that evidence indicates Justice Thomas has “committed multiple deliberate breaches of federal ethics and false-statement laws.”
“We do not make this request lightly,” they said. “The evidence assembled thus far plainly suggests that Justice Thomas has committed numerous willful violations of federal ethics and false-statement laws and raises significant questions about whether he and his wealthy benefactors have complied with their federal tax obligations.”
Elliot S. Berke, the justice’s attorney, previously said that Thomas “has always strived for full transparency and adherence to the law, including with respect to what personal travel needed to be reported,” adding that any failures of disclosure were “strictly inadvertent.”
The two Senators specifically called on the DoJ to examine a “$267,000 loan Thomas used to purchase a luxury motor coach in 1999, adding that they have not received adequate answers from Thomas about how he handled the matter,” per the Post.
The justice revealed gifts that were received following alterations to the financial disclosure regulations.
Conservatives claim that this constitutes reverse court-packing.
Certain liberal Democrats attempted to pass a bill to expand the number of Supreme Court justices in order to appoint more liberal members.
When this was unsuccessful, they initiated focused efforts to compel the most conservative justices of the court to withdraw from high-profile cases.
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