An ethics complaint against Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson related to her financial disclosures is under review by the Committee on Financial Disclosures in the Judicial Conference.
The complaint alleged that Jackson “willfully failed to disclose” her husband’s malpractice consulting income in disclosures for more than a decade. It was filed last month by the conservative policy group Center for Renewing America to the Judicial Conference, which is the governing entity of the federal court system.
The group stated in a letter to the conference that federal judges are legally required to disclose the “source of items of earned income earned by a spouse from any person which exceed $1,000 … except … if the spouse is self-employed in business or a profession, only the nature of such business or profession needs be reported.”
The conference notified the group on Dec. 21 that its complaint would head to the financial disclosures committee for review, per Fox News. In the Center for Renewing America’s letter, the group suggested the Judicial Conference should send any possible ethics violations to Attorney General Merrick Garland.
“We are hopeful that the Judicial Conference takes a long, hard look at the ethics concerns surrounding Justice Jackson and ensures there is not a double standard for justices,” Center for Renewing America President Russ Vought said in a statement to Fox News Digital.
“While the Left has made it a sport to attack the character of conservative Supreme Court justices, they’ve turned a blind eye to actual indiscretions and appearances of corruption actively happening,” Vought continued.
The letter stated that Jackson disclosed the names of two malpractice consulting clients who paid her husband, Patrick Jackson, more than $1,000 in 2011 but that the justice “repeatedly failed to disclose that her husband received income from medical malpractice consulting fees.” The group noted that Jackson admitted some of her previous reports “inadvertently omitted” her husband’s income from consulting on cases in her amended 2020 disclosure form.
“Jackson has not even attempted to list the years for which her previously filed disclosures omitted her husband’s consulting income,” the letter read. “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.”
This is the latest ethics complaint against Supreme Court justices, as congressional Democrats and left-leaning advocacy groups have blasted conservative Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito for failing to disclose vacations and gifts from GOP megadonors, such as Harlan Crow and Federalist Society Co-Chairman Leonard Leo. Senate Democrats have been leading the investigation into the conservative justices after ProPublica reported on Thomas’s travels with Crow.
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The outlet also reported on Alito’s acceptance of a flight for a fishing trip to Alaska. Liberal judges have dealt with their own investigations after a separate Associated Press report found Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s staff had pushed colleges and libraries to purchase her books.
The Supreme Court adopted an ethics code for the first time in November following months of scrutiny. Some Republicans agreed with the ethics code but did not support an ethics investigation, with a few arguing that Democrats were “discrediting” the court.
