Lawyer Who Helped Overturn Affirmative Action Venmoed Clarence Thomas Aide

It’s a big club and still, you most certainly are not in it.

An array of high rolling lawyers with cases before the Supreme Court paid money to one of Justice Clarence Thomas’s top aides through Venmo. The Guardian reports that these lawyers have done everything from successfully arguing against affirmative action, to leading the charge to limit the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to, well, protect the environment.

These top lawyers appeared to be paying for exclusive access to a Christmas party hosted by the Supreme Court justice, according to the payment descriptions on Venmo.The former aide, Rajan Vasisht, received seven payments in November and December of 2019, The Guardian reports; each Venmo payment was listed with descriptors like “CT Christmas Party,” or “Thomas Christmas party.”

The payments could have well been for anything; none of the implicated parties responded to The Guardian’s questions or request for comments.

One of the lawyers paying the Thomas aide was Patrick Strawbridge, a partner at Consovoy McCarthy, who successfully helped overturn affirmative action. Another was Kate Todd, former White House deputy counsel under twice-impeached, twice-indicted, and liable for sexual abuse former President Donald Trump. Yet another party-going lawyer was Elbert Lin, West Virginia’s former solicitor general, who was very influential in a Supreme Court case that limited the EPA’s ability to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. And that’s just a taste of who all attended.

So while scores of communities in Vermont and New York succumb to catastrophic flooding, while Texans and Floridians pant and collapse in the sweltering heat, you can trust that the lawyers responsible for such conditions will still be happily toasting champagne glasses and noshing on their hors d’oeuvres.

The latest chapter of Our Corrupt Supreme Court comes in an already bursting-at-the-seams book of malfeasance.

Beyond the access-through-Venmo payments, Thomas has received secret and lavish gifts for decades from the Nazi memorabilia–collecting billionaire and GOP donor Harlan Crow, including luxurious island-hopping excursions on superyachts, tuition payments for his grandnephew’s private schooling, and even a secret deal in which Crow bought Thomas family property and proceeded to upgrade it while Thomas’s mother still lived in it.

Justice Neil Gorsuch successfully sold a 40-acre property that he had been trying to sell for two years to an undisclosed buyer; the buyer of the nearly $2 million Colorado ranch was the CEO of a law firm that has since had 22 cases with business before the court.

Justice John Roberts’ wife has allegedly been paid more than $10 million by an array of high-class law firms—at least one of which has argued before her husband in the Supreme Court.

And that all—normalized corruption, to more outward displays of it—doesn’t even include other issues, like Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh being alleged sexual abusers.