A law clerk hired recently by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas amid allegations of bigotry cleaned up her public image by recasting the narrative surrounding the 2015 incident in which she was accused of sending a racist text message to a former colleague, the New Yorker reports.
Crystal Clanton, who graduated from George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School in Virginia in 2022, was hired by Justice Thomas in late February following her meteoric rise to the highly coveted position with the nation’s highest court as a new theory portrays her as the victim of a vengeful co-worker.
The racial controversy arose in 2015 when Clanton served as the national field director for the conservative student organization Turning Point USA, a Republican advocacy group closely tied to former President Donald Trump, also known for its divisive rhetoric.
Two years later, an investigative report by The New Yorker exposed Clanton’s text message in which she told a co-worker: “I HATE BLACK PEOPLE … Like f- – – them all … I hate blacks. End of story.”
Screenshots of the string of messages marked with Clanton’s phone number were shared with the magazine in 2017, and multiple employees at the time confirmed Clanton as the sender.
When confronted about the messages, Clanton explained that she couldn’t remember writing them and asserted that the comments did not “reflect what I believe or who I am,” she told the news outlet at the time.
Clanton resigned in disgrace over the incident, but she never apologized to the Black community for the hurtful comments that led to her 2017 ouster as the second-in-command of the conservative group.
Nearly a decade after she allegedly sent the texts, Clanton has managed to move past the episode while benefiting from powerful connections in the Republican legal community and beyond, including Thomas’ wife, Ginni, who hired Clanton in 2017 to assist her work as a national conservative…
Read the full article here
